Origin Spotlight – Notifications and Homepage Updates

[EA_Alex]

@RedFoxxie I'll pass along your design feedback to our design team and the font issue to our QA team to investigate further.  Thanks!  I agree that the notification location is slightly odd, but we don't have a top-nav like AHQ (or Netflix) to hang a notification icon off of, and the bottom right corner would conflict with the toastee notifications that get generated.

@Mug3nXK Tom passed along the details of your issue with the Origin Helper Service to the team that owns that service.  What you're experiencing is a bug.  We'll see if we can reproduce it internally.

We do have some ideas about how we can improve the offline mode experience in Origin, so you'd be able to play offline even if you hadn't launched the game previously.  But this isn't high priority at the moment, since there's a fairly simple solution (log in and launch the game once).  Nevertheless, I'll remind the team responsible for this functionality that it's something we want to get back to eventually.  Thanks for the feedback!

[ivrognard]

@EA_Alex  i will point to the fact that there were games that you could launch outside Origin, without ever launching the client. That happened up to Origin version 9 (that one included). I really was taken by surprise discovering the fact that the very same games needed to be launched from the client in Origin 10 and needed the client to remain open. Few examples: ME 1 and 2, DA:O, Sims2. Would love to see that functionality back, at some point. 

I don't think that i have to repeat the arguments brought by other people in the favor of a proper offline experience. I am pretty sure that your team knows them too well and is tired to hear them. 

Thus being said, i love the notifications feature. So keep up the good work.

[Arpadiusz]

Hi @EA_Alex

I dont know is it help or not, but my Origin is only crashing when I update nVidia driver. Its always crashing then, but never crashing for other reason.

Question: My guess that OriginCrashReporter.exe  is dealing with crash reports. In my case is not even listed on firewall. Is it possible, that the blank report what you receive is caused by firewall block?

[HHomeWreckerr]

I was wondering when are you going enable where you can watch your friends play a game? (Like enable to send an invite, to watch them play.) Think of adding that to another option for Origin? I think it will be a really great idea, to expand on. 

[Tmpst]

Not a real fan of that "Recent Games" feature, because it's pretty pointless for me and I can't even get rid of it or reorder it.

My most recent Origin purchases (in that order):

• Purchased BF1 (pre-order).
• Played the BF1 Trial.
• Purchased Titanfall 2.
• Purchased Mass Effect Andromeda (pre-order)
• Played the ME Andromeda Trial.

I only really played BF1 recently. The old page had that big header "Continue where you left off", which featured the last game, e.g. BF1, and was pretty much perfect.

So how does that new "helpful" list look like for me now?

Anything weird?

There are four buttons, two are completely pointless, because they refer to trials no longer installed or playable and in the case of BF1 it's even a duplicate, because there's the actual full game as well (Andromeda is installed as well, yet it isn't listed there).

And the notifications unfortunately aren't that more helpful:

There've been events and DLC releases for BF1 I might have been interested in (which I luckily didn't miss), yet it s till tells me that Andromeda got "just released".

[EA_Alex]

 @ivrognard The games that you could launch "outside Origin" isn't an Origin 9 vs 10 issue, it's a game packaging issue.  Some number of older games were repackaged to take advantage of modern Origin technologies (faster downloading and installation, cloud sync support, etc...).  Those older games still used Origin, just behind the scenes rather than more explicitly.  And in terms of offline support, you still needed to launch those games once (which required logging in) on a machine to enable offline play.  Modern Origin has the same requirement, it's just the client itself is a little more visible (since it facilitates some of those modern technologies).

@Arpadiusz I'll pass along your feedback to the team that owns the client and OriginCrashReporter.

@HHomeWreckerr You can already broadcast your game, and your friends can watch.  To do this, launch the game, pull up Origin in-game, and there should be broadcast controls from there.  I don't know if you can send an invite to watch, but you'll show up as broadcasting on the friends list of your friends, and they can view from there.

@Tmpst Sorry to hear the Recent Games isn't great for you.  The most recently played game should always be on the left, so in your case, if you're only playing one game right now, you can ignore the non-leftmost boxes.

The issue with BF1 trial and full game showing up together is a bug.  I've passed that along to the team that owns this page and we'll get that fixed.

Right now our notification system has a few weirdnesses.  We're working with our copy team to get the "Just released" nomenclature updated to something more appropriate.  The issue with getting a notification that's 5 months old is an artifact of the notification system being just launched.  Now that it's released, new notifications should be more relevant since they'll only be for things that are just occurring.

In the future, we're looking into what other kind of notifications make sense.

To everyone: Do you want to know about new DLC releases for games you own in your notifications feed, or does that seem too spammy?  What other types of notifications would you like to see there?

[ivrognard]

@EA_Alex  Well, i wouldn't mind, as long as it's not too often and also aknowledge the DLC's that i have. Though, with EA's rate of DLC releases, i am afreaid that it will be spammy at some point. Let's say one notification per DLC before launch?!

[Tmpst]

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@EA_Alex wrote:

The most recently played game should always be on the left, so in your case, if you're only playing one game right now, you can ignore the non-leftmost boxes.

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Yeah, that seems to be buggy since it's clearly not accounting any games being started (at least for me). I have the list from the screenshot since this got pushed out.

@EA_Alex wrote:

To everyone: Do you want to know about new DLC releases for games you own in your notifications feed, or does that seem too spammy?  What other types of notifications would you like to see there?

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 Personally I'd try to make it context sensitive:

• If you own a new DLC, e.g. through a season pass such as "Battlefield 1 Premium" or a pre-order bonus, only acknowledge it, if you haven't played recently (e.g. I own BF1 Ultimate but haven't played for months and In the Name of the Tsar got released).
• If you do not own a new DLC, only acknowledge it, if you've played the base game recently (e.g. I've played BF1 last two weeks and In the Name of the Tsar got released, which I do not own yet).
• In both cases the notification could actually mention that in a small line below the heading/image: "Since you've played/haven't played abc recently, we thought you might want to know that xyz is now available."

This should – at least in my opinion – avoid clutter, but still show you stuff you might be interested in, while avoiding a "look, here, give us all your money!" experience (due to being spammed with DLC).

Maybe even make it an option: "Show DLC releases for games I own" – "Show all", "Show none", "Smart" (as described above; default)

[lozneo]

I see the notifications bar is a new thing. Cool! It'll be nice to get updates there. I have a request though. Can you make it so we can clear old notifications? At the moment I have a notification that Mass Effect: Andromeda came out. Ordinarily that'd be great, but the notification is 174 days old and I can't remove it. Please consider this! Thanks.

[Straatford87]

@chropy @RedFoxxie @Mug3nXK @Red_Hood_1810 @Arpadiusz @Tmpst @lozneo

I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for the great feedback you've given in this thread. It's incredibly valuable for us - so thank you, and keep it coming!

As a side note, @lozneo - Alex mentioned in an earlier post that the dated notification is only there because the notification system just got released. This should resolve itself over time when new notification become available.

To everyone else: we would still love to hear which notifications are important for you in Origin.

Cheers,