Richard Garriott's Pain in My Ass

As a game designer I tend to take a very critical look at how other game companies do things. ...and then I complain about them. That second part doesn't have anything to do with being a game designer, that's just me. I’m not saying I, the company I work for, or the product we just put out is perfect either, it’s just that it isn’t very professional to complain about those things in public so I’m forced to pick on other people and their products.

It is day 4 in my attempt to play “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa”. I have now given up on my attempt to get my normal account name back and am trying to use my other account. At this point I am also trying to act like some average consumer when faced with problems. For example I am now pretending I know nothing about the connection between the game and NCSoft, specifically the fact that I have to use a Master PlayNC account to then add “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa”.

The little card with my “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa” Serial Code that came in the box simply says to launch the game and follow the instructions. I click the “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa” icon on my desktop, it loads the PlayNC launcher and I click on “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa” under the Installed list and then press “Play Now.” It goes through a patch check, EULA, logo screens, skips the movie because it already played it once when I first installed and updated and I am eventually faced with a login screen and asked for my account and password.

It has not yet told me that how I should go about making an account. The only options I can select are Options (Video/Audio/Game/Key Bindings), Cinematic, Credits, and Exit.

I type some random stuff in the account and password fields and press return. The computer is now locked up and both ALT-Tab and CTRL-ALT-DEL do nothing. I know what the problem is. They blew test number one. They didn’t take software firewalls into account and Zone Alarm’s little dialog is blocked behind their screen and they won’t let me ALT-Tab out to say that it’s okay for “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa” to access the Internet. I have to force shut down my machine at this point because it doesn’t appear to be timing out.

Luckily Zone Alarm now remembers incomplete failed software access attempts so I just have to open up its menu and say allow “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa”. Before Zone Alarm did this if you never answered the ‘Allow’ or ‘Block’ dialog the program wouldn’t show up in the list. Granted if you aren’t familiar with stupid launcher programs that do crap like this, you still wouldn’t know why your computer is locking up.

Okay so I get back to the password screen and type random stuff and it just tells me to check my spelling etc. It does say that if I need help retrieving account information I should go to www.plaync.com/us/account/ for more information. But it has never told me how to go about creating an account in the first place.

I go back to the PlayNC launcher and press the Help link. It loads up Internet Explorer which is NOT my default browser. I use Firefox. For a moment I shake my fist at the computer while pretending I’m a ranting, anti-Microsoft, computer guy. I yell and scream for a few minutes about the “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa” sullying my computer with Internet Explorer and probably downloading viruses as we speak. Seriously, if you are going to launch a browser, launch the default browser on the machine.

Lets look at the link on the Serial Code card, www.rgtr.com. RGTR stands for “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa” and it yes, every where they print the name of the game they have to spell out the whole thing. Kinda like the old Virgin Game’s “The 11th Hour: The Sequel to the 7th Guest.” Same thing and I swear it made the manual twice as long. It’s so stupid. Marketing feels that putting Richard’s name on the title like that might help sell the game. He’s a famous guy, we all love Ultima. I get that, I get putting it on the box, but the extra step of bonding his name to the title is annoying. It is ridiculous to read when used in a sentence. And they obviously don’t want you typing that whole thing out in the URL so they shortened it to RGTR which now isn’t connected to the either his name or the game anymore! You might have noticed I’ve gone back over this post and replaced everywhere I had Tabula Rasa with “Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa” just to drive the point home. I do wonder if I could legally put out my own game called “Joseph B. Hewitt IV’s Tabula Rasa”?

Anyway the official game web site… going to look through their forums to see if anybody else has this problem. Community link to Forum & Fansites link… to umm no official forums. They are all fansite forums.

Okay I give up. I didn’t mean to write another really long complaining post. I was just going to post a small thing about them locking up my computer with Zone Alarm and it somehow blew up into this whole thing. I’m going to turn my brain back on and log in with my PlayNC account. I really don’t know how a casual, non-technical, person would ever figure out how to actually log into the game. Going to the PlayNC site, creating an account there, adding the game through that site, THEN logging into the game isn’t a natural process. You would think they would put all that on the Serial Code card but instead they link to the official game site. There do seem to be people online right now playing "Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa" so maybe it’s just me.

Don’t PlayNC

NCSoft has got to have THE WORST help system of any on-line game service. Okay, probably not anywhere near THE worst. SoE certainly wasn’t an award winner for SWG at its launch, but NCSoft certainly does love making you jump through hoops and they have had over four years to actually get some tools in place.

I recently bought Tabula Rasa. In order to play it I have to have a Master PlayNC account. I do have a Master PlayNC account that I created almost four years ago in early 2004 when I played City of Heroes. Unfortunately, none of my standard passwords seem to be correct. I also love how they get you with the too many attempts thing right off the bat. You know how most systems allow you to attempt to enter your password a few times before they say something and make you wait awhile before you can try again? Well PlayNC does that after the first try.

Too many failed login attempts, login temporarily disabled. Please try again in a few minutes.

Granted the wait time is only like 2 minutes before you can try again, but what a pain in the ass especially if you just made a typo.

