Battlefield 2142 Doesn't Track External Data

Wait lemme get this straight the so called explaination is for area specific ads in games based off of a players ip. Well why not just have ads specific to the servers location and not the players? Would that solution have been so hard for them to figure out or was the marketing departments head so far up their collective asses they couldn't come up with this? Instead they fell back on "hey I know lets stick a tracking mechanism in the client end to track ip's etc to server ads in this next release.?"

Myself I'd wouldn't have a issue if it was implemented this way, but as soon as you stick crap on my end just to serve your interests better well fucko's fuck off you won't get my $$.

Fuck 2142 and it's fucking marketting. The day i PAY to be marketted to repeatedly while trying to enjoy myself is the day i take out 3 ribs so i can suck my own cock. AKA - possible but not fucking likely. I'll happily be bombarded with obnoxious advertising in a game i'm trying to play as long as i get paid for it. They can start by giving the fucking game away for free instead of charging $$$ for their marketting frontend.

So once ads take off we'll get this ...

1. Games distributed online to skip the middle man but at the same cost
2. Games with ads to improve quality of our gaming
3. Episodic games where you pay half price for a third of a game

You know what we'll do about that? Nothing .. that's the way things are going. I'll just be happy that the game studios I love are producing quality games even if I have to endure these new emerging trends.

Everyone is coming down hard on EA for this but the MOVIES are the same way.

You pay to sit there and watch advertisements BEFORE the movie even starts. First the sprite ads, and then the trailers.

Further, during the movie there are TONS of placed products.

Heck, even on DVD's they show advertising content.

This is not just an EA problem, it's an entertainment industry problem.

Magazines, are also the same, NEWSPAPERS, Television - each one of these mediums has advertisements which you pay to watch.

At least these in-game advertisements don't force you to pause your activity and look at them.

BTW- anyone having unusual issues with PunkBuster in 2142? I keep getting kicked with a virgin 1.01 install....

I'll be honest. In the future where I DON'T have a choice between games with/without ads, and they just all do I will have no problem pirating games. Or maybe I just won't play games at all. Part of the reason I love games, and stopped watching tv for the most part is because they don't have advertising.

Fuck that, I'm not paying for some fucking advertising, and I'm angry as hell they're putting it in my favorite past time.

It doesn't work either! I downloaded it over EA Download it won't launch. I get EC: 5570. wtf....

Yup, so it's not as bad as it seemed, at least not for the moment. I am big enough to take back what i said when I assumed the worst of the situation.

I will not say I am happy with what IS in the game. There is extra cpu cycles being wasted on this garbage and there is no $$ discount to be seen. (surprise)

I hate the ads for the same reason i hate TBS (the channel), they are the scum of society and should be dragged out into the street and shot. (the people responsible) And anyone who supports this shit, well, same treatment as above. You're fucking scum and are the reason they get away with this shit.

Happy time over. :P

there were ads for the Glory Hole Theme Park in GTA:SA and you guys didn't seem to mind those :D

When we were putting the games out at work today, we took the precaution and pasted a blown up copy of the white slip of paper that comes in the game about the ad stuff. Its spyware, theres nothing else around that fact. A lot of people who arent aware that its included in the game will be upset about it, which means they will want to return it. We dont take returns on opened software, so its almost a measure to save our asses against customers.

I still cant get over the fact that its even in the fucking game.

By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence.

Bill Hicks

Update:

Went into the game to take some screenshots of the ads, but there were not. As of yet, all the billboards still have the default textures and not ads. Not sure why that is.

Would be pretty ironic if DICE's implementation of the ad software turned out to be bugged. :D

Hey there, picked up the game. Installed, logged in, and connected fine. Played for a few hours with no disconnect. With all the unlocks (I'm focusing on the engineer trees) it feels kind of like a combo of Tribes 2 and BF2. I'm liking it.

Ha! I'm in advertising (as a designer, but still) and I think in-games are fairly retarded. I say fairly because in a real world simulation (sports, racing, etc) the advertisements are part of the scenery and to me would feel awkward if they were missing or replaced with fake ones.
Games like Splinter Cell (which I believe had a gigantic AXE body deodorant ad) wouldn't be so bad so long as it was subtle, say like running down the hallway and you run past a Coke machine. Okay, that's fine. I can see that. It's not a big deal and it's something that would happen in real life. That's about the line of acceptance for me.

