Sunday, August 23, 2009

Champions Online Doesn't Want My Money.

I am trying to buy a six month’s subscription for Champions Online, and upcoming MMO from Cryptic. They keep sending me emails saying if I pre-buy a discounted 6 month’s subscription I’ll get access some stuff including access to the Star Trek Online beta. Now, Champions was my game for a good number of years back in the late 80’s and I want to see Star Trek Online early. So I decided to spend money I really don’t have... except that they won’t let me.

It appears their web form has a little problem with the Google Chrome browser. The drop down fields for the Credit Card Type, Expiration Month, and Expiration Year are broken. They aren’t displaying correctly. They are left aligned on top of their text label and are non-interactive.

I went to the support page and one of the options it gave me was a link to the technical support forum. Only when I used the link it took me to a page that said I do not have permission to access this page. I went to enter a ticket and it wants me to pre-search their knowledge base before it allows me to do so, which is pretty standard now days. Only when I entered “google crome” as my search it comes up blank. Blank as in nothing is displayed.

I did finally get the purchase to work by loading it in Firefox. I also managed to enter a ticket saying that their purchase page is broken by searching for something else which gave me the option of creating a new ticket.

The whole thing just got me so frustrated which I suspect has a lot to do with the fact that I normally do this sort of thing for a living and not having a job at the moment. The standard operating procedure for this sort of thing in somebody else's game would be to make snide remarks to my co-workers along the lines of, "look those fools forgot to test their site on Crome!" And then see if we any of us knew somebody who worked there so we could curry favor by telling them about it. Or if was something in my own game, I could pick up the phone and light a fire under somebody; because not being to give the company money goes against what I would say is the number one goal of the company.

The next problem is that I am going to have to spend more money I shouldn't, back to the being out of work thing, on actually buying the game I just bought a subscription for. I have a feeling the guys at Game Stop will have a much easier time taking my money. Unless... I make it more difficult by bringing in my old X-Box, PS2, and Game Cube and trying to get store credit for them which I could use to by the game! Yeah, that should be tons of fun give me lots more to complain about!

2 comments:

nflder said...

Hello there Joseph.
Do you realize that today's working vocabulary is changing faster than I'm ageing?
I had to look up, "Captcha," in the dictionary, and 'lo and behold it was there.
As they say in my country, "I was some surprised me bys."

Joseph B. Hewitt IV said...

Wow. We were just discussing commenting on the blog, captcha, and being to old for this new fangled technology on a Facebook comment where I linked to my blog and was complaining that everybody comments on the Facebook status instead of the actual blog

...sorry I passed out there from that run on sentence. Forgot to breath while I was saying it out loud while typing it.

Anyway, I read "The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way" by Bill Bryson. Lots of stuff in there about language changing, I highly recommend it.