Ponder of the day: If the internet didn't exist, would people still be complaining?

[GisherJohn24]

Quote: Originally Posted by Cardot

There was a time when I was excited to play this mess:

Lol. Classic .

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[Other Guy]

Here's what I've learned personally: video game enjoyment is inversely proportional to time spent on message boards about said game.

When I spend too much time reading complaints about a game, it makes it really hard to enjoy the game because I focus too much on all of the negatives (some of which I may have never even known about).

Sometimes I just need to pop in the game, tune it, and roll with what works for me. I will completely avoid complaints or bug/glitch threads. I find that this method makes playing the game exponentially more fun.

[heelphreak]

4th and Inches was my first football game. You could rename the rosters and choose team colors in the second installment which was the greatest thing in the world to me at the time. I would create teams each week for my matchup and keep my stats with a pen and paper next to the keyboard. LOL

[lunchbox2042]

If there wasn't internet then they wouldn't be pulling resources from offline players to fuel ultimate team and head 2 head online.

[T4VERTS]

Quote: Originally Posted by lunchbox2042

If there wasn't internet then they wouldn't be pulling resources from offline players to fuel ultimate team and head 2 head online.

Not to get too philosophical, but if there is no internet do you even know they pulled resources any where? I think this goes back to the adage "ignorance is bliss".

[GisherJohn24]

Quote: Originally Posted by Other Guy

Here's what I've learned personally: video game enjoyment is inversely proportional to time spent on message boards about said game. When I spend too much time reading complaints about a game, it makes it really hard to enjoy the game because I focus too much on all of the negatives (some of which I may have never even known about). Sometimes I just need to pop in the game, tune it, and roll with what works for me. I will completely avoid complaints or bug/glitch threads. I find that this method makes playing the game exponentially more fun.

i agree with this. For me, I wouldn't have known there was this many AI issues on defense unless someone pointed out. And when I found them as being real, it did give me some of that negativeity towarsd the game I would have PROBABLY not have had because I didn't look for it. Lord knows how many bugs were on the past madden games that were never mentioned or discussed with gamers in the real world...*with no internet*

[Rebel10]

Yes, and if the internet didn't exist there wouldn't be the imbalance on competitive play and online-connected loot box card pack mini games like Ultimate Team, so maybe they would have focused on improving franchise mode, player vs. CPU games, and the features that they used to focus on.

This question is a non-starter. The internet exists.
Madden '18 is a bad game, a rehashed Madden '17.5 being sold for $60, packaging the NFL license into a microtransactions minigame that tries to exploit people with gambling addictions.

If the internet didn't exist, Madden would be a very different game, the development focus would be very different, and so it's impossible to say what our reaction would be. Also, if you're remembering back being a youth and loving Madden '99 it could be because you weren't as critical or did not value money, time, and leisure as you do now. My leisure was worth much less to me when I was 14 or 15, playing NCAA Football 98 or Madden 99 because I worked a stupid job for 10 hours a week, and was at home all weekend playing videogames, so if I wanted to waste 8 hours playing a bad videogame on a Saturday afternoon, why the hell not, I was overflowing with time and had nothing better to do.

But, today, as a disgruntled grown man, who works 40-50 hours a week and spends the rest of my time mowing the damn lawn, I have about 3-5 hours a week to play videogames at the most (typically less), and now I'm a more discerning consumer. My money means less to me because I have a lot more money than I did when I was paid $5/hr for 10 hours a week, but my time means a lot more to me. If I think something sucks and if publishers are trying to take advantage of me, selling me a half-baked, buggy, microtransaction-riddled videogame, I'm going to give them the negative feedback that their product deserves.

I mostly stay away from glitch threads or threads that talk about exploits or break down bad defense. I just don't care enough. But, if a patch gets released for a game that starts causing my game to freeze inexplicably during gameplay, I'm pretty damn happy I can take to the internet and find other people complaining about the same bugs, and hoping to get through to the publisher/developers that their latest patch caused the software to stop functioning normally (of course, if there was no internet, the idea of a game-breaking patch would be ... difficult).

[cthurt]

This is such a interesting subject and could get different point of views depending on what era you grew up in, I grew up gaming in the early 90's where you basically got whatever you got and had to deal with it, which I did but I was a kid then that didn't have to spend my own money for the games that I played.


Thinking about going through that in this time of my life I feel like unless the game is totally broken and unplayable, our standards wouldn't be as high because we would be so used to playing these games from the aspect of how the company that created them wanted them to be played. These days we literally have the power or at least the platform to get the developers to put features in the game that we want even if it wasn't the developers vision to have it in the game with patches and game updates.


Complaints about any product will always be there with internet or not you can always take the old school route of writing letters to companies or calling complaint lines to voice your frustration, its just so much easier now with the internet that literally everyone has a voice directly to whoever they want.