Kotaku runs a story that gets me in an EA bashing mode. NBA07 is bad, Madden07 is worse and gamers still continue to pour money into their titles. EA has a crapload of titles to support and they crank them out like no other, however, I think they’ve had a few quality problems. Maybe I need to explain…

For one, take this gray picture here. It’s EA’s support site; which like all huge companies is impossible to navigate to find patches. The developer is different than the publisher is different than the operations people, is different than the people who admin the game servers (likely). However, you’d think that gamers and geeks would throw their arms up in rage at the obvious and numerous typographical error LINUS SERVER. Like a nominal dart that has hit the bar’s waitress in the head, Linus Server is hilariously off target. But not without consequence. The community is shortly going to be calling the cops and it’s EA’s permanent record that will be charged with darting-with-intent-to-name.

EA has friends too. Valve’s lame attempt into Linusing has produced such great admin interfaces as the steam console, something I have to script to death to make usable and quick. Running a CS server is something that is rewarding after reading geocities documentation and researching what the hell “Free Sound List is Full!” means: it means they don’t handle errors quietly.

Valve neglects the dedicated server usability, EA neglects the Gates Server.