- Sketch
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
Posted by: Yanni Oblivion
I'll try to be unbiased here. Nice PR exercise Bungie.
The FAQ was probably made to quell the mass anger at the (quite frankly) stupid ways, for the most part, that the codes were distributed.
Bungie did what they deemed to be fair, shove all the codes out there for anyone to grab, first come first served, and give a few out to various community sites. However, for M$ to give them out via expertzone to a bunch of people who signed up under false pretences was a kick in the teeth to those that have supported the studio and franchise through thick and thin.
The people who actually purchase ODST for the beta alone feel like they have been screwed over here, but I don't think that is the case. Aside from the aforementioned expertzone silliness, everyone had an equally fair chance to get the codes. I know how much getting to play the beta early means to a lot of people, but Monday is only a day away now, and if anything those waiting those extra few days will be looking forward to getting their hands on it more.
Although one thing I don't agree on is the way ODST was advertised as being the only way to gain access to the beta. However, I don't think any anger should be directed towards Bungie here since ultimately it is their publisher M$ who would have the power to make the decision to distribute codes.
See you all in the beta!
The expert zone issue was unfortunate. Microsoft shut it down once the problem was discovered but by then it seems plenty of people had obtained a code. Those were likely the same people out there making a lot of noise, rubbing other people's faces in it and generally being poor sports. Not the type of people that were being given codes in the community and frankly some of these people have given us opportunities to test the Reach banhammer already.
FWIW we tried to distribute codes broadly and fairly, giving lots of the larger fan organizations their own codes to pass out in addition to spreading them around Bungie.net and our own Twitter account. Even so, with millions of fans and a mere thousands of codes, it was always going to leave out far more people than we could possibly include.
Near the end of the day yesterday we were told we had more codes left (they were being held for test purposes and ended up not being used) so we decided to just release them all rather than let them go to waste.