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GAF Votes FOTY 2011 Thread Fail Of The Year

For me the fail of the year is Microsoft's handling and attitude towards the Fifa hacking/phishing incidents. At least Sony apologized profusely and offered a ton of free games and free PS+/identity protection services to win back people's trust and respect when they screwed up. Microsoft just treated their victims (who actually had money stolen from them and their accounts vandalized, unlike the PSN hack victims) like idiots and in some cases you would have to contact the Better Business Bureau and demand refunds for lost Gold time and MS points. My downtime for Xbox Live was about twice as long as the PSN outage. During the PSN outage there were huge support groups on forums where people could bitch and cry together. A lot of games blogs decided to be warriors of the people causing a silly amount of uproar with multiple articles a day about the downtime when there was really nothing to report. With the Xbox account hackings there's been relatively very little of that, just a whole lot of "sucks to be you" going on. Even some games blogs, like Destructoid, went out of their way to mock Fifa'd victims (which I found odd, since they were one of the top drama queens when it came to the PSN hack and outage). The Xbox attack is on a smaller scale than the PSN one, but I feel like the crimes being committed on Xbox are many folds larger than the PSN hack and leave the victims in a far more fucked up predicament. MS should add 2-step verification soon. Their security options suck.

Oh, and I'm kind of upset at EA for making the DLC that exists in their Sports titles. That Fifa Ultimate Team shit is ridiculous. No wonder why thieves are exploiting it. EA/MS just continue to profit off of all the stolen money instead of taking it down. I can't even look at Fifa stuff anymore without getting irked.

As far as games go I'd have to choose L.A. Noire as fail of the year. The only interesting thing about that game was the face animations. I'm usually not down on games in general. I even thought Dragon Age 2 was adequate. L.A. Noire just rubbed me the wrong way. I think it was the completely fake open world and shallow gunplay that turned me off.
 
5. LA Noire
4. 3DS launch pricing
3. EA stealing people's games for posting on EA forums.
2. PS3 Skyrim and Betheseda's lies.
1. PS3 hack and Sony response
 
1.> WiiU unveiling
2.> Rage (specially PC)
3.> NOA not bringing good japanese games
4.> Dragon Age II
5.> Skyrim PS3
6.> PS3 Network down
7>. Live hacks yet it doesn't get publicity of PS3 ones
8>. 3DS launch
9.> Ubisoft stance of PC gaming
10.> L.A. Noire
 
While Skyrim is tied with SR3 as my GOTY, Bethesda themselves are the biggest failure this year. Delivering a broken product to a potential thirds of your customers is a big fail.

But, uh, SKYRIM RULES!
 
So... I said Brink and Homefront earlier were worse than everything else. I take that back.

Origin.

Its awesome having to run an entire application just so that it can launch my browser to play a game. So fucking worthless and such a shameless attempt to take a bite of Valve's pie. It helps that its also terrible. Powered by EA. REALLY? REALLY??

Also Wii U. What a fucking terrible unveiling. I'm still not sure what the hell its supposed to be.
 
Media response to the PSN hack.

Said it before and I'll say it again, so much of what was written and rumoured at the time did nothing but drum up hysteria, real journalism was unbelievably thin on the ground.
 
The PSN outage was a disaster in the game world, relatively speaking. Thankfully it doesn't seem like any accounts were compromised, but yeah, the other consequences were terrible.
 
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I played pretty much all of the FOTY candidates already mentioned in this thread, but this one takes the cake by a good long margin.
 
In no particular order:

1. Dragon Age II
2. Skyrim PS3
3. EA games gradually pulled from Steam to only be sold on Origin
4. PSN Outage
5. No actual reason given as to why thousands of people are being affected by Xbox 360 FIFA hacks and having over at LEAST $50 per person stolen with completely horrendous support from Microsoft on resolving the issue
6. PS Vita requiring pricey proprietary memory cards to play games, which raises the price to entry much past that good $250, and in addition the be competent with digital games, you'll need the more expensive ones
7. PS Vita digital region locking
8. RAGE PC poor performance
9. Batman AA PC delay only to result in poor implementation of features that were the sole reason of the delay (we were told)
10. Megaman slowly being killed of completely by Capcom
11. EA forum bans reult in a ban from all of your games regardless if it was even your fault or not that you got banned
 
Clear said:
Media response to the PSN hack.

Said it before and I'll say it again, so much of what was written and rumoured at the time did nothing but drum up hysteria, real journalism was unbelievably thin on the ground.
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This so much. It definitely was a story to report on and pressure needed to be applied to Sony, but holy fuck at all the crying. Sony apologized, let everyone know that they fucked, suggested everyone take precautions since user's info leaked and they promised refunds and bountiful compensation. The amount of drama outweighed the actual fuck up. I wish some of those journalists would put the tinniest little fraction of those news reports, blog posts, podcast discussions and snarky tweets towards the Xbox Live hacking/phishing. Microsoft isn't budging, they're the ones who need the bright hot lights shined in their faces.
 
