Pay to Win

Pay - to - Win

Winning - Successfully finishing something before all others or having the best situation unobtainable by others, as in a race, or game.

Please direct me to the person who has WON SW:TOR. I would like to shake their hand and congratulate them for beating an MMO. Most MMOs are ever evolving and can never fully be completed. If someone has completed every quest in the game, owns everything in every collection, has every title, every mount, maximum amount of creds, maximum amount of CCs, and there is NOTHING left to collect, or complete, then they have officially WON THIS GAME. I, for one, would like to shake their hand and pat them on the back for a job well done and find out which MMO they play to WIN next.

I'm pretty sure there were some SWTOR give aways

Not as a prize I want to see the person who completely capped everything in the game and got a Game Over status for beating it. Because they PAYED to beat the game.

so, those of you trying to defend EA by saying there are worse examples think it's a good thing that EA has moved it's focus from it's core product and it's infrastructure and turned to short-term profits that benefit an investor class most of us don't belong to.

we should kill off swtor as a game, because it's just throw away pixels and there are people starving in african and middle-eastern states because of corrupt regimes and resource blockades for financial and political gain of ruling elites. you know who did a bad job running things? charles taylor in liberia. the way he ran things is worse that what EA did by most accounts. first world problems, am i right bran? sorry if that counts as a name call-out, don't want to break the ToS i never bothered reading.

if this makes sense to you, you've failed at sound reasoning. EA sucks. they could do better. they should do better. it has nothing to do with buying apples from the store.

Like all businesses in the capitalist markets have, to invent long lasting products is not as profitable as selling a new product in the long term

that's a very important moral question:
how much of the world am I willing to see corrupted just so I can enjoy a bit of luxus?
(The western worlds answer to this is "all of it")

It depends which part you look at.
EA surely makes a lot of profit, so they do not suck in these terms, they do suck in the care for their products that's right.
As long as you don't want to lay a lot of regulations on them and as long as the people are buying their products, they will be able to continue their suckiness, but I for my part enjoy SWTOR too much to give it up for another boycott action that doesn't work.
People (which includes me and you) are trained to be better consumers, by tv, advertisments and a lot more.
When you see how long people wait for a new product (for example the Iphone 5) and must have it even if they already have the predecessor, you can clearly see how we run for a "better" product even if the means used to produce it are horrible and the product isn't that much better, than it's predecessor.

Not everything is so black and white. You can criticize EA without thinking they are the worst company in America. Should EA do better? Of course they should; I don't know of anyone in this thread that thinks they are perfect, or even close to it. But there are worse companies out there in my opinion.

Once again, you are exaggerating and trying to twist what people are saying to make them sound irrational.
First of all, I don't care enough about EA to "defend" them. Or Ubisoft or Activision or any other publisher for that matter. Plus, you know, they don't really need me to defend them.
But I do care about people who've lost perspective of what's important and what's not, of what's optional and what's not, of what's entertainment and what's reality etc.

Second, let's just say that EA is the worst video games publisher in the whole world. Let's also assume that not one of their titles is worth more than 1 cent.
That STILL doesn't make it the "worst company in America" (or Europe or Asia or anywhere else)

There are companies that do their job well, companies that do their job inadequately and some that are doing it terribly.
And then there are companies that do actual HARM to real people. And the damage they inflict is not "oh, noes my armor is not gray enough".
When you put every single company in the same category and blur the lines between what's done poorly and what's actually harmful, then there is no point in having a discussion.

They could.
And they should at least try to make their games 1000% better. That should be the goal of every company along with profit: providing a great experience for their customers.

But even if EA completely fails to deliver and unless they start polluting the water or putting people out of their homes, they can never be "the worst company".
People really need to get some perspective.

On this note it always cracks me up when I see video game companies top the 'worst company' lists on sites. I get that people dislike EA's practices when it comes to making games, but compared to the kinds of REALLY BAD THINGS other companies are doing out there (Bank of America?) it's so small time.

I get it.

EA is bad.

Bioware is bad for going free to play/market.

Anyone who doesn't agree lacks common sense.

Does that pretty much sum it up?

Funny thing about that though, I suspect there are many folks out there that not only like the direction the game is going, they also like the market and even...perhaps....the F2P system, despite it's flaws.

I don't think it's a matter of common sense. I think it's more likely it's a matter of personal taste.

i believe this is an example of the failure to reason i mentioned above. as it relates to the other responses, fixing the real problems in the world has pretty much no effect on EA or it's business practices, unless those fixes are specifically geared towards legislation or regulation that effects american corporate structure or some similar thing that would actually have an effect on EA.

if another company sells arms or pollutes rivers, that doesn't necessarily mean they are running their company poorly. some people like causing civil wars. there is a lot of money to be made in destroying and rebuilding a country. some people like polluting rivers; mostly just conservatives and the investor class that profits from polluting rivers. if a company does these things because that's what their customers want them to do, then they could actually be focusing on the best product and sound infrastructure and quality employees and happy customers and all that. the problem there is that there are a lot of horrible people that hurt others for their own benefit.

when a bank forecloses on a house that is owned outright by someone else, that's just bad business. those banks definitely deserve to be ranked right up there with EA.