Anyone who has been a long-standing member of any gaming platform like Steam or EA knows that forums are a primary method of communicating with customers and providing technical feedback and support.

A while back, EA apparently abandoned its old platform “answers” to run their own forums.

Now… go to the EA website and click on Resources – Forums. You will be presented with three choices of forum category and each.. will take you to answers.ea.com, which it no longer uses. Do you see a section for Dragon Age: The Veilguard? No. There isn’t one.

The official EA forums are now at forums.ea.com.

How does a major software company not even change links to point to where it wants users to go for support?

I discovered this when trying to get back to the forums I just registered to use. I already had an EA account, of course. I’ve been an EA customer since they bought out Maxis and started demanding people install their platform to run their games.

Sessions also don’t carry over. I have to log in to the help site (which now just lists links and offers automated support.)

Here’s a sample of what happened when I tried to use EA Help

ME: Your forums don’t work at all, and when I finally manage to access them they are filled with people spewing hatred and demanding BioWare fire its Veilguard development team.

EA: Your answer appears to be problematic because of reasons. We provide an environment safe for all users and your question is hateful.

OK, that isn’t verbatim, but it’s close.

The problems don’t end there.

Accessing the forums, you will be redirected to games you aren’t interested in, in forums you never tried to view. Buttons may or may not produce ANY result at all. The reply screen may or may not load. Related posts in the forum you are viewing will probably have nothing at all to do with the forum you’re actually reading.

Accessing the general EA forum to report problems with the forums and EA site functionality, you will see a large majority of those posts are from players having problems with their EA account and EA refusing to respond, sometimes for months.

With the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard becoming so contentious in the direction it takes away from the first three DA games, the site is also filled with demands for the firing of BioWare devs and claims that anyone who enjoys Veilguard couldn’t possibly be a real Dragon Age fan at all.

The EA forums are a mess structurally and content-wise. EA representatives are continuously trying to start “show us your Rook” and “share photomode” moments while they ignore the hostility they claim they don’t allow and refuse to answer questions from long-time users about why they can’t access their account.

Electronic Arts mucks up everything it touches that doesn’t involve a professional sports franchise (oops!). They were voted 2012’s worst company in America by Consumerist, and again in 2013. (Consumerist no longer exists so I linked to the Wikipedia article that includes citations.) They were voted the 5th most hated company in the United States by USA Today in 2018.

I don’t understand the gaming community turning on a subsidiary of one of the worst companies on the planet when BioWare has consistently provided solid games that run well and engage users. OK, a lot of people aren’t happy with Veilguard. A lot of people weren’t happy with Andromeda either. Mass Effect still exists and will go forward. I’ve heard reports of teasers to a Veilguard sequel… not any video or even graphics. But I have yet to find anything to confirm those reports myself.

Like David in the “Overlord” DLC, my autistic brain notices patterns, too. Like, how the same navigation errors that occur in the EA forums sometimes occur in Veilguard. Or that the “here’s what you get, customer. Now piss off for another decade” is much more of an Electronic Arts tone than a BioWare one.

In fact, I’m willing to bet a lot of the delay in Veilguard production was an attempt to see how its projected changes would be received by the gaming community at large based on the inclusion of similar in other games. Veilguard has collections of items just like Hogwart’s Legacy. There are empty slots for the equipment you haven’t collected yet and in some places counters to tell you how many you have yet to collect (so you don’t have to count empty squares, I guess.) Likewise, all the objects you interact with to get loot (chests, bags, etc.) glow golden, as do ladders and some other objects with which users interact.

The mechanics are fun, but extremely gimmicky. The streets of Minrathous look very similar to the streets of Baldur’s Gate (though I honestly like Veilguard’s art better.) You can pet cats and dogs, just like in Baldur’s Gate 3.

It feels like part of re-tailoring the Dragon Age series for a new generation (which is clearly what Veilguard hopes to achieve… they flat out state it as game dialogue) involved a marketing time from Electronic Arts monitoring the success of other games and movies to see what tropes would sell and what wouldn’t.

If you feel that Dragon Age and/or Mass Effect need saving, the last thing these sagas need is for BioWare developers to be fired. What Electronic Arts needs to do is either spin off BioWare to its own company, or allow BioWare time to bring a game to completion before release and offer dedicated support.

What company expects success when it refuses to answer customer’s basic account questions, won’t direct users to its own forums properly, can’t manage or maintain those forums in a functional state, and relies an totally robotic customer support that labels questions about forums “hateful” and damaging to other players?

How could a private chat question placed to a bot POSSIBLY cause consternation for other players who can’t see a private chat bot help session? I’m the only sentient person involved in that exchange.

Electronic Arts – still the crappiest company in America. BioWare still making solid games in spite of it.

I know who I’m blaming if/when the wheels fall off the cart, and it isn’t the people who made the games I love; it’s their corporate taskmasters.

And if you need help with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, for pete’s sake don’t try to get it from EA. There are a lot of good people on the forums, if you can get to them and stay there. It’s 2024. How hard should someone have to get to someplace on the Internet.