Tag Archives: star wars

Dealing with companies with horrible (or lack of) customer service

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Recently, I’ve been dealing with one of those companies known for horrible customer service. You know, one of those corporate entities that everyone loves to hate, yet they keep doing their thing, somehow convinced that people will just forget about horrible customer service in the past, forgive them completely and even though they haven’t done anything to fix anything, their belief is everything will somehow improve.

The company we’re talking about is Electronic Arts, the monopolistic entity of the computer gaming world. Disclosure: Years ago, I worked for them when Maxis was bought by them (and I worked at Maxis Software). That doesn’t mean I have become their biggest fan (or worst enemy either). When I left them, I was lukewarm about the company. My complaint today is coming strictly from a customer, or at least a former customer if you want to be completely honest.

My problem stems from one of those game properties they have that I hate to love, but tend to return to as most gamers seem to have one or two of those kinds of titles in their back list. My title was Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I’ll be honest: It’s one of those games you can enjoy for great segments of time before you grow bored with it and put it on hold for months (or years) before picking it back up again.

Well, I was on my third or so time of going back to picking it up again when all of this happened. I grew bored with World of Warcraft, was looking for something to scratch my gaming itch, and decided to come back to Star Wars: The Old Republic. A few times in returning back, the game is a lot different from when I first played it. You see, back in the older days it was one of those $15/month games, like World of Warcraft. But it kind of failed at that type of game and became one of those free to play (or purchase to play free, or whatever acronym you need to use). The monthly fee was now waived, although if you wanted the full experience of the game (all your characters and not feeling like you’re a toddler in an adult game), you basically had to pay the full price ($15 a month). So, I went to update my billing information and was immediately denied. For some reason, it wouldn’t take my credit card information. So I went to the Paypal option, and it denied that as well.

What I discovered, after some time on the phone with their customer support (this is SWTOR customer support at this time) is that EA has disabled my pay options because during the time I was away from the game someone tried to access my account and buy a copy of FIFA (some soccer game, or something like that). The person was denied (only because my credit card information had lapsed; not through any great action on the part of EA). But because of this, my account has been frozen.

So, I had to then call EA (not SWTOR) customer support where I went through a maze of customer support people who all promised they could take care of it, but each needed the information told to them from the ground up and then hung up and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. A few days after EACH call, I got an email from someone who said he or she was the one who could fix this if I provided more information but that person couldn’t ask me the information by email, so I would have to call back to relay the correct information. Each time I called back, I was given yet another clueless customer service person who couldn’t acknowledge the person who left the message, so they had to start the process from the beginning again. I should add that he email address of the person who wrote me each time basically went back to someone who would state that he couldn’t help me unless I contacted customer service directly.

So, this went on for weeks. All I kept asking for was someone to unblock my account so I can put my paypal information onto my account and be able to play the game again. There has been absolutely no resolution to this issue whatsoever. Fun fun.

So, as it is, I will probably never buy another game from any entity involved with EA, including, of course, EA.

This is customer service at is very worst.

A Simple Story of a Little Jedi Girl…a review of Star Wars: The Old Republic

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As the crowd cleared before her, Zontara realized she was standing in front of her adversary, a gang leader who had stolen the holocron from the ancient jedi temple. She had tracked him to this planet, fought through bandits, thieves and hooligans until she finally tracked the device to this room. Her companion, a large lizard beast who had been at her side since she saved him from a fate worse than death when she was just a young padawan, training to be a jedi consular, fell right before her during this battle, succumbing to the blaster fire of one of the gang leader’s assailants before taking down the criminal himself in a final act of defiance, both bodies slumping to the metal floor.

This left Zontara, herself badly injured from blaster fire from the four men she and her companion had taken down previously before narrowing the odds to a simple one on one. As the gang leader raised his blaster to fire, Zontara raised her own hands and called on the Force, raising the ground as waves of debris fired as projectiles at the violent criminal. Then she called in on all of her energy to pull an entire boulder out of the ground, ripping up the earth around her, and fired it at the man, sending him flying back against the wall. Then the man rushed at her, planning to take the fight to blows rather than rely on his blaster.

For a second, Zontara was a padawan again, recalling the early fights on Tython, where she had beaten back flesh raiders and wandering wild beasts. Each fight back then had been a battle of epic proportions. And she had relied on her training saber, growing more and more adept with the instrument.

But that was then. And this was a different time. As the John Williams’ music began to fire all around her, playing that brilliant Star Wars action theme, she smiled. She wasn’t carrying a training saber now. As the man closed in on her, she pressed the button on her weapon and a green blade of flame emerged from the device, reminding her that she wasn’t just a padawan any longer. No, she was a jedi. And as the lightsaber reverberated in her hands, she rushed at the gang leader, the blade swinging before her.

No, she would remind him why she was a jedi. And only one person was coming out of this fight alive.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was now playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I have to say that it’s definitely living up to its promise of being a great game. Before, games attempted to recapture that Star Wars spirit, but finally a game puts you into the universe where you are experiencing the life of being a jedi, or a bounty hunter, or a Sith Lord. The possibilities are many, and they deliver on all.

