This Past Week

This past week has been brutal. I feel like I've been so busy that it's hard to balance everything that I enjoy in my spare time. It definitely affects how often I get to write on this blog. It's 3:36 AM right now and I can't fall asleep. I know I should be sleeping because I have to wake up early for church later this morning but I have too many things I want to write about and there aren't enough hours in the day to write them all. I know I’m going to pay for this later but here goes…

I normally won't write about work but I guess the events of this week are sort of blog-worthy. We're in “crank” mode and we're trying to get everything done in time for our upcoming release. I probably signed up for more things than I normally should and I should delegate more. I am a bit of a control freak so I would rather work hard on something just to get it to work the way I want it to than to leave it to someone else to do it. All of those extra hours were pretty stressful on both my physical and mental health. I had several milestones that I set for myself I put a lot of pressure on myself to meet them.

On top of all of the busyness at work, the video game (Battlefield: Bad Company 2) that I built my new computer for was released this week. After those long days at work, I just wanted to unwind and blow up some baddies. But unfortunately, the release has been far from smooth. On Tuesday night (March 2, 2010), after I got home from work, I quickly installed the game and set up my controls. I logged on for the first time and was eager to get into the action. What on earth were they thinking when they designed the GUI for this game? The whole interface is garbage. It is so confusing trying to manage my friends list, or browse through the list of servers. There are arrows in places where regular buttons would have made much more sense.

Everything just feels slow. The server list takes forever to refresh. When I finally got into a server, my screen immediately started spinning. Argh! They still haven’t fixed the stupid joystick binding? I went back into the settings to unbind the joystick keys and found that the developers removed the ability to unbind keys. What?! This used to work in the Beta. Okay, now I’m getting angry. How did this game get even buggier in the released version?

I got tired of trying to work around my problems so I just unplugged my joystick from the USB port. I went back into the game and played for what felt like only 15 minutes. The game just felt off. I’m really sensitive to lag so any kind of unresponsiveness feels apparent to me. It just seemed like every server had a 100+ ms ping. I guess that could be expected with the sheer number of people playing at the same time but I’m still not happy.

Some of the weapons in the game just don’t feel “right”. Grenades from the grenade launchers (i.e., n00b tubes) sometimes blow up. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they blow up but don’t do any damage. I don’t care what kind of damage they set for it but all I ask is that the gun’s behavior is consistent. Is that too much to ask?

The game wasn’t all bad. It was really awesome with the new “Destruction 2.0” feature where you blow up just about any obstacle or terrain in the game. A few times I got into firefights with someone and they would run through a doorway and hide behind a wall. I would then just blow up the wall and get a kill. That never gets old. It’s also awesome when you blow up the last support on a building and watch the entire structure collapse on itself and take out everyone still inside of it.

Anyways, I wanted to keep going but then all of the servers went down. Oh great. Now I can’t even play anything. Whenever you tried to join a game, it either made it look like you were logging in but then kick you out or it would just not work at all. That was about 10 PM at night. What am I supposed to do for the rest of the night? Play single player mode? That’s so boring…

What drives me crazy is that I work in Software QA. I know what’s it like to test a product and to make sure it’s as polished as it can be. I understand that there will always be unexpected things that will come up at customer sites and how it feels to issue a patch to fix the issues. But how does a company as large as DICE/EA not have found these obvious issues in their testing and addressed them? How can they still get things wrong when they can learn from what worked and didn’t work in their previous Battlefield games? I tried to find answers online to see if other users have posted workarounds but all of their online websites were also hammered and were either down or very sluggish. I’m sick of paying all of this money to companies just to get a sub-quality product and then wait months for the game to actually mature.

So I’ve been killing myself at work to get things done and thoroughly tested and all I want to do is to just relieve some stress with a nice video game. But I’ve been so disappointed thus far with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I was so excited early on but the game causes me more stress than I need right now. I’ve only played it a few days this past week and only for an hour or two at most each time. There are a bunch of things to like about the game but the there are so many fundamental flaws that It’s just too frustrating to play right now. I haven’t even played it this weekend yet. I guess I really don’t care that much about that game until they get their act together.

On a brighter note, work actually ended on a high note. I was able to finish everything that I wanted to do this week. Nothing feels better than to work hard and feel that you put in a solid week’s worth of work. I feel accomplished. At least I have Bejeweled Blitz to help unwind.