OK, EA, I’ve had it with you. I’ve had it with your stupid install processes that don’t work, I’ve had it with your online registration that doesn’t work, I’ve had it with your buggy software and I’ve had it with your complete lack of reply to emails.

Months ago, I bought the Battlefield 2 Complete Collection. What a deal! One game! Three ‘booster’ packs! 50% off! Here’s the game in question:

So you get Battlefield 2 Modern Combat, and you also get three expansion packs: the Special Forces booster pack, the Armored Fury booster pack, and the Euro Force booster pack. The reason I know this is because it says so on the box. I’ve never actually been able to play them. Periodically I click on something in the game and it tells me I need the Euro Forces Booster Pack to play this (”Click here to buy it now!”). Why can’t I play the games I’ve purchased?

This Electronic Arts purchase isn’t a one-off. Here are some other EA games I’ve bought in recent times.

See, I remember when you guys were cool. Remember Bard’s Tale? Remember Arctic Fox? Or that time when you blew everybody’s minds with Shadow of the Beast?

Back then I didn’t mind saving up my money to buy your games. And you were happy to fulfill your part of the bargain too. We both knew how it worked: I would bring in my money, and you guys would give me my game. You would go away and spend my cash making more games, and I would take my new game home until my parents told me to stop playing it and go to bed already.

But somewhere along the way, you guys stopped upholding your end of the deal. Somewhere, you guys decided that it was OK to take my money and not give me my game in return.But you’re way subtle about it. You still give me the box, you still give me the media, you still give me the stupid little advertisements for hats and sunglasses and EA-brand socks and what-not. But you won’t actually let me play the game itself.

So I get home and install the little darling. Battlefield 2 itself installs OK, but the booster packs? There’s a separate install for those. And it involves getting online to install them. Separately.

And so begins EA’s merry journey of annoyance.

To register, the manual instructs you to visit https://account.ea.com/commerce/bf2cc/code-entry.jsp. Everything looks fine and dandy when you visit that page. Here it is:

Notice how the site is still there, even though this support ticket on the EA website says the site doesn’t actually work. Still, you don’t know that the first time, so you do what it says and create an account in Battlefield 2.

This is Account Number One.

Once you’ve created the account, as instructed, you return to the page, enter your details and voila! Nothing happens. In fact, it gives you the same page again.At this point, let me state that I can, if I want, call the ’support hotline’. But the catch there is, EA, you want me to pay AU$3 a minute to call! With your track record on giving me what I paid for, I bet you’ll keep me on hold for fifteen minutes, then play me a recording saying, “in what it’s cost you to wait for fifteen minutes, you could have bought another game!”.

So the next option is to trawl the EA support base for clues. One support ticket advises you to go to this site and complete the instructions there. You can’t visit that site right now because it’s…er…down, but here’s the Google cache version. That site gives you eleven steps to activate your games (these are games you’ve already bought, mind you). In amongst those steps, it will direct you to another website (note: this website is not mentioned in the original EA support site).  But before you can enter your registration code, you’ll need to create an EA games account. I tell you this because the site itself won’t.

This is Account Number Two.

Once you’ve created this EA account, you receive the following email message:

Note: my ‘Friends at EA’ tell me I can sign into my account using my member name and password. But if you then do exactly as they say, and use your member name and password to sign in, you’ll see the following:

I ask you, who needs enemies when you have Friends at EA like this. Once you are able to get into the site, you can’t do anything without creating a persona account. Why? Who can say?

This is Account Number Three.

Time to send EA a support ticket through their Customer Support section. I and Electronic Arts use the term, ‘Customer Support’ loosely. This is not as easy as it sounds. Even if you’ve already logged into EA.com, you’ll now need to log in again. Note again: do I use my user name? My screen name? Well, my friend, if you try either of these, it won’t work. Oh no, you need to use your email address. But you won’t get an error, it’ll just show you this log in box again.

Now, EA is prepared to send you any number of spammy emails advertising their games, but none of these actually notify you of answers to the support questions you’ve submitted. Since signing up to submit my problem, I’ve received 13 emails. None of these include a solution to my problem.

Silently and without any notification (why not??) they’ve replied to the support ticket with this little gem:

If you have previously registered your game through our electronic registration site, then we will need some information from you in order to locate the Registration code or Serial number/CD Key that had previously been applied. Please respond with the following information:-

Your Full Name:-
Your EA account name:-
E-mail address as listed on the account:-
Any alternate email address that you use:-
Your Date of Birth:-
Your Zip or Postal Code:-

We look forward for your reply.

Date of birth! Zip code! AH HA HA HA HA! Just to play a game I’ve already purchased? AH HA HA HA.

OK, EA, now how do I update the support ticket? You have a note telling the user they can just update the ticket (like you’d expect in the 21st century):

But there is no support for doing this if the EA support person thinks everything’s OK. So, I carefully started a new support ticket, including the original support ticket in my message. I ask them if they really, honestly need to know my date of birth just to let me play a game I’ve already bought. They reply with, among other things, “we have no other ways to identify the actual owner over the web”. Now, I posit that this is what the original media is for. If the original login credentials do not accurately inform you of who is logging in, then the login procedure is broken.

So, the moral of the story? Doubt I’ll buy any more EA games. I’m not the only one who is having these problems, and Electronic Arts just doesn’t care.