So I emailed one of the Vice President's at EA

[Steve]

I laughed at this thread. EA are pathetic. Thanks for posting the email exchange

[D'oh-tastrophe Inc.]

Feb 20, 2013 0:37:30 GMT -5 walkinonwaterr said:

What Mystery Box Loop? Haven't heard of this

I got this after I got out of the harp loop. Basically, the bonus level up boxes keep on rolling in until you exit the game. The best part is your xp meter goes back to bonus level 1.

[batman]

Wow EA... -_-

[Lucerion]

Ea May be a terrible company but they are not nearly as bad as 80% of f2p company's especially the ones based in china lol..

[Heretictus]

Feb 20, 2013 0:25:52 GMT -5 joshhuffman said:

Jaded industry folk seem to be like its par for the course.

I work as a mid level technical manager for a large publicly-held company in the US and agree with Jehenyen's synopsis.

i believe the cause is that such companies have shifted their model to fully focus on meeting Wall Street expectations instead of focusing on the customer. I realize that businesses have always been driven by their bottom line, but in my 28 year career, I've seen a distinctive all-encompassing shift over the past five years or so to managing primarily to Wall Street expectations.

In my position, I am expected to be customer focused, and I am. I can easily do 60-70 hour weeks all hours of the day and night performing software upgrades during maintenance windows, monitoring and managing our customer-facing services, and troubleshooting issues. But we are now expected to take "shareholder value" training and incorporate those principals into our technical work. 

its now all about the quarterly numbers, regardless of what the company advertises or says publicly. There's very little real planning beyond the next quarter. Funding and resource decisions are made based on the quarterly projections. Across-the-board RIFs are enacted on an "emergency" basis with mere weeks to plan in order to make the quarterly numbers. Resources to properly develop and test software, and worse to fix software bugs, are allocated based on the quarterly numbers. All driven by a 20-something or 30-something Wall Street analyst with no real experience in the industry who says company xyz should do $X. And if the company doesn't meet the expectation, your stock takes a hit and shareholders get angry. Too many quarters of missing the mark, and your bond rating takes a hit. Wall Street now runs publicly-held companies.

Sorry for the long post and rambling on. The simple fact is that the customer no longer matters. Only Wall Street matters. For sci-fi fans who've seen the tv show Continuum, I honestly believe its not too far off the mark how it portrays the US in the not so distant future.