GameTap growing pains

B

Brian234

CAGiversary!
I recently joined GameTap and up until a couple of days ago, it was wonderful! There was a cool front end, and the games ran very well.

Unfortunately, they force-switched everyone to a new web-based client, and it is terrible! It crashes frequently, can't download games, can't play most already-downloaded games, and for the games it can play, the experience is diminished (you still get ads!). In other words, if I hadn't signed up already, there's no way I'd sign up now.

There's a belief they will quickly fix some of these problems, but wow, why oh why did they force this junk on people? If they don't fix it in a week, I'll have to get a refund otherwise I'll lose my ability to dispute the charge on my CC.

Here's hoping they fix it quick!
 
I've been a member for a couple of years now, and I'm really disappointed also. You can only play games if they're 100% downloaded. The forum mods and gametap staff say that games will play with partial downloads, just like the last player. But I haven't found one game yet that will. And that's on three different pcs. And the browser games play in such a small window that everything around the window is a distraction.

I'll give them a few weeks to fix this mess. Software developers always seem to pull this bs. Release something too early and have the paying customer give feedback on what needs fixing. As of right now I have so much time invested in Gametap, I don't want to drop. My sub ends in Oct, so I'll give it to then. If the system still isn't to my standards, I won't renew.
 
Yea, this is crap now. I haven't played any games in a while, and then finally started getting into DiRT. Now they pull this crap. It is even labeled beta on the top. I highly doubt they did prior testing and just are letting us do the work. Not a single "download" game works for me, even if it is 100%. I just realized the games weren't fully downloaded, which explains why there was extremely long load times in DiRT. One time I seriously waited over two minutes, put the controller down, came back five minutes later, and finally it loaded right as I was coming back. Sometimes it would takes less than 15 seconds, so I was really confused. Now I know which games will be fully downloaded, so I don't have to "stream" games anymore. I hope they fix everything soon...
 
It was rocky, but it's getting better. Frankly I expected issues like this, so I'm not upset in the slightest about it. I still think it's a great service.
 
Man if I was paying for a service like that I would complain if you can't download your games

How is it so far? (since the post)
 
Games download fine, for the most part - eventually. Sometimes they go without a hitch, sometimes you'll have to refresh the page. But it gets done, and it's performing markedly better each day. Today I only had to restart the process once.
 
The part that really pisses me off is that while Gametap is coming up with answers, they're making the customer do all the work. Honestly, they should have sent out a patch or update by now to cure some of the known problems that they have found fixes for. I'm still having problems. The biggest thing for me is that the previous system worked great. And now they basically have people paying for a beta.
 
I'd be surprised if they didn't issue some kind of credit once the issues are ironed out, which they mostly have been in my experience. They may be trying to do one big patch rather than incrimental ones. Plug-in updates seem to annoy people, even if they're to fix stuff, as evidenced by Quake Live. Maybe I'm just more forgiving of the issues because I really did expect them, heh.
 
It's been about the same experience for me since last week. The Firefox plugin doesn't work - clicking "download" or "play" on any non-browser game doesn't register with the plugin so you can't really use it. The Internet Explorer plugin is buggy but better - the browser will crash about 50% of the time and I have to manually kill the GameTap Player process. Clicking on Play for some games will take a few minutes before the game actually loads (Tony Hawk 3 comes to mind). Unfortunately, there are still advertisements during browser games, and they aren't full screen like they used to be.

Even if these bugs were fixed, this still isn't an experience I'd pay for. I can play ad-based web versions of most of their browser games for free. And, the long delay for the other games completely takes away from the I'll-just-play-a-quick-game-for-nostalgia-sake factor. I've decided to cancel, and will rejoin if they get everything to the quality of the old player.
 
I've seen people complain both plug-ins don't work, but they installed fine for me. I'm using FireFox 3.0.8 for the most part, though.
 
I've read plenty of posts on the Gametap forums and it seems that the Firefox plug-in is hit and miss. I've only been using IE7 because of that.

I finally had the time last night to see why Gametap wasn't working on my Vista Ultimate machine. I ended up deleting the player and re-installing it. It now works fine. So, I now have Gametap working on all three of the family's pc's. :cool: It was frustrating to say the least.

I still have a beef with the new player though. When you click a button, it doesn't really indicate if the button was pressed or not. And it takes forever for a game to start. Combine those two together and, well talk about frustrating! :bomb:
 
Just try to think of the website as the interface... everything is actually happening in the gametapplayer process. Monitor that for signs of activity.

Also try clearing your cache if you have plug-in issues with FireFox. Tools > clear private data.
 
[quote name='Sokkratez']
Also try clearing your cache if you have plug-in issues with FireFox. Tools > clear private data.[/quote]
I just might try that. But I should have been clearer. I haven't even tried Firefox because of what I've been reading, that's why I'm only using IE7. So I really haven't had any problems with Firefox because I haven't tried using it.
 
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