Nobody seems to remember the original DIVX, those cheap movie discs that worked great until DIVX went out of business and shut down their servers, turning people’s movie collections into unwatchable coasters. People were up in arms about it then, but now history’s repeating itself and nobody seems to care, I guess because it’s “just games”.

If people complain about it, but still support it financially, then there’s no point. If you sign up for and support this Origin crap, Electronic Arts makes the same amount of money from you, whether you’re a satisfied customer or not. I feel compelled to not support these things financially.

Every single time I see somebody complain about DLC or whatever, it’s always followed by a group of apologists who tell the person IF YOU DON’T LIKE DLC THEN DON’T BUY IT!! NOBODY IS FORCING YOU TO BUY IT!!!

Really? I was playing Transformers War for Cybertron a while back. A really great game. And one reason I wanted it was because I actually loved the multiplayer demo. I rarely play MP but this one was fun so I wanted to do it. They, of course, put out two map packs which would cost 20 dollars total if you actually bought them. For me, that is a total waste of money. I’m just going to play until I max out my characters, get my achievements and then I’ll be done and playing something else.

But the way they made it work is if you tried to join a game, it would go through the loading screen all the way up until you should be playing, but if you didn’t have the DLC, it would then go through a second loading screen and you’d find yourself all the way back to the main menu of the game with a “you don’t have this map” message. Every time you’d try to log into a game and not have the DLC was nearly a 5 minute process. It would take 20-30 minutes to find a game to play sometimes. It was so frustrating and annoying that it made me think about buying the maps to just not deal with it. Now….tell me…if that’s not trying to force you into buying it, what else is it? They could’ve had an option to never put somebody without DLC into a DLC map. It could’ve just put you back into the lobby instead all the way back to the main menu. But no, it was obviously and purposely made annoying to force you to buy DLC.

Though the worst for me, by far, is City of Heroes. It’s the superhero MMO and I’ve been playing it for years. I’ve quit a couple of times to try other MMOs but CoH is the best to me and everything else gets boring. Now it has ALWAYS been incredibly tough for me to justify the 14.99 a month to play one game. I don’t like it, I think it sucks, but I deal with it because I play it a lot, and they used to add all kinds of content for no extra cost so I felt I sort of got my money’s worth out of it.

A couple of years back they started charging 10-15 dollars for packs of costumes and some temp powers. Something that had always been free. I, and others, found this to be insane. We’re already paying 15 bucks a month and now we have to pay for costume pieces? But the apologists stood up and sided with the company. They didn’t think this was bad at all, they thought it was great! So instead of the company getting the message that this was un-acceptable, they got the message that we LOVED having our wallets raped so more and more of these packs came. And then they even charged for a game add on which they had never done before.

Now a month or so ago they announced City of Heroes: Freedom which is their free to play model. So now there is a very, very, very, very limited version of the game, unplayable I’d say, that you can play for “free” and there will be a DLC store where you can purchase more things to upgrade your free version. Then there will be the 15 a month VIP version which is the full game….which will also have the DLC store. I’m like what the, what, what the who? Why would the VIP player still need the DLC store? 15 a month gets you the whole game, right???

Wrong, they’re still going to be charging VIP players for add ons and costume pieces and stuff. Last night, through in game chat, I found out that they will even be charging for the main powersets and other stuff they never charged for before and never should. A couple of people in the chat tried to complain about it only to get shouted down by sycophants and apologists once again. I find it amazing. It seems to me that calling this update “Freedom” and the players “VIPs” is some kind of sick joke. I pay these people 180 dollars a YEAR to play their game, how is that NOT enough??

I just don’t get how people don’t understand why this is so frustrating. I don’t understand why they seem to ENJOY having some mega-corporation gouge every last penny out of their pocket. They don’t seem to understand that the more they support it, the worst it’s going to get and eventually it WILL effect them and they’ll be the ones crying. I picture these people sitting at a train crossing with the lights flashing, the bells ringing, but they keep on driving cause they can’t see the train itself.

In my office at home I have a “workstation” setup with my C64, my ORIGINAL 286 computer and 486 computer … I paid so damn much for them back in the day hell be damned if I EVER get rid of them ;) So whenever I get ticked at high prices for over rated garbage, or general BS that some of these companies pull, old school I go! In many respects I get much more enjoyment out of those games when I compare them 1:1 to the new ones.