The dark side of the cloud: Steam won’t let me use my new gaming rig

I built a new kick-butt gaming rig and went to log into Steam. It noted this was different hardware from what it saw before and asked me to pop in a code it had emailed me. It is part of their Steam Guard service to protect against account hijacking. I had encountered it before and never had a problem.

Not so now…

The problem: no email. Not for hours. I have tried it over and over again. Nothing! I even checked my spam filters at my Roadrunner web-mail account.

So, I turned in a tech support request. Nothing for hours. I just turned in another one. The acknowledgements of these tech requests from Valve come through fine. But, I have had no replies to them.

So, I am sitting here with thousands of dollars worth of gaming hardware and trying to log into an online gaming service with hundreds of my games worth thousands of dollars — and I can’t do it.

This is (pardon the coarse, but appropriate, expression) complete and utter [bad words go here].

If I want to play a game right now I will need to blow the dust off an old disk and manually load one. Or, maybe check my old Gog.com account.

C’mon Gabe, being able to actually log into a cloud-based service is the one thing that MUST have 100% up-time. If I can’t log in, we have a big problem.

UPDATE: My grandson was FINALLY able to log in on the Monday morning after the weekend passed. I got some replies from Steam tech support, but they were pretty clueless. It was along the lines of, how great for us — the problem is solved!

Update on EA tech support (or lack thereof)

Readers of the blog know of my ongoing tech support issues with EA and their refusal to honor a $20 discount code. I wrote about it in detail here:

https://jamesacooley.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/ea-tech-support-is-still-the-worst-in-the-known-universe/

Well, I have an update, though sadly the problem isn’t solved. I note the curious coincidence that the update came in within 24 hours of posting a flaming comment to PC Gamer’s site to an article on Origin’s attempts to build gamer goodwill after so much “vitriol”. My comment linked to the blog article and I also cross-posted it to Facebook.

In short, EA offered me the same thing I had rejected before (15% off coupon) and I responded by demanding they honor the $20 discount they themselves had issued to me without restriction.

I will post the emails back and forth, though with customer support staff names and codes deleted. I must stress that the EA staff themselves are most polite. One of their call centers is located in North Austin not that far from where I live. My beef is not with any of the EA tech support as individuals, but with EA as an entity and its policies.

EMAILS FOLLOW:

Dear EA:

I quite specifically rejected the offer of a 15% discount code in lieu of the $20 discount given to me by EA the first time.

Again, I have to remind everyone that my $20 discount came with NO TIME LIMIT OR RESTRICTIONS. Indeed, let me once more supply the relevant quote from the original EA email to me, with appropriate highlights:

“Additionally, as a valued player, we would like to offer a small token of our appreciation in the form of a $20 off discount offer “ACTUAL DISCOUNT CODE # DELETED” for the EA Store! This discount code does not have an expiration date, and can be redeemed for any future purchase on http://store.ea.com.”

The EA store later was renamed Origin and revamped a bit, but it is still EA and it is still your store.

So, I ask myself, why would EA now offer me basically the same thing that I already rejected?

What will satisfy me is for EA to honor my $20 discount. Anything other than that will not be acceptable.

As before, my ongoing saga over $20 will be posted to my blog:

https://jamesacooley.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/ea-tech-support-is-still-the-worst-in-the-known-universe/

It is also being shared with the website www.uryaen.com for their industry integrity reviews.

So, can we please just get me the $20 discount and close this thing out.

NOTE: As an aside, the $20 game I was going to buy from Origin when the discount code was rejected was Spore. While this saga has been playing out, I ended up just getting it from Steam. They will now get the sales of any DLC for it.

James

P.S. Please note that my frustration is not with any of the individual EA customer service staff, who I must stress have been exceedingly polite. Rather, it has to do with the inability of EA itself to resolve what appears to be a simple problem.

From: Customer Experience [mailto:EA (EMAIL DELETED TO STOP THE SPAMMER BOTS)]
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:48 PM
To: (MY EMAIL DELETED TO STOP THE SPAMMER BOTS)
Subject: Case (# DELETED): Invalid $20 Coupon

HELP CENTER

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts regarding your invalid $20 coupon.

First, I apologize for the long delay in our response. We have been undergoing a restructuring of our support tiers and as a result our email queues have been somewhat neglected.

Depending on what $20 coupon code you were trying to use, the previous advisor you spoke to may have been mistaken in that it was invalid simply due to expiration. We did have a $20 coupon code that was valid from January 17th until the end of the month, but it was not valid for SWTOR, preorders, game time codes, games released less than 30 days ago, and third party titles. If you tried to use the coupon on any of those products, that is most likely why it was invalid.

