The Acceptance of Mediocrity
147 days 4 hours ago
| by:
pixelsword
This generation has seen the dumbing-down of products and services to an outrageous degree and the sad thing is that people are stupid enough to justify it. A company puts out a crap-game and instead of thinking carefully and wisely to ensure a quality product, they just patch it later on if there are problems they feel like dealing with. Why even finish a game to AAA quality if you can just patch it later? Look at some of the terrible games and products that were the result of poor planning, which we as consumers have to deal with:
- a number of multi-platform games made for the PS3 (and some for the 360) in which some were patched later on, and some were given the big Fork You (case in point, EA's/Valve's treatment of patching their PS3 games)
- the strap for Nintendo's controller, which has probably broken more glass and bruised more people than a hillbilly wedding reception.
- Red. Ring. O'. Death. 'Nuff said.
This in reality is bigger then a petty Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo squabble: this
sub-par release of junk just to be sort-of fixed later is the future of
products worldwide... or have you already forgotten about the lead/drugs/werewolves (kidding on the last one) in
children's toys from China? Or how it seems that whole crops of food
are getting salmonella every once in a while, grown from sub-par
techniques? Anyways, back to games.
It's like they just sucker you out of your money, you get upset and then they go "there, there; I'll fix it for you AS MANY TIMES AS IT BREAKS. You don't even have to pay for it, if it breaks the way I say it should break." Wrong! I had to pay for it when I bought it, I'm just not GETTING WHAT I PAID FOR. I lose money on my investment if I have to Wait for a game patch, get my HDTV replaced because of the controller flying out of my hand, or have to wait for a console to return, only to turn around and replace it again in a few weeks.
I don't know if the thicker-headed fanboys (read: people me) are grasping the seriousness of the situation, but maybe if I place the quality level on another product, perhaps people may see the difference. Okie-dokey, here goes:
Let's say Midas sold a new line of breaks and twenty million people bought them, but out of the first ten million one out of three people had their master cylinder malfunction, causing the breaks not to work at all. Now, not all of the three million people who experienced failure actually died, many were just mangled, or were injured. Midas puts out a statement that in fact that it was only 200,000 people who actually were injured, killed or mangled, not three million, and that those 200,000 people were a low enough number to call it "not a big deal and people are blowing it out of proportion". But later on, many people start to complain, news articles start to pop-up out of nowhere stating that millions of people were mangled, or injured. After being outed by a company survey close to Midas, Midas finally puts out a statement stating that they will start up a replacement program to fix the breaks... except they never actually fix the breaks in a manner that will prevent the same thing from happening again.
Would YOU use those breaks?
Would you put your Father/Mother, Sister/Brother, Girlfriend/Boyfriend, Wife/Husband or child in a vehicle with those dreadful breaks controlling them?
I would hope not!
But that's what has been done when people ask about the 360's reliability as a console: despite the total lapse of quality, people are recommending it to people, despite the fact that they or people they know went through multiple consoles! Now, why do you think people are still going through multiple consoles?
Because people have accepted the fact that their console will fail, so if Microsoft realizes that, they know that they don't really have to fix the problem if people don't really care to have it fixed. Standing up against bad services and products only serves to help us as consumers... it doesn't help the people we made millionaires by consuming their crap products.
If someone forces you to bend over, you know what's coming, so your fight it.
If you bend yourself over, not only do you know what's coming, but you must like it... or at least accept it.
Right?
Anyways, it's 5 in the morning, I need some sleep. Lord willing, I'll probably see this tomorrow and laugh.
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