EA Censors Support Number On Sim City Forums
The gaming industry is full of trends, whether it be the influx of FPS games. The surprising number of downloadable tower defense games (seriously, there are tons), and more recently, really really bad customer relations. With Ocean Marketing’s memorable debacle, sending threats to customers, Randy Pitchford ignoring and blocking all criticism of Colonial Marines, and now EA censoring mentions of their Customer Care number, seemingly to ignore any and all complaint about Sim City.
Reddit user, LeLedg, posted their experience with EA’s Sim City forums. Using a forum feature, EA has been censoring all instances of the customer care number, 1.866.543.5435, and only this number. It seems that EA’s way of dealing with customer complaints is to not deal with them at all. Though, it should be noted that EA has been bragging on about how they’ve been purportedly hearing from thousands of paid advocates of Sim City’s controversial “Always Online” DRM.
The Reddit Thread has been abuzz with discussion about the topic. I’ve skimmed a bit, and cherry picked some of my favorite comments below:
“Customers want refunds and/or offline mode.
EA turns customer support into offline mode.
Brilliant move EA.”-pk-
“Can’t be more than a few people left in this world, who actually likes EA…”
SanMichel
“Except for the 90% of their customers whose only exposure to videogame news is the clerk at gamestop?”
jakj
“I asked for a refund as well through the live chat and they refused. They said they were going to email me some sort of discount code or something for my trouble. Been 2 days now and still haven’t gotten it. I didn’t intend to use it, but still….. EA Customer Service too good.”
Fellshadow
What honestly baffles me the most is the modern attitude of attempting to save face by ignoring complaints. It’s as though these companies think that people don’t talk amongst themselves outside of the official channels. If EA is supposedly working on something to fix this, why wouldn’t you simply apologize and state this? The wrong types of people are being hired into customer relations, if you ask me. The belligerent, can-do-no-wrong attitude of these people, acting as if they’re doing us a favor by letting us buy their broken, over-hyped and under-delivered, unplayable, and non-working games. Man up, take responsibility, and be a decent person, and maybe we could start to forgive you.