The coupon code will be expired by now, and unfortunately we cannot generate that particular code. However I have created a 15% coupon code that has most of the same restrictions but will be valid for SWTOR: (CODE NUMBER DELETED)

If you need to contact us again about this issue, feel free to reply to this email. If you have any other issues, questions, or concerns, please contact us by logging into help.ea.com and clicking on the Talk to a Game Advisor link to open a new case.

Thanks again for contacting us, and have a great day!

Best Regards,
(NAME DELETED. AGAIN, THE STAFF IS NOT THE PROBLEM. IT IS THE POLICIES.)
– EA Customer Experience

Summing it up: At some point, I think EA will decide that they have bled enough in public over this to honor their $20 discount. It just needs to rise up to one of “the suits” who will go, “Just give him the (insert a cuss word or two here) $20 and be done with it!” Still, it just amazes me the lengths one has to go through sometimes to get people to do the sensible thing. Just do it on the front end. It is easier and better for business.

EA Tech support is still the worst in the known universe

I have had problems I have written about in the blog about EA/Origin’s EPIC FAIL in the tech support area. My experience is that they are a comedy of errors if you try to deal with a support issue. My favorite example is when they tried to apologize for screwing something up by giving me a $20 discount code — but their own website REFUSES to accept it as valid.

Anyhow, my grandson wants a game that EA has available and my discount would pay for it completely. So, I endured another bout of tech support Hell trying to MAKE them HONOR their own discount code. First I had to crawl all over the website to try to find a phone number. I called, navigated the phone menu — and was on hold for at least half an hour listening to elevator music. While waiting on hold I decided to see if my bad experiences with EA (whose support site is here in Austin) were shared by others. Oh, boy, I am NOT alone! Note the absolutely horrible score and user comments here: http://www.customerservicescoreboard.com/Electronic+Arts

Out of a possible score of 200, they are cellar-dwellers at at 28.79, with 241 negative comments and just 17 positive ones.

When I finally got a warm body, they tried to tell me the $20 code no longer was valid at the new Origin website and they could give me a 15% off code as a replacement. I refused it, noting that their email to me stressed the $20 credit had NO EXPIRATION DATE and that a 15% off discount code saved me $3 on a pending $19.99 purchase vs. the $19.99 I would otherwise have saved.

Indeed, here is the actual email from EA from 6/22/10 that I quoted back to them:

Hello James,

Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.

Please be informed that you do need to purchase the 800 points as there is no an option to purchase specific or concerned points.

Additionally, as a valued player, we would like to offer a small token of our appreciation in the form of a $20 off discount offer “DISCOUNT CODE DELETED” for the EA Store! This discount code does not have an expiration date, and can be redeemed for any future purchase on http://store.ea.com.

If there is anything else we can help you with please let me know.

Thank you,

(Support agent name deleted)
EA Online Support.

Anyhow, back to the current situation: I mentioned that my next steps might be forwarding this dispute onto the Texas Attorney General as a possible consumer fraud item. The tech support guy (who I stress was quite polite) couldn’t talk about anything involving legal stuff, so I decided not to put him the middle of it.

Anyhow, we left things with me asking it be escalated to Level 3 tech support and the request was granted. Who knows where it will go from here. My prior dealings with EA don’t give me much confidence, but maybe a blog post documenting my ordeal will get their attention.

I also note that a long-standing dispute with EA involving Battlefield Heroes items that we bought has apparently simply vanished from their system entirely. Maybe I will need to make another whack at recovering the items we bought while I have their attention, as that is still a sore point.

(We had a BH account with some premium items bought for it. A hacker got into the account and bought a bunch of other stuff with our debit card information. EA froze the BH account and, to their credit, worked with our bank on getting the bogus charges backed out. The problem is that we also lost the premium items we bought for the deleted account. Repeated attempts to get EA to address the matter were in vain. I can post the emails showing our attempts to get it resolved.)

Oh, if you need to reach EA tech support by phone, let me save you a lot of hunting around on their difficult to navigate website: 1-866-543-5435 from 7am-9pm CST (7 days a week)

The epic tech support fails I have suffered with EA/Origin are one reason why I stick with Steam as my strong preference for downloadable games. Steam’s tech support isn’t perfect, but the few times I have needed them they were, by comparison, a joy to deal with and they actually fixed my problems. Gabe Newell and Valve seem to understand customer service!

Possible fix for RAGE crash on launch within Steam

It appears the Steam crash at launch is triggered by having the default triple buffering enabled in the AMD Catalysts Control Center in the OpenGL settings. See: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=25493732&postcount=33

Here is the fix (high-five to CatatonicMan for posting it):

I fixed the crash after startup by turning off Triple Buffering in Catalyst Control Center.

