Anthem Friend Exchange

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Well here we are… it is officially the day that Anthem launches…  and by launches I mean if you paid a bunch of money you can get access to the game today.  I know several of us did this thing ahead of purchasing the PC version, because in doing so it gives you a discount off the game purchase price in the first place.  The only problem is things are way murkier than they have been in the past.  There are now two tiers of Origin Access…  the $5 a month basic customers and the $15 a month customers.  We are now in an era when you need a spreadsheet to explain when exactly you get to play the damned game.  EA support of course did this thing…  and while I am grousing about it I do not necessarily blame Bioware for this apart from the fact that they allowed themselves to get bought years ago.

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So if you are dumb like me and went ahead and ponied up for a month or two of Premier…  then you can start playing Anthem legitimately today at 9 am Central Standard Time.  I will unfortunately be at work and given that we have freezing rain going on outside I have no clue what my commute is going to look like.  As such I will probably get a super late start tonight and am hoping the servers are stable by the time I actually get home.  If you have Origin Access basic… aka the $5 a month that used to be the only thing that was available…  you get to play a 10 hour head start.  Something of note…  if you are in this camp Origin loves to not fully close games.  I had this happen to me with Andromeda and saw all of my hours tick away while I slept.  Make sure the executable for Anthem is good and dead in Task Manager to prevent this from happening to you.

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For everyone else…  you get to start playing next Friday, which is kinda screwed up that the folks who are paying the $15 premium are going to get one full weeks worth of game before the folks who simply ordered the game.  This is a frustrating situation and I am weak as fuck for playing into the “buying early access” game model.  The real question is… I have no clue what this is going to do to the grouping dynamic and how far of a gap between characters is completely reasonable.  We didn’t really pay attention to levels during the demo but wound up largely within a level or two of each other given the very limited range that was possible.  We all mostly capped out at 15 by the end, and while I think we pulled in someone who was around 10…  it wasn’t really a noticeable issue.

I am hoping it will be simple to help pull players up and do group content together regardless of the level gap.  This gets into the other major problem with Anthem…  there is no guild/clan system going in at launch.  This combined with how dodgy the Origin client is in general has made me contemplate some sort of alternate way of collecting people who are going to be playing and also occasionally available for grouping.  As such I set up a google sheet this morning to start collecting Origin account information.  Because I didn’t think of a better way to handle this…  there are two parts to the system…  the Sign Up Form and The Roster sheet.  I will be manually copying entries from the Form over to the Sheet… which is honestly the only way I could think to do this without either manually sharing out the Roster or giving everyone Edit access which would go horribly wrong.

Why would I do this thing you ask?  Well it is simple…  Origin is this walled garden disconnected from the other various gaming networks.  It for whatever reason does not seem to understand that we want to group up with people we might know from other platforms and as such has no way of importing users or getting suggestions from other platforms.  There is no twitter or facebook integration, and most certainly nothing like the Steam integration that Epic Games Store has.  So you are stuck trading ids with people on a one by one basis and I figured something like this… would allow a large number of us to catch up in one pass and turn the friends list in Origin into something that is actually useful.  Right now at the time of posting the sheet only has my information but I will be updating it throughout the day and keep posting new names at least once daily after that.

So to summarize:

Hopefully this smooths out the bumps given that this is a bit of a new venture into MMO territory for the Origin client given there was no integration between Origin and SWTOR.  If you think this is a really dumb idea, then I am more than willing to accept those comments.  If you think it is a good idea however…  fill out your info and lets get ready to fly some mech suits!

5 thoughts on “Anthem Friend Exchange”

  1. I’ve had a blast ingame today when time allowed. I’ve clocked in 8 hours with the title so far, but not all of that playing between waiting for friends to catch-up on chats etc. That mix of SP and MP between missions is honestly not very graceful, but I’m not really sure that there is much of a solution to be had here.

    I’ve put my details in, but will take a more proactive stance on adding people to friends list tomorrow… Well, later today. It’s… possible… that I’ve now seen in the wrong-side of 4am tonight. So I am going to sleep shortly. (Now!) 🙂

    I do have a set group of friends who I made buy this thing as well who I will need to prioritise if group space becomes an issue, but at least so far we’ve been lucky to have 3 on at a time, although has been a few instances of 5 on and we’ve had to then split anyway.

  2. I also love Origin. Best thing I bought this year. I saved money on Battlefield V and Anthem alone, plus last time I counted I have played 24 (and counting) other titles from the “EA Vault” – ones I never would have purchased or played otherwise. Great value!

    Still signing up for the Roster though =)

  3. The $5 a month EA access was a pretty good deal considering it got you 10% off Anthem anyways. And 10hrs of game time before the official launch. And access to FIFA, Madden, BFV…..But 10hrs of playtime before next Friday is just about perfect given how many other games there are to play right now anyways.

  4. That is an interesting thought. What if World of Warcraft changed their pricing. For $10 a month you could play all old content, and for $20 you could play all the current content of all games on the desktop launcher.

  5. I don’t feel dumb about going with EA Premier. I paid $15 and so far I have played Titanfall 2, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Battlefield V and now Anthem, and there are other games I’ll check out that I just haven’t got to yet (tho to be perfectly honest some of them may be in the $5/month tier’s Vault). Last month I also paid $15 to play FF XIV, 1 game. So for me the value with Premier is there.

    Another way to look at it, the $80 I would’ve paid for the Legion of Dawn version of Anthem (the version you get with Premiere) gets me 5 months of EA Premiere and it is rare that I personally play a game for that long, so for me all the other stuff is gravy and/or extends the value.

    Bottom line, do what is right for you; I don’t think you should feel dumb about going with Premier! I think its a neat service.

    OK and now I’ve gone off on a wild tangent… LOL Sorry, I know that wasn’t the point of your post, just don’t want you feeling like going with a subscription model is something you should feel wrong about.

    Also Bioware has said a number of times that things are supposed to scale so if a level 5 and a level 25 group up, through some mathematical dark magic both players are supposed to be able to contribute and both will get rewards drop that are appropriate to their level. I assume it’s like the ‘bolstering’ you see in PvP modes in MMOs, basically.

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