Game News Want a refund for Simcity? Your account may be at risk!

[Whisky]

Tags: EA Games; Maxis; Sim City

Despite a customer service representative mentioning yesterday that EA would honor refunds, it seems that EA's reps are not honoring refunds.

Even worse, they are allegedly threatening to ban anyone who asks for one.

EDIT: According to the log, the user was threatening to call his bank for a chargeback when the rep threatened to ban the user. Banning for chargebacks is a common part of TOSs for many digital distribution sites.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Classy as usual from EA. Well, it is a sad truth but people bought that game should've seen this coming...

 

[Commissar Draco]

Morons who bought this Heretic shit deserve good old Exterminatus not only Kwan consumer laws protection.

 

[Yeesh]

EDIT: According to the log, the user was threatening to call his bank for a chargeback when the rep threatened to ban the user. Banning for chargebacks is a common part of TOSs for many digital distribution sites.

This is a very crucial point. Most people reading headlines or blurbs about this take "dispute" to mean arguing or advocating for a refund, when in fact "dispute" in this context is telling your bank or credit card "Gimme my money back because EA tricked me." Cutting off access to the game at that point seems fair to me, since you're saying it's worthless and you don't want it.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Somehow this doesn't surprise me one fucking bit.

 

[Zewp]

This is a very crucial point. Most people reading headlines or blurbs about this take "dispute" to mean arguing or advocating for a refund, when in fact "dispute" in this context is telling your bank or credit card "Gimme my money back because EA tricked me." Cutting off access to the game at that point seems fair to me, since you're saying it's worthless and you don't want it.

Except they don't ban access to the game, they ban access to your account. In other words, every game you've bought in the past.

 

[Yeesh]

Except they don't ban access to the game, they ban access to your account. In other words, every game you've bought in the past.

1. Are you sure this is a permanent, EA-wide ban?
2. Do many EA games require onilne account access to play? It seems that DRM model is the source of much of the complaining about this game; has EA been using it all along?
3. Bringing your bank or credit card company into the dispute like that is basically accusing EA of fraud or stealing, because you don't like a game you bought. That still wouldn't justify EA banning you from playing every EA you've ever bought (if that's really what happens here which is a big IF). But if everybody's going to be dicks, they might as well really be dicks.
4. I'm old and I'm incapable of feeling sympathy for anyone but me. Fuck em. Fuck em all.

 

[Zewp]

That would most definitely be an account-wide ban. I mean if you get banned from EA's forums you're banned from all your games. There's no way in hell they're going to let you get away with doing a chargeback.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Getting banned from your games? What kind of a cretin would buy games when it's possible to get banned from playing them ?

 

[Sranchammer]

Why...why would anyone deal with them?

 

[tiagocc0]

Why...why would anyone deal with them?

sadomasochism

 

[Anthony Davis]

Yeah, I saw this yesterday complete with the log from the chat. EA man...

I remember when EA came out as pro-gay marriage and all these people I knew were like I LOVE EA! HEART EA! EA IS THE BEST!

...I felt like I was in another world where a company can buy an indulgence (being pro gay marriage) and people instantly forget that EA is still a really horrible company to its customers.

I wonder indulgence EA will 'purchase' next to get people to love them again in light of this Sim City mess.

 

[Zarniwoop]

I wonder indulgence EA will 'purchase' next to get people to love them again in light of this Sim City mess.

They won't need to. The majority of gamers these days are morons with incredibly short memories and/or no spines. The same thing happened with BF3 and FIFA 12's launches and that was quickly forgotten. Not much came from EA being voted worst company in the US. Remember Activision giving their customers the finger by not allowing dedicated servers in one of the Calls of Duty, I think MW2? Remember all the hate and Steam groups promising to boycott the game? Remember those same Steam groups buying the game en masse?

By the time the "next big thing" comes out, people will love them anyways.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Well, I don't know if they're ever going to be done milking the LGBT crowd. At least given the BioWare forums it seems like it's a sure bet that if you get "those people" on-board you can pretty much fuck around all you want.

Anyway, this is a horrible mess to say the least.

 

[hoverdog]

I remember when EA came out as pro-gay marriage

I find it hardly surprising

considering how much they like fucking their customers in the ass

 

[Anthony Davis]

Well, I don't know if they're ever going to be done milking the LGBT crowd. At least given the BioWare forums it seems like it's a sure bet that if you get "those people" on-board you can pretty much fuck around all you want.

