Battlefield 3: Pay your way to the top...

Article first published as Battlefield 3: Pay Your Way to the Top on Technorati.

EA's Origin store page for the shortcut kits

Imagine a scenario where one day you start up Battlefield 3, check your stats and proudly gaze upon the hundreds of hours and earned achievements.   Confident, you get on a multiplayer server and find yourself repeatedly dispatched by low level players with really big guns.  

Thinking it's just a bad server you move on to another only to have it happen again and again.  Why?  because they took advantage of a leg up from EA and now have access to resources you haven't earned yet.

 That's a very real possibility now with Thursday's release of new add-on packs for Battlefield 3.  Don't confuse these with DLC packs, however, this is something entirely different and a portent of things to come in online gaming.

Go to EA's Battlefield website and you can purchase everything from clothing to a novel based on the game.  Now EA is offering a new option called "Shortcut Kits"  These "Kits" allow less experienced players on the PC and PS3 to gain all the weapons and vehicle options available in a player class or discipline (air or ground) as well as co-op weapons for $7 to $18 per "Kit". 

If you're the type that just has to have it all you can also purchase a "Kit" that includes all the upgrade items for $39.  Most importantly it's available without the usual time investment necessary to acquire the good stuff.

EA is very forthcoming about the purpose of these kits.  On the official Battlefield Blog, DICE's  Tommy Rydling cites the purpose of the "Kits" as, " the perfect way to gain some ground on the veterans online".  

There's two flaws in the logic of offering these kits for a game like Battlefield 3.

EA may be signaling an attempt to adopt the profitable MMO free to play, pay for upgrades model.  The problem for a game like Battlefield 3 is that it's neither free nor is anything else connected to the franchise. 

MMO's depend on either subscription or upgrades for revenue but rarely will the paid content threaten the investment (financial or otherwise) of veteran players. Most content such as the myriad of hats available in Team Fortress 2 is designed to allow the player to customize their appearance or upgrade equipment.  

While some advantage may be gleaned in PVP player modes, the successful MMO doesn't rely on it.  Instead individual character development and engaging single player missions keep the player's interest which usually leads to some level of purchase later on.  Whenever a free to play MMO favors paid players the title generally fails in short order.

That leads to the second problem.  Battlefield 3's strength and popularity are tied directly to its multiplayer.  The franchise has generally had weak single player and cooperative ( if included) modes throughout its history compared to its Call of Duty competitor.  

That translates to a very large risk of alienating veteran players who've invested time and money in the franchise only to be bested by nothing more than a better weapon.  Better equipment always equates to better odds in PVP and Battlefield 3 was designed from the onset to be a Multiplayer game.  It's the very lifeblood of the franchise and not conducive to a MMO revenue model.  

There's been much debate about this latest development and being so close to April 1st it's hard not to wonder if it's all just a bad joke.  Apparently there is precedent, however, as Bad Company 2 offered a similar option sparking the same controversy.  There's also a purchase page for the kits within the Origin client which was my first exposure to this revelation.  Hopefully this is an April Fool's joke but even if it's not it's in bad humor.

Nvidia's GTX 680 game changer

Now we've got a game...

No doubt if you're reading this you already know that Nvidia released the GTX 680 late last week.  With little more than a single card and the rest of its family tree just rumors at this point Nvidia has managed to change the graphics market.

Regardless of whose review you read it's hard to deny the fact that the GTX 680 is the card we've been waiting for ever since the first space heaters known as Fermi rolled off the assembly line.  Toss aside the marketing hype about specialized features, custom cooling solutions and questionable bandwidth claims because Nvidia finally has a real horse in the race.

Don't get me wrong, I'm nobody's fanboy as I consider Nvidia's Fermi predecessors burnt offerings.  AMD/ATI has been on a tear for the past few years with the price/performance crown squarely in their camp with little competition from team green. 

Nvidia's claimed performance advantages over ATI  offerings in the past few years were easily erased with little more than a driver update.   With Fermi, Nvidia saddled itself with products whose signature was high power consumption, high operating temperatures and a high price to match.  Compared to their competition, those factors ceded the market to AMD/ATI when performance never rose above the level of equivalence. 

Think of it this way,  If you had a choice between two cars with the same performance attributes but one was less fuel efficient and subject to overheating it's likely you wouldn't choose it.

Enough about what Nvidia did wrong because it seems they've finally done something right.

The 680 GTX is a video card based on the new Kepler GPU architecture which is claimed to be "Fermi evolved" but where Fermi from its inception was meant to be more GPGPU this new card has actually scaled back that functionality.  A functionality that most gamers could care less about by the way.  It is reasonable to consider Fermi as a square peg in a round hole as its core design was more about compute performance than pixel pushing.  When you repurpose an architecture like Fermi to run contrary to its primary purpose it's no wonder that heat and power consumption result.  Performance will similarly suffer.

Addressing the deficiencies of Fermi is exactly why the 680 GTX takes the win from the 7970.  A $50 to $100 lower MSRP only drives the point home.  Further, a TDP of 195 Watts versus the 250 Watt TDP of the 7970 puts the ATI offering in the unenviable position of being the new king of hot, power hungry enthusiast video cards formerly occupied by Nvidia.

I've only found one review that claimed the 7970 was the better card and then it was based only on memory bandwidth which has less value on graphics processing than CPU workloads.  GPU's have multiple avenues to tweak performance.  Just as an Nvidia GTX 260 with its 448 bit memory bus is easily bested by an ATI 128Bit bus on a 5770 due to factors other than memory bandwidth. 

Much like Intel took back the CPU crown from AMD with Bloomfield (Socket 1366) in 2008 based at least in part on a technology heritage flowing from mobile platforms it appears that Nvidia's more efficient design may be borrowing to some degree from their forays into the mobile market where power efficiency and thermal control  while maintaining performance is a priority.

AMD/ATI may be facing a similar situation in the graphics realm to its experiences with Intel in the CPU realm.  Recent reports suggest a price drop is likely but not certain for the 7970 due to the full line of 7xxx series cards and prices already announced.  A price drop at the high end would have to extend down the entire line.  With thin margins, AMD isn't in a good position to pull the trigger. 

Who'd have ever thought Nvidia would be the new price/performance leader?

HardOCP's review of the 680

PC Magazine's article on the 680

PCPer's 680 Review