guylee1 wrote:Ha, never thought of that! Do they really have to read all this?

"have to"? No one "has to"

Not in my job description

Picman

*zips in, snatches a lobster claw out of cesse's hand and slips out the back again before he is recognized.*


Picman

My inaugural "minnow" post
Yea!!
200!

Picman

*Ducks in quickly for a bowl of today' special, Lobster Newburg, and fills his BFG mug with a hot grande vanilla latte...then slips quietly out the back before anyone notices.*


Picman

Hey...I am one post away from shedding my Guppy trappings.!!

Sorry we were having several technical issues today

This is of course not the desired behavior, nor has it happened like this before. We also had to take down the forums for a few hours today to get everything running smoothly again. We don't know why it was malfunctioning today but we are looking into it.

Picman

At any one time we have a lot of beta programs. One for games, one for game manager, one for new web services and online games. We have more beta tester that we can utilize right now, but we are putting together a way fo teh more "committed" forum members to proactively sign up and to pick what type of bet program you wish to help with.

This will take some time, but will happen. Just be patient.

Picman

BertaPep wrote:Terrific for basic problems however....

I am pretty computer savvy and had worked for an online provider in both in-house and out-house as we used to call it for well WELL over 20+ years (remember PCLink?).

Anywho, having an unrelated computer problem, it resulted in having to reinstall the OS which means drivers, .dll files etc had to be found in the old OS installation and reinstalled )or copied) into the new OS installation (on the same drive). ANYWHO -- the Game Manager wouldn't recognize my 30+ games any longer. I downloaded a trial and got it back up and running but the new installation wouldn't or couldn't find my games which were in the same place as usual. NO redirection of anything.

So, I asked CS instead of redownloading/reinstalling each and every game, if I couldn't edit the .XML files which contain all the game titles/id numbers/etc. to redirect to the games already installed on the computer. I had my XML editor at the ready and was waiting for a technical response.

What I received was a 'gee, I'm sorry but you have to redownload and reinstall the game manager using the control panel and selecting a trial game' (DUH!). Then you have to redownload and reinstall each game (DOUBLE DUH!). Then I received a coupon for my trouble.

Getting a free game is wonderful, a nice perk but the CS person didn't even TRY to address my question about editing the XML files!

So, again, while CS is wonderful for simple questions, to get a technical response for someone who has more than a 'insert disk and select RUN' mentality is frustrating at best.

OK -- I've whined enough. Happy gaming one and all.....

Berta

Berta -
The locations are stored in the registry, so the CS agent could not help you as we do not want them directing anyone to manually alter registry settings (being very technical, you know what kind of trouble you can get into by manually editing registry settings). Unfortunately their response was the only way I know of to get the GM to recognize the games after installation of your OS. Reintalling your game manager allows you to tell it where to store your games, reinstalling the games resets the registries to point the the correct location.

More than most of you probably wanted to know. Our CS are very caring, but they also are instructed not to give advice that could create other problems.

I hope you never HAVE to use them again, but if you do I am pretty certain you will be pleased.

Picman

Data centers are all now back into the safe zone and all downloads should be as fast as normal.
Cazzabee - Sounds like you may have a McAfee update issue that happened last week. If so make sure you Manually update McAfee.

Picman

Our servers were a bit slow today.
This was a big traffic day (the biggest ever) and during the period of peak traffic from 10am to 1pm PST we downloaded over 300,000 games (in just 3 hours, that is over 100 Terabits per hour for those techies out there!) and we did get some reports of slowdowns, but things should be better now. We have huge data centers in the east coast and the west coast, but you crazy gamers just keep downloading more and more games, so we need to add more servers to the several thousand we already have It is a good problem to have.

Picman

Hi all -
Beta tests are 1 hour as we are not allowed by external developer to give away the whole game.
The Beta test are incredibly useful and are used almost entirely to figure out how to improve the game play, not to find bugs. We have a huge teams of testers that find bugs in the games, but a lot of them are 20 something dudes...not the best folks for understanding what is fun or not about a game..you all are the best for that. Things like timer issues, screens to dark, object too small, game play too monotonous, too much dialog, too frustrating to get through...that is what BFG gets out of beta testing and we provide it to the external developer to maker their games better. Sometimes they take your feedback and make the changes, but not always.

We recruit beta testers with links every few months in our weekly newsletter "Game Splash".
I hear you loud and clear that we need to provide a way for those who are passionate about beta testing to sign up (and who better to judge the quality of the games!!) I will see what I can do about setting up a way for forum members to actively sign up. Stay posted. I have some connections around here

Picman

Just a little "tech talk".

All you info here is correct...but one small terminology "nit" that might help when communicating with sales people or tech support some day:
- Memory is where the games live when they are actively being run. A new computer will have 2GB to 4GB typically these days. The more memory you have the more programs you can run at the same time and if you run low on memory the programs you are running perform slowly.
- Storage is what this forum thread is about. A hard drive is referred to as storage not memory. This is where the programs live when permanently even when not in use. Typical Hard Drives come with between 50GB to 500GB these days. The average BFG game is about 20MB to 100MB, though some of the Large file games are up to 2GB in size (or 2,048 M . If you avoid large file games, you can "store" as many as 100 to 200 games on a typical 100GB hard drive. Running low on storage does not makes games play slow, it just limits how many you can have installed.

If you have a fast internet connection, all you need is BFG as you can always redownload and install any game form your purchase history. If you like having all your games instantly playable without delay, then an external hard drive is a great option if your normal hard drive is not big enough.

Picman

AlleyKat5432 wrote:Hi and Happy New Year!