Anyway, this is a horrible mess to say the least.

I got nothing against the LGBT crowd and I hope my post wasn't taken that way. I think EA, like other more nefarious companies saw an opportunity and for literally zero dollars and a promise were able to get rational friends of mine, some of them game developers, to get the honey glow in their cheeks over EA.



Honey glow, heh, I loved Wreck It Ralph.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Well, I don't know if they're ever going to be done milking the LGBT crowd. At least given the BioWare forums it seems like it's a sure bet that if you get "those people" on-board you can pretty much fuck around all you want.

Anyway, this is a horrible mess to say the least.

I got nothing against the LGBT crowd and I hope my post wasn't taken that way. I think EA, like other more nefarious companies saw an opportunity and for literally zero dollars and a promise were able to get rational friends of mine, some of them game developers, to get the honey glow in their cheeks over EA.

Oh me neither, but the "EA - friend of the LGBT crowd" thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth because I completely feel they are being used as some kind of "get out of jail free"-card, and there's no actual respect for the community. I mean, they could have picked any group or minority to serve their purposes, really.

Eh. Games = sinister business.

 

[Surf Solar]

EA support is really shitty. I once had an issue with a product key not registring properly. So I called the hotline like they suggested, a funny voice told me to wait 40 minutes in queue till someone is ready for me, all the while I have to pay moneyz for the call. Yeah, no. Then I tried to contact someone over their online contact thingy. Had to wait another 50 minutes, then someone was there. Asked me for my problem, then went simply offline only to say "sorry" without any explanation.



In the end, I solved it by myself through lots of googling. Good job, EA.

 

[IDtenT]

Who needs marriage? People that need someone to be loyal to. It's the perfect market for a loyalty driven company.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Best review of new SimCity!

 

[tiagocc0]

WTF?

Connecting to review

Estimated load time: 70 minutes

EDIT: They just nailed it, I even got angered!

 

[Anthony Davis]

Best review of new SimCity!

Wunderbar!

 

[Anthony Davis]

Sigh, I can't get SimCity 4 to play at 2560x1440... even with:

-CustomResolution:enabled -r2560x1440x32

and it also seems that all the good mods are locked away behind logins and other shenanigans, not that I actually know what a good mod is for SC4.

 

[RK47]

EA has removed the fastest game speed, because apparently they log everything and if people play too fast their servers can't keep up.

\

Quote
More Server Woes
Let the record show that even though I've been able to log in to my server of choice (US West 1) without a wait tonight during peak hours (it's now 9pm Pacific time), I am unable to load the cities in my saved region. So I might as well be locked out.

A Wasted Day
At this rate I'm going to have to change the title of this post to "SimCity Review Without Progress." On the plus side, I never saw a log-in queue, but what I did get was even worse: it let me log in, but I couldn't load a city. I'd either be told it was unavailable at this time or simply hang on the loading screen until I Alt+F4'd out. I did manage to get in for a grand total of about 5 minutes last night, but everything was so broken (social features weren't working at all) that I decided sleep was probably a better use of my time. When I attempted to load my biggest city, here's the choice I was given:

Not much of a choice, is it? Either lose an unspecified amount of progress, or lose all progress. So I picked roll back and braced for the worst... but nothing happened. I couldn't even do that much. Then I tried to load another city, and hung on the loading screen again. All I could do was claim a new city in my region, and I didn't feel like starting from scratch again, especially knowing that my progress would likely be lost.

I still have to recommend that you stay away from SimCity for the time being. The latest word is that "non essential services" are being disabled to lighten the load on servers (I can't imagine the leaderboards and achievements were getting a lot of use anyway when many people can't even play), so we'll see how that shakes out today and tomorrow.

Update: Holy smokes, EA and I have very different definitions of "non-essential services." Even if I could get in right now – which I can't, because I'm stuck in yet another loading queue – I don't think I even want to play without Cheetah Speed, the fastest time acceleration. There's already quite a bit of waiting around before you can gather enough cash to buy something like your first $30,000 police station or a coal mine, but this will tip the balance of the pacing drastically in favor of tedium. It's now basically futile to play. Also, Amazon.com has pulled SimCity from its download store. To any Europeans reading: just stay away. Save yourself the frustration.

Who'd have thought things would get worse before they got better?

 

[tiagocc0]

Man.. I wouldn't want to be the developer trying to fix this mess!