I also believe that if you're going to receive money from advertising then there should be benefits passed along to the end user (i.e., reduced price of games or tonnes of bonus content released for free and not as an expansion, etc) because the price of games seems to go up and now we have to be bombarded with advertising that in most cases will not fit in with the world you're trying to play in. I'm not surprised we're at this phase, but I do think it's total lunacy.

As a designer who may (MAY) in the future be subjected to creating ads for games, I'd like to try and promise that I'll do what I can to minimize the stupidity (that is, a current day ad for a futuristic game) but of course, it'll most likely never be my call.

i havent actually seen any ads yet in bf2142. and i played a couple of hours the other day.

anyone know of some locations? or have the ads even started popping up in game yet?

whats more annoying atm, is that the stats system is bugged. points arent being saved correctly and servers are crashing.

Something I'm still not clear on:
is the software that sends them your ip and etc. built into the game executable (or accessed by it from a DLL) or is it something that runs in another process, independant of the game executable?

If it only runs when the game is running, then I think it can be lowered down to "I do not like this" levels, whereas if it runs in the background independantly then it stays firmly at "FYAD EA&IGA" level.

I wonder how long until we can "click" these in game ads, on accident of course and have it tab us out of the game to a popup =(

Repost? This is where the ads will be:

http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=4040

I do not mind ads in games. As long as they follow some basic rules.

1. I get some benefit from having looked at the ads. Price reduction on the game purchase, extra content after the fact or maybe even discounts/cupons on the product being advertised.

2. They fit into the game and game world. No Pepsi ads in LOTR unless you can work it into a Grog formula..

3. They never become intrusive. I should never be forced to view an ad before I am allowed to continue playing. The second an insertal is used, I'm done. The minute I have to look at ads to unlock parts of the game, I'm done.

The real screenshots I have seen so far meet all the criteria but the first. So I ask all the EA people on the Shack, what is the benefit to me?

What I also dont understand is, how they think in game advertising will gain anything?...

Video Gamers are the most media savvy people in the world.
We've been born into advertisements being everywhere we go and look.
We've been trained to tune them all out, and ignore them.

I know when I see an ad on TV, I dont even pay any attention to what the product is, or even ask myself questions about the said product.... I either laugh or ignore it...

It would be interesting to see some Statistics on the effectiviness of advertising on today's population.. I have a feeling its declined in the past 20 years...

Online petition:

To: EA Games

Starting with the release of Battlefield 2142, an online PC game, EA Games has begun incorporating the IGA software with their games. This is stated in a disclaimer accompanying Battlefield 2142:
“The Software may incorporate technology developed by IGA Worldwide Inc. ("IGA") (the "Advertising Technology"). The purpose of the Advertising Technology is to deliver in-game advertisements to you when you use the Software while connected to the Internet. When you use the Software while connected to the Internet, the Advertising Technology may record your Internet Protocol address and other anonymous information ("Advertising Data").”

Not only is it offensive enough that EA Games has decided to force adware into products that consumers pay a large price for (often $50 or more), they have further made things worse by giving this software the ability to spy on our computers. Although the information is submitted anonymously, it is still monitoring what we are using our computers for. The disclaimer is also extremely vague; giving no specification of any boundary EA has set.

Adware and spyware have often been proved to slow down computers. It is another unneeded piece of software constantly running in the background and consuming memory, CPU cycles, and internet bandwidth. If every company were to take from EA’s examples, our computers would be bloated to the point of barely being usable.

EA has not given us an option to opt out of this, and their only compromise so far is for us to not use the game on an internet connected computer. Seeing how consumers have paid for an internet enabled game and one that is primarily meant to be played on the internet, this is an extremely poor compromise.

As a result of these actions by EA, I am calling for a boycott of all EA Games which feature this software, namely Battlefield 2142. It is unacceptable to force spyware onto a user’s computer in order to use a product. A disclaimer included in the box does not make this okay. Especially after Sony’s Rootkit software, it is unacceptable for companies to be doing this.

Sincerely,

http://www.petitiononline.com/bf2142ad/petition.html

I'm wondering if it would add to the game to have advertizing from the year 2142 ?Maybe something like "Clones are us"

Am I the only one confused why the game isn't free? They obviously didn't spend much time on it and they're going to be making profit from ads for years to come. Plenty of other free multiplayer shooters released without ads.

"does not capture any personally identifiable information"

It tracks your IP address and gives you a unique gamer reference that sticks with you all the time. They also track exactly what adverts you look at, for how long and at what times you play .

