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It's THURSDAY!!!!
I was going to post a massive missive to get all you mopes to download Battlefield 1943 for tonight, but it seems there have been some snags... gaming site N4G reports:
Planet Battlefield writes: "Lastly, some people have noticed that as of right now Battlefield 1943 has been set to 90,000 Microsoft points on Xbox Live instead of the usual 1200. Some suspect DICE want to put up more servers before adding more players to the game."
So it doesn't look good. However, Planet Battlefield themselves have an update on their site:
The 90,000 point issue was an error showing only for silver accounts and should not have been shown in the first place. It has since been resolved.
So there you have it. If you see BF43 showing up in the Marketplace for 1200, points grab it, and LET'S PLAY!!! Otherwise, unless you've got $1285 of spare MS points kicking around, it looks like CoD4 again.
So it turns out we were able to download it after all, but server problems cause a couple of disconnections for a couple of us, but mainly it was hard to get into a server together. BF43's multiplayer party "lobby" is not quite up to industry standards, forcing you to re-invite everyone if there is an error connecting to a server. And that happened a LOT.
We ended up having better luck with finding servers separately, then one of us would join the other. Even this took 4-5 attempts at first, but it was up to 20 tries when Snuffy joined us.
Which is when we discovered that you get automatically logged out of the server after 45 seconds if you fail to notice the little "Continue" button in the bottom left of your screen at the end of the lengthy loading process. I ran afoul of this bizarre little auto-boot twice; once during a bathroom break, and once while explaining to Snuffy how to accept a squad invite (he's been away from gaming for some time). Which resulted in another round of trying to reconnect to Friends (45+ attempts). But seriously, if you're going to stray from the widely accepted norms for auto-joining a game, at least make it obvious that the player is about to get kicked!
A hopefully unbiased game review to follow after their server issues have subsided.
According to PlanetBattlefield:
"We have full support of EA to add as many servers as takes and then some so that everyone can play. This work has already started and servers will be added around the clock with teams working to cover this 24 hours a day so not a moment is wasted. You will be able to play this game and play it lag free!
This is good news for those you (Snuffy) who have had server connection issues.