Thanks for the tips, everyone. I never got rid of McAfee but did try disabling everything during a download. I think I know what part of the problem is - game disappearing for no reason. I uninstalled and reinstalled Mystery Ravenhearst again and after a two-hour+ download the install failed indicating there was not enough room on the external hard drive. Perhaps I was pushing the limits by installing the game there in the first place (although I'm really surprised to learn that it's almost full).

Now I need a techie. I have tried to download the game two more times indicating that I want it to go to the C drive on my laptop (through Firefox). Both times I got the same "install failed" message indicating the external hard drive was full. It keeps defaulting to the H drive which is the external hard drive.

I went back into Firefox and deselected it as the default (which I had tried before) but am afraid to do another download in the event this happens again. I've deleted everything to do with the bigfish files on both the laptop and external hard drive.

How can I make the C drive on my laptop the default drive? Or do you think this might be a different issue?

Thanks!

AllyKat5432 -
I am not tech support guy but I may be able to help. When you tell firefox to download to the "C" drive, that is only the tiny stub. That stub then calls the Game Manager and the Game Manager then installs the game to the location you specified when you first installed it (which sounds like your external drive). In future versions we will have an option to allow you to change where games are installed at any time, but for now, here is what you need to do:
1) Go to Start=>Control Panel=>add/remove programs. In here you choose Big Fish Games Client and uninstall it.
2) Go to BFG web site or your purchase history on BFG and download any game (such as Ravenhearst). It will see that you do not have Game manager and install it again.
3) Important! While installing Game Manager it will ask you where you want games installed to. This is where you would want to change it to a drive like "C" where you have more room.

All future games you install will install on the new drive. All the games you already have installed stay on the original location unless you uninstall and then download and reinstall them, in which case they will reinstall in the new location.

Hope that helps!

Picman

What? 10 minutes and no comments on the liopleurodon??

Bump.

Picman

suzangh wrote:Thank you.

I remember whenever I didn't have a credit and I wanted a game I would just click on the buy button. After 3 or 4 times of doing that I realized I was not adding to my subscription total cause I was buying the games not credits. Darn! lol Since then I always buy a credit THEN the game even though I don't have to anymore.





On another note I hope I need a lot of posts to morph cause just this thread and thanking people in my morphing post I've accumulated 20 posts already! lol
(but please don't tell me how many I need to morph cuz I want it to be a surprise from now on thanks!)

Just a small clarification Suzangh...buying a game for $6.99 as a jumbo pack member or buying a credit then using it on a game is the same as far as BFG is concerned, they both count towards you 12 credit goal. (not that it matters as no one really ever cancels after just 12 )

The main benefit of buying credits ahead of time is that you don't have to come back to the web site to "buy" the game, you can just unlock them by using a credit in the BFG game manager while playing the game.

Picman

Hehehe...I have an idea that would even make prpldva proud.

Search YouTube.com for "liopleurodon walking with dinosaurs cruel sea".

The largest and most ferocious sea creature of all time. Watch the first 2 minutes of video titled "part (1/3)"

Not sure how to capture it as a 16 x 16 pixel image though??

Picman

If the download is stuck at 2% you have a connection issue either on your side or on BFG's side. If you pause and resume it will re initiate the download where it got stuck.
We specifically advise people on dial up not to attempt to download files over 10MB to 20MB. We have an online games section designed for slow connections and the games are all completely free.
The game in question is available at Retail, but for $20 not for free.

Alternatively you can opt to get the CD Backup of the game when you buy it (or use a coupon for free) and have the CD delivered to your home. Or if you ask really nicely, a lot of people have a back-up CD for this game on these forums of this game and they are so friendly they would probably mail it to you.

These are also moderated forums and the use of the term POS (or Piece of S***) is a violation of the terms of use and I while I understand your frustration, swearing is not an effective way to get an issue resolved and violates the rules that govern these forums. BFG is the largest company in this business and we have the best tools and customer service. If it does not work for you, there are plenty of alternatives, including retail stores.

Picman

Picman

Lassie1952 wrote:I also want to thank the BF staff for resolving this issue. All my games were deleted and now I have to reload them. But before the fix, I couldn't do anything! I really appreciate the quick help, right during the holidays when they should have had a well deserved break.
At first, I was so confused and concerned, I would have wandered away to another game site, but this response has earned our loyalty!

However, after the dust settles, I would really like to know (not too technically) how and why this happened. Please offer an explanation.
Thanks again. Great customer service!!!!

McAfee does automatic updates as new threats emerge. They do this by looking for a series of characters in the software that are (hopefully) unique to that virus. Unfortunately that same string of characters can coincidentally be found in legitimate products as well so they they give false positives. The ant-virus companies test against major products like MSFT Office and other high volume products but (apparently) not games. Their update on the 22nd was intended to identify new viruses, but they did not test the update on games and the DRM (Digital Rights Management) software that BFG and 4 other game sites use, and their update falsely identified all games from those 4 sites as a threat and unistalled them. Once McAfee was informed, they identified the problem, used a different string to identify the virus but not flag legitimate games, and released an update. Unfortunately it took about 30 hours for them to do this and it had a bad effect on 100's of thousands of games. We test all our games on all anti-virus applications, but they do not announce when they do updates, so we have very little control other than to complain to them when it happens. This has happened to all game sites at one time or another. It has happened to BFG 3 times in the past 6 years (all FALSE positives) by McAfee, AVG, and Avast.
Occasionally (quite often) an anti-virus update will also match an innocent string of characters in a specific game and just that one game is affected, in this case it falsely identified the security software that was in EVERY game and that is why this was such a high impact event as it affected all 1000+ of our games (and those on 3 other sites).

More info than you wanted, but that is how it happened. Nothing BFG good do but react as quickly as possible at all levels of management at McAfee.

Picman