Nearly a decade ago (2004, I believe), there was an attempt to do this with an MMORGP in Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. And in the beginning, they did a very good job. However, there was always something missing: The story. Basically, it put you in between the original movie and The Empire Strikes Back, or it might have been right after The Empire Strikes Back (don’t recall exactly). And you spent your time fighting as whatever you wanted to be, but you didn’t really get a choice of anything other than living in a sand box of the time period. There were no real quests. You just killed stuff and made stuff. And you flew around. And then you could fight space battles (eventually). But that was really it. And then they changed it to try to be more quest-like, except they had already destroyed the game before that point, and it just went down hill from there.

Star Wars: The Old Republic puts you 3000 years before Luke Skywalker started whining to Ben Kenobi about moisture farming. Revan was a great jedi that had gone to the dark side and then came back again (the original Knights of the Old Republic game) and he’s now a legend that has been gone for some time. That’s the universe you find yourself living in wit this game.

You can play on either the Republic side or the Empire side. I haven’t explored that much on the Empire side, although my friend Jason has, and he seems to enjoy the story they’ve developed. I look forward to trying it out myself when I exhaust the story lines of the Republic side. But right now, I’m having a blast.

There are problems with the game, including bugs that need to be fixed, but they’re not outrageous. I get the impression they’re trying to address them, even if they’re not addressing the community about the bugs being addressed. Unfortunately, community bases can be overreactive on these things, and reading the message boards is kind of dangerous if you use those as your gauge to figure these things out. But from me, I find myself enjoying the game and see many more hours of playing before I might get bored with it.

The graphics are excellent. The interface needs some improvement. Unlike World of Warcraft, there are no mods working on this game, mainly because Bioware hasn’t supported them yet. My hope is that they do support them so we can start add extra usability for this game. As a healer in the game, I can tell you that it is sometimes really hard trying to interface with the system as a healer, which can sometimes get a group killed faster than it should. Hopefully, they’ll work on that.

Overall, if I had to scale this game, I’d be giving it either 8/10 stars or 8.5/10 stars. But that is saying a lot because I’m extremely critical over games, and I haven’t played a game in a long time that I’ve given more than 6 stars on that scale. The original of this game is still one of the greatest games ever created, and I’d give that 9.5/10. The second of the series, KOTOR 2, I’d give about 7/10, as the story kind of went a bit down hill, almost as if it was written by the B team.

The Evolution of Writing in Online Computer Games

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Recently, I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, often shortened to TOR. Up until this time, I was a huge fan of World of Warcraft, as was practically every other computer geek on the planet. However, having always been a fan of Star Wars, I figured that when it came out, I would have to try it out. But part of me intended to pass on it until I found out my friend Jason was going to be trying it out, so I decided on a whim, so was I. After buying the Collector’s Edition for somewhere around a million dollars, I installed it, updated the patches and then listened as the infamous John Williams music started up, announcing to the world (you should hear my sound system on my computer) that I was now playing a Star Wars game, as I really like this type of games and other games I play online such as  Casino games which are easy to find in the olympic kingsway casinos online.

And I did. And still am.

What I did want to say about the game is that because it is made by Bioware, a company well known for some of the best games in the past, but also known for games with great storytelling, it should not be surprising that this MMORPG was one that focuses specifically on the story. Now, having said that, I should make a disclaimer. Not all the stories in this game are alike, meaning that some are better than others. I’ll get into that in a sec.

The game takes place thousands of years before the known Star Wars universe, which means that whiny Luke Skywalker won’t be born for many years to come, and the brooding Anakin Skywalker, badly acted by the lousy actor who played him, also won’t be along as well. This means that they have somewhat of a fresh universe to play around in, just keeping in mind that they can’t really become too inventive because it a) is part of the Star Wars universe and George Lucas would have a cow if you veered too far off from his IP, and b) it is based off a series of games created by Bioware called Knights of the Old Republic, which means that some of the elements in the game are based on events that have taken place in that IP. But having said that, they do a good job tying all of that together.

As a new player, you get to choose which side you want to be on, either the Republic or the Empire, which if you are familiar with the Star Wars movies, isn’t really all that different from the latter day period of the movies. Instead of the Empire of the movies, the Empire is one of the old Sith and the Republic is, well, the Republic. Except that in this Republic there are jedis. LOTS of jedis. Not just Luke, the old guy with the lightsaber and the Muppet guy.

So you get to choose your class then. Now, if you’re like every other Star Wars fan, you’ll choose a jedi, which is what I did. And a few days into it, I realized it was a mistake. The reson it’s a mistake is not because a jedi is not fun to play, because they are a great deal of fun. It’s a mistake because the story is exactly what you expect. You’re a jedi, you’re learning the Force, and you’re doing good for the Republic. Not much of a stretch. I can see how some people thought the story was kind of stilted. Because it is. It’s still better than 90 percent of the stories in other games, but it was still stilted.

