I See Now Why People Hate EA

Ever wonder why EA has won back to back 'Worst Company In America' awards from The Consumerist? Today's rant may shed some clues.

Several years ago, I purchased a game from EA, played it once, then left it on my hard drive for several years collecting dust.

A couple of days ago, for some strange reason, I decide to dig it out of the corner and give it a go. The first issue encountered was the download platform was considered woefully out of date, so the program decided to update it to the new one (just the kind of service I don't need...if things work, it's usually a bad idea to fix them).

Once that is done, can I play the game now? Oh heck no, the new download manager doesn't recognize I ever downloaded and installed the game, so it promptly tries to download it again, only to have it crash attempting to reinstall the thing (probably because it's already installed doh!).

So I spent two days ripping out the botched install by hand (you would not believe how it infested my system registry...ouch), then uninstalling and reinstalling the download manager....and am now on attempt number two installing the bugger.

So, do I get to play the game now? No, it turns out the game has a software activation module that leads to an old website (it's now pogo.com lol, luckily EA still owns it or I'd be really out of luck).

So, then I had to go to pogo.com and create an account there, goto another EA website and tie that to my other EA account, then uninstall and reinstall the game again...time number two on this mess.

Now do I get to play the game? Oh heck no, turns out there is an undocumented problem that needs fixing first...another day later, I finally uncover that, and I get to play the game....joy!

Dear EA....is it that boring being the number one gaming company on planet earth that you have to go around fixing stuff that works, just to generate consumer complaints and challenge your technical support?

Or do you just do it to challenge me?