It's funny, the client recognizes it, if you download it with a german IP. Then the language is automatically set to german - even though it is not supported! The result is that I had to explain this like 50 times to my compatriots. And there are surely a lot of them who weren't lucky enough to know someone that know the solution and thus are lost to the EC.
It seems many decisions not to go with EC have come about through questionable choices in installations. Every time I've heard someone say "just open this unintelligible file in notepad" to address a basic fault I've wanted to scream (at EA, not the helpful person). It shouldn't be so difficult and people expect much better. Even KR loaded up fully optioned, which most people weren't prepared for or equipped to handle so they gave up. When I first tried KR I couldn't even navigate to the options to crank down the settings.
"But EC's still beta", but it's public and it's going to be in beta until they cancel it and it's 2010 already. This is 1990's compatibility-type screwing around that came with self-published independent shareware games. It is not the stuff you'd expect of a huge corporation pushing a decades-old franchise.
Excuse my harsh tone but I dread to think of how we've lost so many people, and so many opportunities to advance the game client, through these sorts of bungles. I realise past mistakes are not the fault of the current dev team but it just keeps happening time and again.