I try to use their lost password feature. It pops up two security questions that I am assuming I picked way back when. It also has one of those annoying ‘type in the letters you see that are distorted, hard to read and partly hidden on this noisy background image’ things that all appear to be coded to just reject your first attempt out of hand. The questions are “What was the color of my first car” and “What was my childhood nickname.” I enter the answers and am told I’m wrong.
Funny that I have a color picture of said car right here and am still haunted by that cruel nickname. The only recourse I am given is that I have to contact support. No link, just told that is what I have to do.

Under the ‘Help’ link on the side menu I find a ‘Support Center’ link, enter ‘Lost Password’ in the search field and get an entry titled “PlayNC Support - What should I do if I think I have been hacked?”

Okay, lets try, “Forgot Password”… okay that came up with a few, one of which is “I forgot my PlayNC master account password.” It gives me the same spiel about going to the lost password link and if I have updated my account and added the security questions that I need to answer them but if I haven’t updated it then I need to just enter my date of birth. Note to self, in the future don’t update and add the questions I won’t remember the answer to in four years.

At the bottom it has another link. “I can't use the FORGOT PASSWORD feature because I cannot remember some of the required information.” Why this link isn’t included on the actual Lost Password page I don’t know.

That page tells me to use the “Ask a Question” link and paste in the following into the form:

Subject:
I forgot my PlayNC master account password and I can't reset it using the FORGOT PASSWORD feature.
Question:
Here is my account information:
PlayNC master account name: ENTER ACCOUNT NAME HERE
First and last name: ENTER FIRST AND LAST NAME HERE
Physical Address: ENTER POSTAL MAILING ADDRESS (not e-mail address) HERE
Date of birth: ENTER DATE OF BIRTH HERE
Serial codes/access keys: ENTER CODES/KEYS HERE
Unique Account ID(s): ENTER UNIQUE ACCOUNT ID(s) HERE

Now the problem with all these is I have moved around a bit and there are 5 possible postal addresses I may have used when I first signed up for the account: My house in Vegas, my mother’s house in Vegas (my main U.S. mailing address), my work address, my original apartment when I first moved to Australia or my current apartment.

The Serial Codes and Unique Account IDs are the game code and account names used on previous PlayNC games. I haven’t a clue. I played several of their games but when I stopped, I canceled the accounts. I don’t have that information. (Actually I do as I am very anal about that sort of thing, but let’s pretend I’m a normal person who doesn’t keep game boxes for more than a few years after they’ve stopped playing them. And that they don’t keep game activation code emails buried in some folder in their inbox. Or at least pretend I’m just too lazy to go out into the box in storage where those old game boxes are which is probably a lot easier.) I wrote that I have no active accounts for those two entries.

I got back an email saying that some of my information in incorrect or inaccurate. To assist them further I need to provide them with additional information. They do apologize for what appears to be additional steps. I am told not to reply to the email but rather to go to a link to update my support reqest. This link takes me to their Knowledge Base support page. At this page I am asked for my email address and a password. I wanted to write back, thanking them for their time but informing them that I was going to return Tabula Rasa to the store.

I can’t however as I have no password for their knowledge base page. I am pretty sure I was never asked to create one. Just now in writing this post I have actually retraced my steps to creating this customer service request. I have looked at the original email they auto-sent me when I entered the customer service request and all over this current one. Both say that if I need to update my request to go to that link but neither give any indication of a password. And this email also says if they don’t hear back from me in 72 hours they will assume the issue has been resolved. Not letting the customers answer back is a nice way to get their customer support resolved issues scores up.

Looking back through the PlayNC email crap I have kept. I do have one regarding why I quite City of Heroes. Petition: “Falling Forever: Walked into a building for a mission and fell through the world. I am still falling. /stuck does nothing.”

I remember that I waited online for quite awhile but never got a response. Tried logging off and back on and was still falling. I got this email three days later, “My apologies, but I am not able to find your hero online at the moment. Unfortunately, we can only assist you on this issue while your hero is logged in. Next time you log in with this hero, please reply back to this email letting us know that you are online, and we will get to you as quickly as we can. You may continue to play, and we will find you in the game when we get to your petition.”

This is why I was working to get macro programs banned from SWG customer service. I may not continue to play as falling forever is not what I consider ‘playing’ and I certainly wasn’t about to spend three more days doing it. If somebody had to actually type an answer to that it would probably have more to do to address my problem than suggest that I log in, write them email, then sit there for hours while waiting for them to come to my aid.

The real end to this story is I have another PlayNC account. I created a second one way back when because of this same problem. I was only jumping through these hoops because A. I wanted to complain about them and B. I would prefer to have the other account name as it is my standard one I always use for MMOs. Seriously, if they want you to maintain a master account and not make a new one for each new game, they need to smooth this process out.

It does annoy the piss out of me that they don’t just do the standard “mail the password to the email address on file” like the rest of the world does. I would only need to contact customer support if I had changed my email address or something. They certainly don’t seem to have a problem spamming my email with crap about how they keep re-activating my various game accounts for their ‘special’ weekends to get me to come back.

I wonder if my CoH character is still falling?