Black Ops reported to UK Office of Fair Trading

Gamer’s Voice, an independent pressure group formed by Labour MP Tom Watson in 2009, is contesting that ‘Black Ops’ fails to function as advertised. Indeed the problems affecting ‘Black Ops’ online are such that this aspect of the game is “rendered almost useless.”. Gamer’s Voice has decided to report ‘Black Ops’ publisher Activision to the Office of Fair Trading.

Read Below for full letter

Gamer's Voice Yahoo

 

I compleatly agree with this, even tho BO is one of my favorite games having to deal with it not responding more then 50 times or so it gets annoying, its probably closer to 100 times now its has stopped responding on me. I think an agreement for people who bought it and cant play it should get there moneys back.

 

I have issue with series lag and game suddenly stop responding (multi player)

 

I'm sure the EULA (which, imo, is garbage) contains some standard verbiage to the effect of "we don't even guarantee that there is a game on this disc."

 

EULA may be unenforceable in law, as it is not made clear to the consumer at the point of purchase. UK consumer law offers fairly good protection, and I'm not aware of any court cases which have ruled on the enforceability of EULAs in common law (its quite possible in fact that software companies are unlikely to want to test the enforceability of such clauses).

 

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but I don't think the OFT would take this as serious as many other issues, although I completely agree that the PC version of BLOPs was dissapointing in so many areas (yet in those unlaggy, un-stuttering seconds I love it).

Hopefully this does get taken seriously and forces a good debate on the issue

 

I'm seriously hope OFT take action against this issue.

 

All this and I still place $100 on the next CoD shattering all previous sales records for fastest and highest selling game of all time. Activision knows they can get away with selling games like this, and the public will gobble them up. Instead of a lawsuit, why don't people try what me and other discerning gamers do: stop buying Activision products.

They produce crap and people keep buying it... why would they stop producing crap? That's called a bad business move in my books.

 

Doesnt activision own blizzard?

 

Yes, it's called Activision Blizzard, but Blizzard still runs independently for now.

I really don't see what all the hoo-hah is about over Black Ops, I bought it for the PC and apart from the dumb respawn system it's an average game if you enjoy twitch shooters and spray and pray.

 

Cool, if this goes through and activision starts giving out refunds, count me in.

 

My BO does the exact same thing.

 

LOL . But seriously, given the draconic EULAs rules, I wouldn't be surprised if it would be written...

 

Well, I agree that stop buying their products (or bad franchises) is a way. But still it is time a lawsuit type of action is taken. Game companies should be held to some level of QA with respect to the games they sell.

 

That's exactly what I'm thinking. If they charge for something they need to provide the service without problems.

 

I don't agree one bit. Show me a perfect piece of software. You can't, cuz there isn't any. Why would you want to force laws and court precedence that software companies can now be sued for not reaching the unobtainable. That sounds like the best thing we can do to insure the death of innovation and the future of programming.

Start being an informed and prudent consumer. I just saved you a ton of money in legal fees. If you can sell a piece a crap for $60, more power to you and your brilliant business sense.

 

Problem is activision failed to fix those issues.
Nothing is perfect, but if developer failed to address those issues what's the point of advertising that consumers can play online?

 

EULA doesn't mean anything in Europe, they have much better consumer protection law than we do unfortunately.

 

Quit being so subjective, what you find to be "crap" is considered a great product by other people. If something sells then it is good. No one likes crap, so obviously people buy CoD games because they enjoy them and they give them pleasure. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's crap. Regardless of technical issues like lag/disconnections, the game itself is obviously loved by many, which is the complete opposite of crap.

 

This game earned a billion yet they fail to put in time to fix probably some very simple issues? I personally have very few connections issues, but it is apparent that a very large portion of buyers are having connection issues. It is too bad that most games released in the last few years have had very low quality support.

 

Come to think of it, a surprising amount of my games are ended in d/c or failed host migration. Modern Warfare 2 was a lot better in that aspect.

 

Love is blind; Activision is clearly exploiting this in their loyal customers. Other publishers and non-franchised games couldn't dream of getting away with something like this and still be sell their games. Activision pretty much knows they can get away with anything on CoD and still set world sale records.

This is clearly learned behavior by Activision, and guess who taught them?

 

Glad I sold the game while it still had value.

