I bought Battlefield 3, and all I wanted after it was delivered was to insert the discs, install the game, and get right into it...start playing the campaign. And maybe, just MAYBE, let the "patch" or update download in the background from fileplanet or gamespot downloads or something, so that by the time I'm done with the campaign or have tried it for a few hours, I can jump into multiplayer too. What I found was a completely different experience, a bitter experience; what I found was the Origin.

What is the Origin I found, you ask? Origin was a weird sort of glorified, covert FORCED registration to begin with (to ensure that neither I nor any other buyer can re-sell your game if we thought it's crappy or just not good enough for us or just not good value for our money or not fun or whatever). Origin was a messed up updating procedure that refused to let me just friggin' "Play Now Without Updates", no matter how many times I pressed the button, tried, or begged it; and the weirdest, most infuriating thing of all, it kept sending me to an ONLINE page every time I pressed that button, an online page that had a redundant and—at the same time—sadistic button titled "Launch Campaign". Excuse me? Whah? Launch CAMPAIGN?! Where am I again? Is this the "internets" or the game interface? OMG, is this a webpage?!! Oh wait, yes, that's the uber awesome BATTLELOG! Awww, I get it. Yeah. The Battlelog. Very progressive. Very...very...very friggin'...is this button working?! No, it's not...it pops up yet a third...or fifth (I lost count) pop-up window or new interface or new cute surprise saying "update needed" or something else along those lines, which I couldn't bother to replicate right now. Origin took 16 hours on an already painful wireless internet connection to look like it filled that download bar of a 3.9 gigabyte update (3.9!!!! That's a freakin' half-game, isn't it?), but in the end, it was just teasing me, tricking me, no more. Origin re-downloaded no less than 1.2 gigabyte of those 3.9, and it spent the last two hours of those 16 hours pretending to be downloading at the regular speed, with the download bar full; I had to wake up, take a look for a few minutes at the download that should have finished two hours ago, figure out something weird was going on, close Origin down, re-start it, and watching the bar go back to 83% from 100%, thus re-downloading 0.6 gigabyte. And I had to wait yet 1.5-2 more hours on the same half-reliable wireless internet connection for the update to finish...for that glorified, highly acclaimed game that everyone was talking about, and I was eager to play.

That is your Origin, and that was my experience with Origin. Other companies are forcing its customers to get or be online for overzealous copy-protection measures and procedures, just to be able to play a game that they had already paid for, and now Origin is forcing me not just to be online for 2 minutes for an overzealous copy-protection measure, but to be online for 18 hours or more, without even taking a single look at the single-player campaign, just to download a full 4-gigabyte update using software that is far from reliable in resuming broken download, and far from reliable in even finishing the download properly. This is what we, honest paying customers with integrity, are getting, and this is what we get it for actually wanting to—sometimes and not 24/7—join an online community of similar gamers and engage in multiplayer fun, while everyone is talking about how people who get the pirated copies of games need to be online only while downloading the game (maybe while sleeping the whole download time), and waking up to just go through a sometimes ridiculously easy process of "pirating" the game, and they can start playing immediately, no fuss, no forced registrations, no regrets on wasted money if the game is crap, and so on and on.

Honestly? I'm not sure if all this is worth it. I know the people reading this message may genuinely empathize or sympathize at least or understand where I'm coming from, or maybe not. But I also know that their corporate leaders, the people sitting up high on the corporate ladder of the huge corporations that publish our games, could not care less for treating customers in a respectful, or at least polite way, and a in a trusting way. To them, we're all crooks who would never pay for an entertainment service, even if it was delivered respectfully and considerately, and even if it truly is high-quality and offers hours of multiplayer fun. So those leaders send down overzealous orders that compels their paid programmers (who know pretty damn well that other passionate programmers WILL be able to hack their methods) to come up with the most overzealous, most ridiculous ways of digital copy-protection, and forced registration, and enforcement of no reselling (their bosses want more profit, more money, more and more), and so on and on. Would a corporate leader actually read this message and feel any empathy or sympathy like you do? You better not be naive.

What to do? Well, try to write a message like this one sometime, and send it to the company in question. The corporate leaders won't care about one or two messages, but they will easily dismiss them as "isolated incidents", but when they start reading thousands of messages, they will hopefully link them to bad publicity and loss of their cherished profit, and perhaps be FORCED to drop their overzealous policies and forced registrations and what have we...perhaps. And until this whole ridiculous charade of glorified, covert copy-protection, DRM, forced registrations, and anti-reselling policies are dropped by corporate game publishers and their greedy leaders, we should boycott what we can; they only keep doing it because we drool on our entertainment "fix" and let them, but if we don't let them, they'll learn to show us some proper respect, even if a lot of us gamers are just teenagers, and I'm not a teenager but I respect quite a few mature teenagers that I met.