This is using the RAGE-specific AMD drivers with a pair of HD 4870s in crossfire. It is also repeatable (triple buffering on crashes game; triple buffering off does not).

For me, it is under:

CCC -> Gaming -> 3D Application Settings -> OpenGL Settings -> Triple Buffering
Last edited by CatatonicMan: 10-03-2011 at 10:20 PM.

Fallout 3 DLC now available on Steam! Life is good! No more MS GFWL hassles!

Now Available – Fallout 3 DLC
Product Release – Valve 12:02
You can now enjoy all five of the Fallout 3 Game add-on packs! Create a character of your choosing and descend into an awe-inspiring, post-apocalyptic world where every minute is a fight for survival.

Fallout 3 DLC:
– Operation Anchorage
– The Pitt
– Broken Steel
– Point Lookout
– Mothership Zeta

Game gripe: key codes on downloaded games

I buy a lot of games off of Steam and marvel at the need to enter key codes to play them. Hey, the Steam services MUST know these are legal copies, because they sold them to me! Also, why make me copy a code to the clipboard and cut-and-paste it into a slot. If you must have a silly code, then let the game itself look for it upon first launch. Ditto for all of the other codes needed for DLC for games like Mass Effect 2.

Stuff that doesn’t like Windows 7 64 bit

I have played with it for a few days now and have discovered some software from my old Vista 32 bit machine that will not work with Win7/64.

Adobe Flash: It won’t work with the 64 bit version of Internet Explorer 8. An update is reportedly in the works. This one kind of surprised me. The workaround is to launch the 32 bit version of Explorer for sites that use Flash (or just use it all the time).

The versions I had of Registry Fix, O&O CleverCache, and O&O Safe Erase also were not compatibility with Win7/64. Some of them have version that are compatible out now.

Steam seems to be working well most of the time, though I do NOT recommend using the standard methods of cutting-and-pasting your SteamApps folder over into the new install. It seems to not work consistently and may create an issue where Steam launches and then shuts down. Do a clean install of Steam from a fresh download and then have it download and reinstall the games.

Steam had a strange glitch where various desktop icons for the games were not located and placeholders were used instead. I pointed them to the correct icons and this is fixed. However, when Steam is running, it shows the taskbar icon for Fallout 3. If I try to change it to the one for Steam, it changes my desktop Fallout 3 icon to the one used for Steam. Strange…

Once in a while my Fallout 3 launcher pops up with no text displayed on the desktop panel. It typically is the first launch after a reboot. However, it has always worked fine the next attempt, so I haven’t fretted it about it much (yet).

I like the power savings features, but note that the machine will NOT detect operations like Steam file downloads, ongoing defragment activities, etc., and will go into deep sleep mode. So, if you tell a huge game file to download when you go to bed, you may find little progress made by morning. The workaround is to turn of the sleep mode in the power settings when you have operations to run when you are away from the machine. Turn it back on when you are done. It is a nice power-saving feature and is the most bug-free version I have yet encountered.

I will post more as I find them. One thing I would like to find is a way to get bug reports to Microsoft. They need to add a driver that Asus motherboards need to the standard Windows 7 driver package, as I ended up with an “unknown device” error and discovered that it is pretty common with multiple motherboards from various vendors impacted. The driver file is a tiny 5.5 KB, so surely they can find room to squeeze it in.

Secret of Monkey Island is buggy. Lucasarts, please fix it!

I was excited to download the redo of Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition from Lucasarts for the PC. I downloaded it from Steam onto my grandson’s computer and we went to fire it up — and it didn’t work.

It crashed every time with a message saying MISE.exe could not execute. Searching the crash on the Internet, I found lots of other folks with the same problem. There were numerous fixes to try, ranging from reloading DirectX to manually creating a Settings.ini file to change the resolutions to ones that could be supported in your monitor.

I tried them one after another, with failure at each turn. Finally, I found a fix at the Steam forums that let the game operate.

Here is what allowed the game to run:

“It may cause some Problems if you are using a SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio or Audigy and not start with the “MISE.exe has stopped working” Message e.g. Sound Problems or if the Game hangs during the Credits:

– Try going to Control Panel –> Sound –> Click on Speaker, Navigate to your “Sound Blaster” Tab and Check “Disable Enhancements”.
– If that doesn’t work trying to Change the Default Sound Device to OnBoard Sound or Disabling the Driver might help.
– Muting all Sounds in the Audio Options might prevent the game from getting Stuck during the Intro Credits”

As soon as I checked the “Disable Enhancements”, the game would run. I didn’t need to do any of the other steps past checking one box in the Soundblaster tab on my speaker properties.

