They're fucking brilliant!  And if you pay in money before 8pm, it's credited immediately!  And like Starbucks, they remember my name!

the problem with complaining about day one dlc is that you don't even have to buy the game. eve additionally you can get special editions which include dlc so you aren't
paying extra.

Nobody makes cluster bombs anymore, and no arms manufacturer makes anything designed specifically to cause misery, fyi.

Elmlea wrote:

They're fucking brilliant!  And if you pay in money before 8pm, it's credited immediately!  And like Starbucks, they remember my name!

Do they write it on the notes? I used to do that when I was five.

I used to hate Origin and the idea of EA trying to muscle in on Valve's space with Steam. Then I humbly bit the bullet and got Origin with ME 3 on PC and lived with it. Not a bad program. Not great. Haven't used it again since I stopped playing ME 3 over a month ago.

Cluster bombs are designed primarily to cause mobility kills on armour, without necessarily killing the occupants.

No modern weapons are designed to cause misery or suffering, and it breaks one of the central tenets of the law of armed conflict to field a weapon that does cause undue suffering (eg mustard gas), or to modify a weapon purely to increase the level of pain or suffering it causes (eg smearing faeces on a bayonet or making dum-dum bullets).

Subjectively, any loss of life has the chance to cause misery, but that's not the design intent of any weapon, and any allusion thus ("then it's not their fault") is perhaps a little crass.

It's an obtuse comment which I struggle to link to banks, to be honest.

Wasn't one of the reasons cluster bombs were eventually banned because of the rather large percentage of child deaths they caused, and one of the reasons cited for that that the bomblets were designed to look like colourful baubles that children would be attraced to? And then of course they tend ot spread over a large area, often don't explode but remain active for years after being dropped, and tend to blow limbs off as much as kill people.

Subjectively, any loss of life has the chance to cause misery, but that's not the design intent of any weapon

I think we can safely say pretty much all loss of life causes misery.  I also think trying to separate 'intent' from 'almost inevitable consequences' is disingenuous.

Are thermobarics still in use? Footage of those going off keeps me awake at night.

I think there's a couple of reasons. EA have insisted on using their own servers for console games since the last generation, this sometimes has advantages, but has caused a huge amount of technical problems over the years. Other publishers have a reputation for bugs, but the EA servers have caused a lot of games to be completely broken on-line for a lot of people repeatedly over the years. Their ambition outstrips their technical ability in a lot of cases.

They also have a dominant position in the sports genre, especially as far as licensed titles go. I'd guess that a lot of people see themselves as forced to buy FIFA and Madden for the licenses, they're then much less tolerant of the attempts to make money from add on content. That's not entirely rational, but it is understandable.

Activision in contrast just don't make many games these days. A lot of people like COD and they buy it, end of story.

I_R wrote:

Conversely, that's what I find interesting about it. They make video games, in a lot of cases, people love those companies. I wouldn't be voting for them either, but they've done a hell of a job managing to piss people off so much.

From my own experience I don't really know how 'bad' EA are (only played a few of their games in recent years), but such is the internet and its denizens that this kind of backlash could just as easily come from a bubble-dwelling vocal minority who have a propensity to wind themselves into a frenzy about not all that much. So it ain't necessarily the case that EA have had to be all that awful to provoke such a reaction. But then again it could be. I dunno.

I thought it was interesting how EA managed to turn Mass Effect 3, pretty indisputably an excellent game for the vast majority of the experience, and turn it into an absolute PR clusterfuck with day-one DLC, DLC attached to a bewildering array of merch, a controversial ending possibly affected by executive interference, a really out-of-place message about DLC at the end, and so on.

Are EA really worse than Zynga?

There's an issue where a few of their games aren't as big as EA would like and people avoiding them because they have a negative opinion of EA might see those studios shut down.

JonB wrote:

Wasn't one of the reasons cluster bombs were eventually banned because of the rather large percentage of child deaths they caused, and one of the reasons cited for that that the bomblets were designed to look like colourful baubles that children would be attraced to?

I won't drag us off topic again, but no, cluster bomblets were never designed to look like colourful baubles, nor were they ever designed to attract children! They look like little bombs, and there were some weapons that had some bomblets that acted as mines and didn't detonate immediately (runway denial weapons for example) but normal cluster bombs are all instantaneously fused and designed to detonate on impact. The smaller payload often resulted in a higher failure rate, but it's unlikely they'll randomly explode in the future if the fusing mechanism stops them detonating when they're meant to.

Kids are curious and they will play with things like this, but the idea that they're designed to attract kids is fairly abhorrent. Anything that works like a mine is now banned due to the risk of anyone finding it in the future, not just kids, and our main cluster weapon did include minelets as it was an anti-runway weapon.

Webbins, modern small arms ammo is designed to injure; not to fill up hospitals but to occupy people on the battlefield, so that one injured guy takes 2 colleagues to remove him to safety. It's also out of reasons of humanity; people would generally prefer for combatants to be removed from fighting but not killed altogether.

Bollockoff, yes, but the thing you're thinking of isn't a traditional thermobaric weapon. Modern thermobaric weapons just use pressure to carry the explosion in a more directed way, rather than using air as part of the explosive mixture. You're thinking of a fuel/air explosive weapon, which don't tend to be used anymore.

If anyone cares to ask any more feel free to start another thread in the off topic section.

Elmlea wrote:

I won't drag us off topic again, but no, cluster bomblets were never designed to look like colourful baubles, nor were they ever designed to attract children! They look like little bombs, and there were some weapons that had some bomblets that acted as mines and didn't detonate immediately (runway denial weapons for example) but normal cluster bombs are all instantaneously fused and designed to detonate on impact. The smaller payload often resulted in a higher failure rate, but it's unlikely they'll randomly explode in the future if the fusing mechanism stops them detonating when they're meant to.

I don't wish to carry this on here either. It's easy enough for anyone to Google something like 'cluster bombs look like toys' (without quotes) and read through the relevant results.

Anyone can also Google image search 'cluster bomblets' to see pics of various types.