My choice? You, the gamers. You guys buy millions and millions of games like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, but you don't give a shit about games like Rayman Origins and Bullestorm. Thanks to you guys, we can look forward to a bright future of sequels and sequels to sequels. Fuckers!

Runner up choice is Bioware, not just for DA2 but all of the shenanigans through out the year. The line about gamers not appreciating DA2's "innovations" sealed the deal.
 
Pc versions of games that play worse than their console counterparts.
 
Snuggler said:
My choice? You, the gamers. You guys buy millions and millions of games like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, but you don't give a shit about games like Rayman Origins and Bullestorm. Thanks to you guys, we can look forward to a bright future of sequels and sequels to sequels. Fuckers!
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Bubububu I put Rayman on my Christmas list. And Ghost Trick. And Shadows of the Damned! Week one sales aren't that important, right :(
 
Fail isn't a noun. Stop using it as one.

With that said, I'll interpret it as "biggest disappointment".

I'm going to have to go for RAGE, personally. It wasn't a bad game, but it looked so awesome before its release and it really stumbled out of the gate.

I would have given it to Dragon Age 2, but all signs pointed to it being a terrible mess for a few months before its launch. Such a disappointment after I enjoyed the first game so much.
 
Mike M said:
My question is what exactly is so bad about Dragon Age 2? I'm currently playing the first one for the first time (Not very far, though), but I have reason to believe my wife got me part 2 for Christmas. From what I gather, it sounds like the biggest gripes are the more action-y battle system, copy pasted dungeons, and all around epic-ness being drastically scaled back.

That about sum it up?
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Yes and no:
1) The main gripe with DA2’s combat is how badly most encounters are designed. Choking on waves forever.
2) You’re pretty much right about the dungeons.
3) Epicness doesn’t have anything to do with what’s wrong with DA2’s story. The story is separated into three acts: the first act which feels unfocused and disjointed, the second act is kinda interesting, and the final act concentrates on a conflict that inspires absolute apathy.
But other than the game itself being bad, the horrible marketing(both pre and post release) and reviews contributed to a lot, I’d argue maybe even the majority, of the hate.
 
I like to look at the business side on something like this so my fail of the year would be the 3DS. Nintendo's first fiscal year with a loss combined with a serious failure of knowing the market gets my vote.

Close runner up would be the PSN hack, mainly because it not only affected Sony but every company that sold products on the service. Getting hacked happens, having your network go down for a lengthy amount of time afterwords shouldn't happen.
 
Ps3 skyrim
&
On PSNoutage... Was scared at first but now...us I just accept it as a risk being registered to anything connected to the internet. I do not blame Sony for it either.
 
It's very tough. For me, it's between PSN hack, Dragon Age 2 and Skyrim PS3.

But my vote goes to Skyrim PS3.
 
Neuromancer said:
This one has the distinction of effectively destroying an entire series.
Click to expand...
Guitar Hero needed like 27 iterations before it died. To kill off a franchise with a single game... a feat.

As someone who voted Guerilla as GOTY '09, Armageddon was by far the biggest disappointment and biggest fail of the year.
 
For me, it's the Wii U controller.

I love the Wiimote/nunchuk combo. All it needed were some more buttons and continued improvement on the Motion + tech. And if you really wanted to appease the doubters, throw an analog stick on the Wiimote, so that you can even have dual analog.

But no, the obstinate hardcore whiners won out over a superior control method simply because it was *gasp* new, despite being capable of offering the exact same physical experience as a standard pad. Yes, the Wii U supports Wiimotes, but they are clearly not the emphasis on the new console.

Nintendo, without the courage of their convictions, reverted to an ugly dual analog pad, but simultaneously tried to "innovate" by aping the iPad with the near-useless gimmick of watching your Nintendo games (finally in HD) on a 5 1/2" screen. And with absolutely zero compelling software to justify the WiiPad (probably because anything that could be done with it also could've been done on DS), the response was tepid as expected.

Yeah, Skyrim and Dragon age were bad for fans, but those are just a couple of games. PSN is unfortunate, but you can't stop hackers if they want your shit. But the Wii U controller? I've gotta deal with this shit for the next 5 years.
 
My vote is a tossup between Skyrim (PS3) and Dragon Age 2.

Skyrim (PS3) because I totally fell for the lies, believing it was a "brand new engine" and that the console versions were reaching "parity".

Dragon Age 2 because I told myself I wouldn't look up anything about it since I liked DA1. I went in completely blind and wow... I really wish I did some research.

PSN Hack was bad. But I'm not sure if that's a failing. I didn't really follow the story but did we find out what really happened? Was it really Sony having terrible security, or is it just hackers being hackers (they can get into anything given the time/motivation)?

EDIT: Upon further reflection, I'll have to give it to Skyrim (PS3).
 
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