However, this latest episode illustrates once again why my favorite gaming platform (PC) is giving away ground to consoles. My grandson just wanted to play his new game. He didn’t want to wait while I spent hours going over tech support web sites trying to find a fix. With his various consoles, he pops in a game and they work.

I can’t count how many times I have had to play “Internet detective” to try to troubleshoot problems with PC games. It is a sad commentary when the users of a product tend to be the ones actually supplying the fixes and workarounds via forums.

The sheer number of posts indicating a crash at startup problem indicate to me that Lucasarts released the game before sufficient bug testing. Seriously, how many people use Audigy or X-FI Soundblaster sound cards? The answer is a whole lot of us! A game that won’t start if you have a Soundblaster installed with the default configuration is a game that has problems.

It also unsettling that the Lucasarts tech support web page didn’t have the solution present (or I couldn’t find it), but the Steam user forum did. Steam is a distributor of the game, not the studio that created it.

Lucasarts needs to get a patch out the door and fast. They are sitting on a gold pile with their stellar back catalog of games that could be redone using modern graphics and sound. I would love to see Full Throttle or Grim Fandango redone to run smoothly on modern PCs and operating systems at high resolutions. Full Throttle was a game I loved upon its initial release. Grim Fandango is a game I wanted to try a few years after its release, but I never could get it to work right.

However, if the first relaunch of a classic title turns into a frustrating experience for gamers, they may be soured on doing it again. A few more days spent bug-testing might be a lot better than a pile of complaints (and refund requests) from gamers who can’t get the game to work and refuse to spend hours hunting for a solution.

They will simply look favorably at the consoles that play their games reliably with minimal hassle — and PC games will have to fight to lure them back.

While on the topic of buggy games, I wish Bethesda would take a break from cranking out new add-ons for Fallout 3 and deal with the still-present crash problems. I love Fallout 3, but it is still as unstable as the San Andreas fault on my system. You just get in the habit of saving frequently to deal with the random crashes to desktop.

MS GFWL is still an abomination.

I went through another ordeal merely trying to buy something from Microsoft Games for Windows Live last night. The latest DLC for Fallout 3 (Point Lookout) was out and I went to the GLWL site to get it for the PC. I had 100 game points leftover under their wretched system of making me buy points instead of simply buying the content. I went to order another 1,000 points to be able to get the 800 I needed to buy the DLC. I went through the transaction, went back and tried to order the game — and got an error telling me to try again later. My credits then showed up as a mere 300 points. So, I went back and ordered ANOTHER 1,000 points (should have just done 500, but it was late and I was drinking cold beer). I now showed 1,300 points and I tried again to download the DLC. No go, of course!

I then discovered that there is NO PLACE ON THEIR SITE I could locate to tell them you have a problem with your order. I finally found a users forum which told me that others had also had games refuse to download. Some fixed it with some process for clearing their records (which wasn’t detailed). Others were able to do it after logging in again later.

I tried to find any sort of “support” address to be able to contact to tell Microsoft that they had apparently taken my money and not delivered my product. I was routed on their website to long lists of support portals, but none of them covered Games for Windows Live transactions. I finally ended up sending a note to threw the “Privacy” contact form with a request that they route it to the GFWL folks.

I finally just waited some more and logged in again. This time my content agreed to download. I still had to go through a silly manual cut-and-paste of various games files to get the new content to work with STEAM, which houses my Fallout 3 games files.

I just tried to log into MS GFWL to see how many game points show up in my account and am getting an error.

I hope Bethesda Softworks is realizing that MS GFWL is a dud as a means of distributing their add-on content. Please, please, please go to the more reliable and infinitely more user-friendly STEAM platform for PC DLCs. STEAM does so much right that it makes GFWL looks embarrassing in contrast. Hey MS, just copy STEAM!

Next I really STRONGLY urge Microsoft to put a a prominently located place on the GFWL website to report problems with transactions. It is simply unacceptable to make customers have to play Internet detective to try (in vain) to locate a means to inform you that we may have not gotten our content.

While we are at it, I also want a way to just buy the items I want ala carte and to not be forced to buy “points” in quantities that mean I end up with unused points sitting in an account for months at a time. This amounts to your customers being forced to make MS GFWL a no-interest loan of our money. This is great for MS, but not right by the customers. I am going to try to seek a refund of the points I overpaid and wonder what nightmares await me as I try to discern the process for getting my loot back.

The irony is that I buy all my games and have no tolerance for piracy. Yet, when I Googled the new DLC, the search returned several pirateware sites where I have no doubts I could have gotten the same content with far less hassle than buying it via MS GFWL.  If the gaming industry wants to see less piracy, please consider making the purchase of your content approach the same level of user-friendliness as stealing it.