Last night I got a little desperate. I was lonely, maybe a little bored, and there she was. She was beautiful and new. Something I have always wanted to get my hands on but never had the goods. I was tired of playing Minecraft and browsing Reddit every night. It was time for some real action, and she was willing. There was one hitch, I had to pick her up. And I had heard bad bad things about where she was. I have never trusted the place myself, and my intuition told me to run. I told myself, “you can find one just like her somewhere more safe and reliable”. But I had what it took for this one, and I had it now. “Thats it,” I said trying to pump myself up, “I’m going for it.”

Unfortunately I’m not talking about a woman, but a $18.00 copy of Battlefield Bad Company 2. And her ghetto house on the bad side of town represents one of the biggest game publishers there is, EA, and I would like to focus specifically the EA online store. Much like a disease ridden whore, the EA online store takes your money and delivers nothing but dissatisfaction. Let me walk you through the losing of my EA Store virginity, and why I wanted to scream rape.

This weekend marks EA’s fourth summer sale, one I have been watching closely. Already owning all the Bioware games, there was little I wanted from EA. However last night I saw they were selling Battlefield Bad Company 2 for a small price of $17.97. Almost half the price of my favorite purchasing location, Steam. Although I was scared of EA’s store, I thought maybe my fear was misplaced and I should try it before complaining.  It seems my gamer intuition has become strong over time, and I should listen to it more often.

I didn’t listen to my gut and went ahead with the purchase.  It was relatively simple at first, and I had a good feeling about it. I purchased it, and a notice came up saying that the purchase was complete and to wait for “Notification.”  So I waited, and waited, and then waited some more. A few hours had past and still I had no notification of any kind. Finally around 3:00am I awoke to the e-mail notification noise from my Droid Incredible. It took forever, but hey at least I knew in the morning I would be able to download my new game.

Oh how wrong I was.  I followed their email step by step, but to no avail. It couldn’t really be that easy could it? I went to view recent orders and was greeted by this page.

Great.  No order found.  I was frustrated at this point. How was I to download my game?  Then I remembered that EA had a download manager needed to get its games.  ”That has to be the problem.” I told myself that phrase over and over as it downloaded. EA Manager had been installed, I put in my credentials.  Here it is suppose to show your download, unfortunately it just said “No Entitlements.” I logged in and out several times but it didn’t help. Then I noticed a place to put in a product key to download the game. I tried it and got this lovely message.

Fan-fucking-tastic. I suppose it’s time to email them about this. I go to the support section, which has to have multiple menus and drop down boxes. What ever happened to just having a support email?  Instead of having us go through 10 drop down menus so specific that I can’t even clarify my problem. So I go to click Battlefield Bad Company 2.  Huh?  Where is it?  I see Battlefield 2, 2142, Vietnam, but where is the newest?  Oh..it’s not there. So not only does it your download not work, but your support forces me to ask a question about a totally different game just to get through to support.

Okay no big deal.  The help request is sent, in time this will all be resolved.  About 5 hours later I receive a response from EA. It’s much nicer than my email but is useless. Their response? “The code should work.” I agree it should, but it fucking doesn’t, and I have made this clear to you. I even tried again for good measure, same result as before.  Even if it did, the purchase page nor the confirmation email stated anything about using the code.  How would anyone know to try that? It simply said to view your recent orders and click download, which didn’t show on my account. At this point I had enough, and I sent a reply asking for the cancellation of the purchase.  To slip back into my analogy, I gave her cab fare and kicked her ass out the door. Whether this will go as planned or not is unknown, but I do know one thing, I will never buy from EA again.

During this whole problem, there was only one thing EA manage to complete properly, and thats charge my credit card.

EDIT: Spoke with someone on the instant chat since I had not received a response via email. They wouldn’t cancel the order, however they did finally (after about 30 minutes of troubleshooting on their end) get it working. Not before frustrating the tech though.  Actually felt bad for the guy, he probably has to deal with all the pissed off customers that weren’t helped by the email support. One thing that bothers me is that it still doesn’t show the purchase in my account history.  So despite the efforts of a hard working rep (thanks Cody!) I still wont be shopping on the EA Store ever again.

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