So after not playing Battlefield 4 for a couple of weeks I decided to fire it up today and lo and behold, shortcut bundles!
Now feel free to flame me but I have more money than time (cause, ya know, I have a full-time job) so I’m a sucker for these things. Yes, 14 year old, you ‘earned’ those jet upgrades that allow you to constantly destroy me… Which is why I’ll never earn enough experience to unlock the upgrades to allow me to ever fly more than 20 seconds at a time for the remainder of the game. Say what you want, EA encourages this race to the top since it just makes them money. But I digress.
Ok, so I drop $40 on the ultimate shortcut kit, log on and…. nothing. Yeah, absolutely nothing upgraded. If you’re interested in what is included in the bundles check out this EA Help page. Hmmm. Search the forums, seems like this is a pretty common problem (fail #1). So I decide to throw caution to the wind and contact support (I mean, if no one ever does, they won’t know the severity of the problem right?) So I initiate a support chat and am promptly informed that my wait time for an agent is 10-15 minutes (fail #2). Wait, what? Isn’t that the whole point of ‘live chat’? Not having to wait like you do with email? Hmmm. So I keep it open and bust out 15 minutes of Braid while I wait. Then Cheryl gets on. She’s nice enough but just interacting on chat is a pain in the ass since they have a known issue in the live support chat client that doesn’t support backspace or delete in Chrome (fail #3). Seriously? Ummm, that’s kind of an interesting commentary on your quality if your support tools are broken. At the end of the chat I’m informed it’s a known issue with no ETA for a resolution. How challenging a bug can this be? And there’s no way to override on someone’s account to say unlock a bunch of stuff as a work-around? I guess not.
It goes without saying that I haven’t been a huge EA fan for a long time now but it seems like even though they own some IP that I’m a fan of (huge Mass Effect nerd) it just seems that their products are always broken and they don’t really care. I mean, I guess we keep paying them so why should they change?