Well, it's that time again, fellow dirty, crawling Euro mongrels. Long-awaited MMOFPS PlanetSide 2 has been delivered to the rest of the world pretty well, with smooth launching and decent server capacity.
(Incidentally, when I say "rest of the world", I mean that in the literal sense. Such notorious gaming hotspots as Vatican City and West Sahara are fine to play through the US Sony Online Entertainment system, but not anywhere like UK, France, Germany, or Luxembourg.)
However, it turns out that a few people dun goofed over here in smelly Europeland. I'll try to summarise this torturous circular madness as well as I can. PlanetSide 2 launched through its own website and through Steam, however Steam has distributed the (not insignificant 10GB size) "US version" to everybody, which is fine if you're reading this from deep in the Congo, but London is a no-go. With this Steam installation, you can try to make an account, but it is linked to the US site, and you can't register there.
So, you go to the inexplicably-separate EU site (assuming it hasn't crashed. the .com address has had a stable day, but .eu has had a fun day rising and falling like a boat in a storm) and register there. So far so good. However, your .eu account isn't tied to the US version. For some reason. It's only 2012, what can you expect from professionals?
Your .eu account is only useful with a Euro launcher. So, you download the launcher from the .eu site, and because you're very clever, you simply replace the US launcher in the Steam folder/you download the entire game outside of Steam. However, the guys over in IT have been living off gin and fish fingers, and this .eu launcher is, in fact, completely borked. You cannot use it to successfully enter PlanetSide 2 (there are reports of some workarounds, however they seem to have a very low success rate). If you're lucky, it will freeze up after you accept the EULA and never open properly again.
Read more wailing over on the EU forums --> http://en.planetside2.eu/forum/support-forum-f3120/
While I am aware that this game is free and therefore not subject to the same rules as Diablo 3 was on its launch day (or more accurately, week), plenty of EU players were in the beta and have been locked out of their accounts by this, and a decent chunk of those had items or a subscription that they have had nicked from them by a bunch of incompetents.
The simple fact of the matter is, I spent a day downloading 10gb of data so that a pointlessly frustrating and old-fashioned system could break down on multiple levels and somewhat ruin my day. Frankly, I'm tired of playing second fiddle to North America. This level of poor communication and enormous oversight would not be tolerated in the US (see Diablo 3), but because developer, publisher, and journalist weight all draws from one continent, it's not considered a big deal.
There is currently no timeframe for a fix, just a vague "we're working on it." Lovely. I'm willing to bet that if this had occured in the US, there'd have been news articles and mass complaint about a grossly mishandled launch, but since we're European we can keep our fucking mouths shut and be grateful they even release in our little backwater.
I suppose we could secede from the Earth itself, but that sounds like effort. Instead, I'd like to make my voice heard. So, here I am.
In all seriousness, I understand that mistakes happen and that people apologise (Sometimes. I'm still waiting for Bioware to say 'sorry' for calling me an idiot because I didn't like ME3's ending. But that's for another time), but these are trivial mistakes that have inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of gamers, and will negatively affect the company. Was nobody watching the EU release at all? Two entirely separate branches of it both managed to fail, simultaneously, in such a way as to lock every European out of the game "until further notice".
You can point at this and call it a First-World Problem if you like, but I know I'm not the only one who took time aside from work or school to download and play the game, and was very disappointed by this rather absurd failure.
*sigh*. Presumably there's no rush. After all, it's only Europe.
(Incidentally, when I say "rest of the world", I mean that in the literal sense. Such notorious gaming hotspots as Vatican City and West Sahara are fine to play through the US Sony Online Entertainment system, but not anywhere like UK, France, Germany, or Luxembourg.)
However, it turns out that a few people dun goofed over here in smelly Europeland. I'll try to summarise this torturous circular madness as well as I can. PlanetSide 2 launched through its own website and through Steam, however Steam has distributed the (not insignificant 10GB size) "US version" to everybody, which is fine if you're reading this from deep in the Congo, but London is a no-go. With this Steam installation, you can try to make an account, but it is linked to the US site, and you can't register there.
So, you go to the inexplicably-separate EU site (assuming it hasn't crashed. the .com address has had a stable day, but .eu has had a fun day rising and falling like a boat in a storm) and register there. So far so good. However, your .eu account isn't tied to the US version. For some reason. It's only 2012, what can you expect from professionals?
Your .eu account is only useful with a Euro launcher. So, you download the launcher from the .eu site, and because you're very clever, you simply replace the US launcher in the Steam folder/you download the entire game outside of Steam. However, the guys over in IT have been living off gin and fish fingers, and this .eu launcher is, in fact, completely borked. You cannot use it to successfully enter PlanetSide 2 (there are reports of some workarounds, however they seem to have a very low success rate). If you're lucky, it will freeze up after you accept the EULA and never open properly again.
Read more wailing over on the EU forums --> http://en.planetside2.eu/forum/support-forum-f3120/
While I am aware that this game is free and therefore not subject to the same rules as Diablo 3 was on its launch day (or more accurately, week), plenty of EU players were in the beta and have been locked out of their accounts by this, and a decent chunk of those had items or a subscription that they have had nicked from them by a bunch of incompetents.
The simple fact of the matter is, I spent a day downloading 10gb of data so that a pointlessly frustrating and old-fashioned system could break down on multiple levels and somewhat ruin my day. Frankly, I'm tired of playing second fiddle to North America. This level of poor communication and enormous oversight would not be tolerated in the US (see Diablo 3), but because developer, publisher, and journalist weight all draws from one continent, it's not considered a big deal.
There is currently no timeframe for a fix, just a vague "we're working on it." Lovely. I'm willing to bet that if this had occured in the US, there'd have been news articles and mass complaint about a grossly mishandled launch, but since we're European we can keep our fucking mouths shut and be grateful they even release in our little backwater.
I suppose we could secede from the Earth itself, but that sounds like effort. Instead, I'd like to make my voice heard. So, here I am.
In all seriousness, I understand that mistakes happen and that people apologise (Sometimes. I'm still waiting for Bioware to say 'sorry' for calling me an idiot because I didn't like ME3's ending. But that's for another time), but these are trivial mistakes that have inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of gamers, and will negatively affect the company. Was nobody watching the EU release at all? Two entirely separate branches of it both managed to fail, simultaneously, in such a way as to lock every European out of the game "until further notice".
You can point at this and call it a First-World Problem if you like, but I know I'm not the only one who took time aside from work or school to download and play the game, and was very disappointed by this rather absurd failure.
*sigh*. Presumably there's no rush. After all, it's only Europe.