How is that not personal information?

From a moral standpoint, what is y'alls opinion on putting advertisements within video games? Do you think that in-game ads benefit the player in any way or add to the gameplay experience?

Do you think any of the following game companies would ever put some stupid ass advertisements within their game world? 3Drealms, Epic/DE, Id software, Human Head, Bioware? Blizzard?????

http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=13056929

I got to thinking about this...

I already use gmail, itunes store recommendations, tivo, amazon recommendations, barnes and noble member card, duane reade discount card, pathmark discount card, etc.

I really don't care who else gets my marketing data...I'm more worried about google storing my internet searches than I am in EA wondering if I viewed their ad.

I think there needs to be some sort of a convention among PC game developers and publishers regarding how far in-game advertising goes if they're going to do it. As it stands, a PC game can potentially access a lot of data on the host system: the text string generated by you typing a message to your teammates, the term papers saved in Word document format on your hard drive, your Internet Explorer browsing history, your ENTIRE Windows Registry, etc., etc. Most PC games today require being run under administrative priviliges since they will run into authentication difficulty when accessing certain resources. This leaves a GIANT hole that is open for harvesting by any developer greedy enough to go data mining on the computers owned by their customers.

To any developer who wants to whine about me not being fair, too bad. You lost the benefit of the doubt today with this mess that EA's greed has exposed. It was bad enough that you treated us all like potential criminals with CD checks and activation, but now you want to go and steal our data? We need to put a stop to this, and develop an industry agreement on what personal data game publishers will and will not collect. Preferably they will be cut off from participating in all-out customer-side data mining, and only be able to deal with IP address geolocation, and data transmitted directly to their server systems by wilful actions of the player (in-game movement, voicechat, etc.)

A Pandora's box was opened today, and all in the name of greed. They wanted more money to fuel their ever-growing game production budgets, and they chose a less-than-ethical method to pursue they money they sought. We gamers need to push back before this gets any worse.

Regarding today's online controversy, Townsend noted that "you are always going have that hardcore vocal minority" who don't want in-game ads. But he suggested that if those same people "knew the kind of painful transition that most publishers are going through right now", they might approve of in-game ads as an important financial support function for next-gen titles.

I doubt if the quiet majority wants ads, I'd be willing to bet nobody does. As for the the "painful transition," EA doesn't strike me a company that's on the brink of collapsing due to money problems. But maybe I'm off on that.

PHEW NOW IM RELIEVED

Although I really dislike EA I just have to say ingame advertising is not new:
http://www.commander-keen.com/screenshots/keen1/8.gif
(don't know whether id Software got money for the product placement).

Nevertheless I think it's something different if they track your IP. Usually companies track much more than they tell you.

Paying 40EUR for a product filled with product placement and IP tracking is ridiculous. MANY other games have/had longer development schedules and make cash without ingame advertising. It would be ok if EA uses the extra money for better quality, lower prices or something useful. Unfortunatly they shipped a buggy product (a better BF2 mod) which is not very cheap.

When was the last time you bought something because you saw an advertisement?

I buy stuff cuz I want to try it, friend recommended it, looks cool, ect....

I have never bought something because I saw a f'n commercial or ad.

I don't mind ads if the product is free; see Anarchy Online. Play for free but see ads, once you start paying the ads magically go away.

Not that I'd pay $50 for a glorified BF2 mod anyhow, but the point still stands.

What a slippery slope. First they use the IP for tracking your region, then there will be a "checkbox" in future games to opt out of marketing related to your IP address.

Screw this I'm going home.

well I was on the fence about whether or not I was going to pick this up or not. I think I'll pass.

Still waiting for some real screenshots of in-game ads. :) Just to see what they look like.

OK, let's get to work on an internet app to inject our own ads, should be fun.

So basically they are saying that they will only grab ip info so that they can do adds by region. Thats awesome, except you dont need to grab ip info so that you can display an add in French.

I would be willing to say that about 99 percent of people buy the game in the language that they can speak/read. This means that all EA needed to do was to make sure that they encoded some type of language specific part into the CD key or something else within the game.

Im not against ingame adds, but I am against using my computer to do more than just the game.

Shouldn't the headline be something like
EA: "Battlefield 2142 Doesn't Track External Data"

The way it's worded now makes you think that the statement is a fact.

Bottom line, EA is still evil. :)