I’m aware of that. This piece is intended to be ironic/hyperbolic. 

Well, so what? Two days is hardly a long time to wait…

What Origin has to do with the Beta is that if I had pre-ordered BF3 on Origin specifically, I’d be allowed into the Beta two days early along with the Medal of Honor pre-order people. 

I don’t buy EA’s argument that only Origin allows them to push updates
for BF3 the way they want (something about Steam’s update policy being
restrictive or prohibitive).

However, on the EA servers argument, I must defend their decision to use
and require the EA servers from a technical standpoint. And it’s not
EA’s fault, actually. It’s the fault of Microsoft and Sony for having
game consoles EA wanted to release their games on. I’ll clarify.

Microsoft and Sony both provide a basic level of hosting for multiplayer
games on their respective services that publishers can leverage for
their games to reduce costs. In a perfect world, every publisher’s
developers would utilize those systems and everyone would be happy
because they would always work and be accessible.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world.

The problem EA faces with deciding between using their own servers to
house stuff like stats is that Microsoft and Sony almost *definitely*
have different policies for what can and can’t be recorded onto their
servers, as well as how much data can be stored, how it is used, and how
much it is used. These rules are usually defined in an Acceptable Use
Policy or AUP, and this is something you’ll only be familiar with if you
have ever signed up for a service that has specific resource
limitations. Web hosting, cell phone data plans, and the like come to
mind.

If EA can’t store the same data in the same way on both Microsoft and
Sony’s servers, then they have to spend an indeterminable amount of time
tailoring it to each of those services, for each game they release that
would use them. That means a potential of 200% more work for them,
because they’re already going to be using the EA servers on the PC
versions.

Their solution was to normalize all that data so that every game has the
same common access point when it comes to data storage for stats and
account names. They can decide how much data they want store, how it can
be used, and how much it can be used. They also open up access to their
stats servers to developers to create websites that aggregate
statistics in a user-friendly format, which you can’t do for games that
are only hosted on Microsoft or Sony’s systems. The only stats systems
spawning from those are 1st party sites, which admittedly are usually
good, but don’t necessarily offer everything a player wants. The Halo
stats website is one of these, but also keep in mind– that game is only
on one platform.

The only disadvantage to this system is that if it goes down… it’s
likely that everyone is affected across all 3 platforms. They have
systems in place that are there to minimize/eliminate the possibility of
that happening, but shit does happen. There are other implications to having the systems controlled by EA, such as them being able to shut the service off whenever they want (technically, but not realistically– except for sports games).

TL;DR – Would you rather EA’s developers spend more time (and money) and possibly deliver a subpar experience, causing them to want to charge for more services OR put up with the occasional disconnect or technical hiccup?