How EA lost a potential Customer
Admittedly I am not the hardcore gamer I was even a decade ago, and certainly not anywhere like I was in the 1990s. But there are a few intellectual game properties that I still have a soft spot for after all these years. Many of these amazing properties are now owned directly or indirectly by EA. I even was a major member of a well known Forums dedicated to one of EA’s most famous MMO games.
So I’ve known about Warhammer MMO for quite some time. For whatever reason I thought it was not available for Mac. Anyways, I go to sign up for the free trial. But, it says my email address is already signed up, but gives me no way to recover my password from this page. Twenty minutes of searching I finally end up on the main EA web page and am able to recover my password from there.
I do that but then find that I still can’t create an account for Warhammer. It says my email address is already in use. But I can’t find a link to the Warhammer game off of EA’s web page so that I can try to use the cookies that are already enabled.
Next attempt is to login from the Mythic web page. But apparently this can not be done. At all. So I try the Origin’s page. This allows me to login, and now I can create an account on the Warhammer page.
Great!
So I download the client. Unpack it. And it immediately crashes. No error message. Nothing in the log files even. So I reboot, remove it and all the misc files that are strewn about by the installer. I reboot again, download again and install again.
Same problem. So now I’ve wasted about an hour to play a game that I’d been looking forward too for years.
These are just a lot of small problems, but they all add up. I would potentially signed up for the game for a month long period at a minimum. Perhaps even longer if I really liked it. If I, a reasonably competent IT guy with some years of experience can’t get the game to work, how can the non-technical make it work?