I received Mass Effect for Christmas and finally installed it to try out today. When I try to start the game, it tells me that the activation limit has already been met, despite being a new copy. Okay, that's weird, I think to myself, but hey, one quick trip to customer support should sort that out, especially given how commonly it came up when the game first came out and people upgrade their systems. How little I knew...
I began by looking at the only sticky in this(?? See below) forum that seemed relevant and it linked to a topic that no longer exists. The search feature turned up nothing; I can't tell if it's working or not, as the Bioware site acts especially glitchy for me. It also asked me to activate this account (which I'd already activated and posted with in the past) and then wouldn't let me post until registering the game (which I'd already done), and later still wouldn't let me post without even giving a reason, just saying that access was forbidden.
In retrospect, some of these issues may have to do with the distinction between Bioware's old forums (Mass Effect 1 Tech Support) and Bioware's social network (Mass Effect 1 Tech Support), but if that's the case, this strikes me as extremely nonintuitive and poor site design because people who weren't around during the time the new forums sprung up may be unaware that the forum they're reading - which has nothing, such as a notice at the top of the page, to indicate that it is no longer active except post dates, easy to miss for someone scanning a list of topics relevant to their own issue or looking through stickies that tend not to have new posts in any case - is defunct, leading them to waste their time trying to use the old forums and struggling to figure out what they have done to anger the forum gods, an experience that might be more common than you would expect since search engines frequently still link to the old forums. (The confusion and despair one feels in attempting to decipher the previous sentence can be considered an analogous experience.) One can imagine how this might, in turn, compound the frustration being experienced by someone locked out of their own game by a poorly thought-out form of DRM that seems designed to penalize legitimate customers. But hey, that's just me.
Anyway, I also looked in a few other topics; one told me to visit a support page that no longer exists. (Incidentally, that link Bioware has at the bottom of their home page for Customer Support? It only links to support for Dragon Age.) Another said to try at EA's support site, where you can get supposedly get a program sent that adds another activation to the game. Off to EA's support pages I merrily went, still hopeful in my youthful innocence that I could quickly resolve the issue and get on with my day.
On EA's support site, my question isn't in the list. (Nor is the answer to the question of why one has to register to access customer support, especially when said support consists of browsing pre-selected questions, the type that never have to do with the issue you're experiencing.) Searching for "activation" within Mass Effect questions comes up with something about screen size and resolution; "drm" gives me the ever-so-helpful answer that I need to revoke the license on the (nonexistent) other computers with the game activated, or e-mail them. When I click contact info or try to use the live support chat I saw linked in one of the topics, it asks me to log in again, and when I use the username and password I signed up with not two minutes earlier to try to log in, it tells me that the username and/or password is incorrect. I made a second account with one of my other e-mail addresses and experienced the same problem. This happens if I use the e-mail I signed up with instead of the username, too, and no, it's not my cookie settings. In this case, at least, my own ineptitude does not appear to be fueling the problem. To be sure that I was not getting the username or password wrong, I used the retrieve passwords and retrieve username forms. The password e-mail reached me, but the username e-mail never did (not even in junk mail).
Here I must digress to note that this forum lacks a sufficiently angry smiley to express the frustration I was feeling at this point, so I will have to resort to the cold, hard gaze of
So on and on I went, until I came back here and found that I could post again. I can't follow the directions in the sticky to report the problem, as they direct me to the EA site, which is a dead end. Hence, this post.
Tldr: The game is telling me that I've exceeded the activation limit even though this is clearly not the case, and at this point, all I want to know is how I can get this issue resolved, preferably by phone or e-mail or some other method where I won't have to deal with byzantine, glitchy web pages.
Modifié par unlimited_sake, 18 janvier 2011 - 07:06 .
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