Minor Out-of-Game Systems Rant

I briefly thought about titling this post "Customer Service Rant", but then I realised that this would be doing an injustice to all the times Bioware customer service was perfectly helpful with issues that I've had. This isn't really about the customer service reps anyway, more about two out-of-game systems that have annoyed me as of late.

First off, you may or may not have noticed that I added my referral link to the sidebar a little while ago. It's no big deal; I just saw other sites doing it and figured that I might as well. People that use it get some goodies, I get some goodies - it's a win-win, right?

The other week a friend e-mailed me to say that he had used my link to give the game another go. He had forgot his original account information, so he just signed up through the link again, made a new account, bought several months of game time... and neither of us got anything. Scouring the forums for information on what had gone wrong, I found out that I had missed an important line of small print that says that referrals only count if the referred person ticks the "please send me promotional e-mails" box when they sign up. D'oh! I can't decide what's worse: that this is a requirement to make a referral to begin with, or that they've hidden this requirement in the small print so that it's easy to miss. I mean, most people probably wouldn't mind ticking that box at account creation in order for the referral to go through, after all you can always untick it in your preferences later if the e-mails annoy you. But for that, you actually have to know about that requirement...

Oh, and forget about trying to ask customer service for help afterwards, apparently they have no way of tracking referrals if you don't accept those promotional e-mails at signup. Clicking that referral link and confirming that you want to be referred by an existing player is clearly just for show. /facepalm

The funny thing is, the other day another friend of mine used the link and his referral did go through. so now the referral page on my account management has updated to show that I've earned the first referral reward, the Kurtob Alliance speeder. Except that I already earned that one from referring a friend one and a half years ago, under the old referral system, and it has been landing in my mailbox on every character I've created since then. But clearly Bioware has no way of verifying that either. /eyeroll

It's not a big deal for me as I'm not exactly dying to get any of the referral rewards; it just strikes me as a very badly thought out system.

The other thing that has bugged me has been Bioware's billing. I had to change to a new credit card recently and was able to enter it into their system just fine, but when my sub ran out today and I tried to re-subscribe I kept being given an error message: "An error has occurred while trying to process your request. Please, try again later." Where had I seen that before? Oh right, I remember having the same issue at launch - Tobold even blogged about it back then. I can't believe that it's two and a half years later and they are still giving out the same completely unhelpful error message. I get that there can be problems with these things, but is it that hard to actually let me know what's wrong so that I can fix it? Again I tried Google to see whether anyone else with the same problem had made any useful discoveries, but all I found were reports of how phoning customer service about this issue would only lead to them blaming your bank - even if you had already tried three different cards from three different banks and they all assured you that they weren't blocking anything.

In the end I settled for borrowing someone else's card... the same thing I had to do back at launch. I love the game and am clearly willing to jump through all kinds of hoops to be able to play it the way I want, but you'd think that Bioware would be interested in making it a bit easier for people to give them money...