City of Larceny

I started playing City of Heroes this week… it’s a fun game,
but just like in real life you really need friends to play with. Communication skills are essential for a well-honed team machine.

In other news, when you sign up, you are City of Heroes’ bitch. You sign a lengthy Agreement every time you log in, and if anything goes wrong, like the server shutting down, too bad. I see “mapserver failures” all the time, and you have to log in again.

Buyer Beware

When you buy the game, you get one month of usage, starting from the beginning of your account…. NOT from the beginning of your usage. If something goes wrong with that first time, too bad… the clock is ticking. And Support is only open 1pm-5pm Central. I recommend starting your account the early afternoon of the day you intend to play, so if anything goes wrong you can still reach support. If having to do that seems ridiculous to you, I agree completely.

I had a really ugly experience where my account was activated but it thought my time was out before I ever played… and the days were rolling by. My appeals for a refund or a changed billing date were brushed off as not “being part of their policy.” Short of a lawsuit, there is nothing I can do.

The saga:

1. I bought my copy of the game at the mall- $49.99 at GameStop


2. I went to PlayNC.com to create my account, and added my “20 digit serial code”
   to bind my copy of the game to my account. This was on July 13th in the evening, the binding was at 10:21 pm EST ( 7:21 pm pacific)
3. I installed the client. I tried to log in – it told me my time had run out! My bill date on the web site was 3 months at a time, starting on August 13th
4. So much for my gaming night. My next available night was… maybe the next week. Bye bye money! bye bye!
5. I called Support at 11 am PST the next day and got “Chris”
6. even Support can’t add time to an account – like not only is it not “their policy” but that particular department doesn’t have “the tools” do do it.
7. the player can change the billing date but Support cannot-
   the player can change the date… to after when time runs out…
   but then there is a “gap” between when the account is shut down and when the billing starts again.
8. the game code “20- digit serial code” is tied to a particular account:
   once a code is used to start an account, cannot be changed or used again. And Support doesn’t have new codes, and won’t help you get a new one, or invalidate an old one.
9. During the exchange, Chris admitted- there was a server down or a delay or something, until 12:21 am CST July 14th- which would have been 9:21 pm PST. So if I had sat there in front of the computer trying to log in over and over for two hours, I would have gotten on. I guess I must me lazy or something.
10. what would have been nice is if they could have:
    • had an error message that was appropriate to the problem on the client
    
    
    • had some way of getting off-hours support, since nighttime is when most people use the service
    • been willing to credit my account with the lost time (one day in this case)- either by changing the start time of the account binding, or shutting off the account and making a new one with a new start time
11. Basically, they were unwilling to help me at all. Note that if this was the cable company or an ISP, they would credit for downtime, since the outage was their fault.