 

It's your fault if you're having problems with Call of Duty: Black Ops. The warning signs were all there. Activision screwed people over with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, with the many issues it had unresolved, but inspite of it all people still fell for it a second time and invested in this company. In my opinion Activision is a lazy and greedy company which should have been blacklisted by everyone after Modern Warfare 2. They've been recycling the same garbage since Modern Warfare 1 with minor additions and "improvements" and passing it along as "new" titles and selling it to the public overpriced for maximum profit.

 

^ The Truth

I never planned on buying BLOPS, was an x-mas present. Never informed my parents of my plans to boycott lol.

Activision won't be getting anything from me in the future that is for sure. We are the ones with the power, but unfortunately there are far too many mindless sheep out there.

 

Honestly I believe Treyarch is the worse of the two ( treyarch, Activision) evils. What I mean is:

Infinity Ward made ALL of the good Call of Duty game 1-4. MW2 was still a very good game, it only lacked dedicated servers -- which was Activisions final decision, a reason why almost all IW left and started their own company. So if MW2 would have had dedicated servers NO ONE would be playing Blackops, because Blackops is inferior in every way to ALL of IW's work/games -- what is sad is Blackops is Treayarch's best effort of the COD franchise.

Treyarch has basically taken, with Activisions guidance, all of IW's inspiration/development and basically ruined it.

Blackops is by-far the worst thing to happen to the COD series. It is a travesty really. The only other game worse than BO is World at War, another Treyarch-trainwreck of a game.

tl;dr Treyarch has taken the COD franchise the way of the dinosaur.

 

I disagree with you (respectfully!).

I agree IW did a fantastic job on cods 1-4. 4 especially was epic, and I still think PC-wise, it is the best COD mp to date.

In comparing BO to MW2, lets assume for a minute that BO did not have the performance issues that it has, and worked fine... then what do we have?

MW2 had a substandard sp campaign, especially compared to BO. What little interactions with the environment etc are offered in cod games was not even present in MW2, it had the biggest feeling of 'run here' and then run here again. Cod 4 had epic missions like All ghillied up and the one where you chase the guys son etc., where the objective had much more meaning. Compare it to Cod mw2, where the objectives where comparatively lame, and the damn game didn't even finish, with the rangers missions and the price/soap missions ending virtually mid sentence!

BO had probably the best story of all cods so far, and some of the missions e.g. the prison break sequence were very unique.

MP wise, BO has much more balance, and Treyarch didn't go overboard with ridiculously powerful weapons (unlike IW with the ACR - i mean, !) as well as killstreaks that only encouraged a camping gameplay style. There were also several bugs in MW2 as well, as well as lack of dedicated servers just so IW can milk more money from PC players with map packs.

However, having bought BO, I agree completely that the game was rushed, and is still in no playable state on PC. Terrible optimisations (still can't look down main street in Havana without fps drops) etc. as well as non-functioning zombies, wager matches not working definitely turned this game into a major disappointment.

I ain't buying another cod game for a long time.

 

I laugh at my friend who brought BO, the multiplayer lags too much, most of my friends didn't get BO even though they have MW2. (and still play)

 

It is not about being perfect. It is just that all the recent CoD games are about their multiplayer component (reason why millions of copies are sold), thus you'd expect a decent multiplayer support (be it stable connections, or continous support to remove hacks, or etc.) which have been seen in other multiplayer games (do you think an MMORPG title could survive if they have connection 'issues'?).

Just my 2 cents.

 

Sorry to nitpick, but Treyarch developed Call of Duty 3, Finest Hour, and Big Red One.

Personal opinion, I guess, but I loved World at War. It's easily my second favorite CoD game after CoD4.

 

PC users not alone. If you read the letter it said even PS3 users have problems. I think activision just rushed this game to cover up their problems with Infinityworld

 

Well, I think the PS3 users deserve those problems for trying to play Cod on a console

Jokes jokes -

but yeh, absolutely gutted. Really hoped for gun game etc to be great (had awesome time with that mod in CS:s)

but it seems that only Blizzard and Valve are developers that give two s***s about PC anymore.

Hopefully they introduce the next counter strike soon with HL2 Ep3

 

we need an epic re-imagining of CS to replace CoD/BF for the pc community

 

From a theme standpoint BO is awesome. I really like the game but that is coming from someone that hasnt played a COD game prior to this. You can nag BO all you want about how bad it is, but for new players it is a good game besides the fact of it freezing on me which it hasnt in 30 hours or so now, Its one of my favorite all time games.