So I then rerolled as a trooper, which is a fighter for the Republic, someone without jedi powers. And immediately, the story became Bioware’s and not George Lucas’s same old story. And it has turned out to be really decent, full of intrigue and betrayal, the kind of thing Bioware does extremely well. Let’s just say that I’m not looking forward to the rest of the story lines that don’t involve me being a jedi.

What I did want to talk about, however, is the whole concept of storytelling in games. Sadly enough, games don’t do these very well. Especially MMORPGs. World of Warcraft is a great game, and it has a huge backstory to it, but to be honest, every time I hear a bit of the story, I feel like I’m listening to something written by a ten year old who is trying to keep your attention while you’re driving and you’d rather listen to the radio. Every game I’ve ever played with Bioware has been one with a great story, even if the game wasn’t that great, although even that hasn’t been the case. Their games have generally been very good.

The problem is that it’s very hard to keep a gaming community based on storytelling alone. One reason WOW does so well has nothing to do with story but because it does gaming well. It’s a lot of fun, and it keeps people wanting to come back to the experience. With a game that is based on story alone, there’s only so long you can keep the player interested, especially if the story doesn’t change multiple times into the game. If you hit 50th level, and you have no new content to play through, the chances are pretty good you’re going to become very bored with the game, which means they either have to become like Blizzard and create a great gaming experience, or they’re going to have to keep reintroducing new story elements into the universe to keep up with their players. And keeping in mind that some of these players play 24/7, that’s a big order to fill.

I have great hopes for this game, mainly because I love the IP, and I love their storytelling elements. But if they can’t sustain it, then it will be one of those great footprints in the history of games, and that will be truly sad. So, here’s hoping they can keep it up, because if they do, they’ll always have me as a customer.

The Second Season of V Disproves My Theory That V Couldn’t Get Any Worse

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I discovered the other day that the television show V actually came out with a second season. Somehow, I missed it when it aired, but as I had seen the first season and was really interested in seeing how it played out in the second season, I went out and bought the season of DVDs. You see, I should probably explain that my fascination with V is not because I think it’s a great show, but because I watched the first season and kept saying to myself: “How can a show have such great acting talent, an obviously decent budget and still manage to suck so badly?” I mean, the star of the show is one of the main characters from the GREAT television series LOST. And then there are people in the show that come from some of the greatest that science fiction has ever offered. There was a guy from Firefly (the pilot on the show), the star of Earth: Final Conflict (a strange show that is oddly A LOT like V’s premise of an alien race showing up, promising great things but having a hidden agenda), an actress who was one of the recurring characters on The Office, the secondary female star being also from Firefly and Stargate SG1 (she played the prostitute on Firefly and the Ori human leader in Stargate SG1), the hot girl who played Supergirl on Smallville, and so many other actors that I was constantly saying, “hey, I recognize that guy/woman!” Yet, with all of that talent, they still managed to produce one of the most ho hum shows I’d ever seen.

So, I thought that the second season really couldn’t get much worse. Well, I was wrong. What started out as a “oh no, the aliens are really evil but only one FBI agent knows about it” has now turned into a show where I find myself going, “who cares?” almost every time a big event occurs in an episode. The aliens are diabolical, yet the rag tag team of rebels is at some times brilliant (beyond belief), the greatest Spetznaz operatives the world has ever known, completely stupid and clueless, overly obvious to the point of where I keep thinking, Okay, we have the stupidest aliens in history because they can’t figure out that the guys working against them are always present whenever things go bad, and filled with so many dorky coincidences that I’m sometimes embarrassed to be watching.

Spoiler alert: The end of this season got even worse than I ever imagined it would be. The aliens became so powerful, and so evil that it actually hit a point where I thought, wow, there’s no way the humans are going to win this one. Everyone is paranoid, and the good guys are losing their way and their battles, and I thought, okay, wow, this is going to finally start getting really good to where the main characters are really going to have to doing some serious crap to win this battle. And THEN: a secret organization of military organizations made up of every nation in the world comes to the rescue of the main hero, telling her that she’s no longer alone in her battle, that this organization of super army has been tracking the evil aliens, JUST IN CASE they might be evil, and now they’re ready to work with her, because they now realize she’s actually on their side.

Really? That’s the October surprise you have for your viewers? When things get really bad, SHIELD is going to appear out of nowhere and help the Avengers now that they’ve lost all of their powers, even though we never hinted SHIELD existed in the first place? How about a superduper weapon that they’ve been building in the Antarctic wastes, just in case something like this should ever happen? Or perhaps a Death Star? Or should we just find a hot shot pilot who has never flown a battle before to fly a sortie against the alien horde and shoot his blaster at a two meter hole that will somehow blow up all of the alien ships together? I mean, we’re doing stupid crap. Why not?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Season 3, so we can see what “great” entertainment they have to offer next time around. I’m hoping the hero finds an alien motorcycle and jumps over the alien space shark that is threatening humanity.