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EA can suck my left nut.
I try to be impartial. I really do. Times come, however, when I just have to rage against certain organizations. My school is quite often the target of my wrath. Today it's Electronic Arts. Destroyer of games. Ruiner of developers. Greedy bastards of the Apocalypse. I hate EA with more passion than ought to be legal. I've felt that way for years. This seething rage is nothing new for me.
When it was announced that Harmonix would be releasing Rock Band under the EA banner I cried. It broke my heart. How could Rock Band possibly come out to the accolades it deserved when EA was behind it. While Rock Band is a lot better than I expected, no major bugs and very good on the DLC, it has major issues with the instruments. To be specific the guitar is a bloody steaming pile of crap. The drums have issues, but I'm willing to attribute more of that to users than to shoddy quality on the instruments.
The guitar breaks if you look at it. Most of the complaints coming out are the that the guitar stops down strumming. This is what happened to me, and this is what pushes to me to write this article.
A few days after I purchased the game stories were already circulating about faulty guitars. I continued playing with mine since it was working fine, or so I thought. I started missing more notes and chalked it up to the Strat being different from GH3's Les Paul that I was used to. In hindsight what was happening was the down strum was slowly going away. I missed notes cause the guitar wasn't registering my down strum. To compensate I would naturally strum a little harder without realizing it. Eventually I couldn't strum down hard enough for it register consistently enough to play. This was within a week of purchase.
I put in a trouble ticket at EA's support website, giving them game, system, and needed instrument. I wasn't overly concerned since I still had the Les Paul and it worked with Rock Band. Besides I still had drums and vocals to play through. No big.
On December 4th I got an email informing me that they didn't know what I needed. grrrrrrrrr So I updated my trouble ticket and replied to the email. I was assured that my RMA would be processed immediately, and apologies were made. Still no big. I had the Les Paul and the X-Plorer so I had enough for a full band for family and friends to play.
Over the holidays I was really too busy to check in and I assumed my replacement was on it's way. With the shortage of instruments and all the reports of dead guitars I figured it would be a couple weeks before I got mine. No big.
I checked in yesterday to see what the hold up was, over a month with nothing was stretching it for me, only to find that my RMA had been canceled. WTF? Canceled? I hit the roof. I mean went abso-freakin-lutely ballistic for a few minutes. I don't get visibly mad often, but when I do WW2 Hiroshima is a safer place to be than in my presence. They don't know I have 2 GH guitars so to them I've been unable to play 1/3 of the game for over a month. Now I'm of the school that being professional and courteous often yields better results than flying of the handle so I waited until I had calmed down a bit to send off my response. It was then worded in such a way that I was courteous, but they knew I was nearing the end of my patience. I still haven't heard back from them and it's been over their self-imposed 24 hour reply window.
I'm quickly running out of patience with EA, and I didn't really have much to begin with. At this point I can only hope Spore dies a quiet death on the back burner. I don't even want to know what it would be like once EA had their shot at removing all the life from it. Better to have it aborted early, than still born.
When it was announced that Harmonix would be releasing Rock Band under the EA banner I cried. It broke my heart. How could Rock Band possibly come out to the accolades it deserved when EA was behind it. While Rock Band is a lot better than I expected, no major bugs and very good on the DLC, it has major issues with the instruments. To be specific the guitar is a bloody steaming pile of crap. The drums have issues, but I'm willing to attribute more of that to users than to shoddy quality on the instruments.
The guitar breaks if you look at it. Most of the complaints coming out are the that the guitar stops down strumming. This is what happened to me, and this is what pushes to me to write this article.
A few days after I purchased the game stories were already circulating about faulty guitars. I continued playing with mine since it was working fine, or so I thought. I started missing more notes and chalked it up to the Strat being different from GH3's Les Paul that I was used to. In hindsight what was happening was the down strum was slowly going away. I missed notes cause the guitar wasn't registering my down strum. To compensate I would naturally strum a little harder without realizing it. Eventually I couldn't strum down hard enough for it register consistently enough to play. This was within a week of purchase.
I put in a trouble ticket at EA's support website, giving them game, system, and needed instrument. I wasn't overly concerned since I still had the Les Paul and it worked with Rock Band. Besides I still had drums and vocals to play through. No big.
On December 4th I got an email informing me that they didn't know what I needed. grrrrrrrrr So I updated my trouble ticket and replied to the email. I was assured that my RMA would be processed immediately, and apologies were made. Still no big. I had the Les Paul and the X-Plorer so I had enough for a full band for family and friends to play.
Over the holidays I was really too busy to check in and I assumed my replacement was on it's way. With the shortage of instruments and all the reports of dead guitars I figured it would be a couple weeks before I got mine. No big.
I checked in yesterday to see what the hold up was, over a month with nothing was stretching it for me, only to find that my RMA had been canceled. WTF? Canceled? I hit the roof. I mean went abso-freakin-lutely ballistic for a few minutes. I don't get visibly mad often, but when I do WW2 Hiroshima is a safer place to be than in my presence. They don't know I have 2 GH guitars so to them I've been unable to play 1/3 of the game for over a month. Now I'm of the school that being professional and courteous often yields better results than flying of the handle so I waited until I had calmed down a bit to send off my response. It was then worded in such a way that I was courteous, but they knew I was nearing the end of my patience. I still haven't heard back from them and it's been over their self-imposed 24 hour reply window.
I'm quickly running out of patience with EA, and I didn't really have much to begin with. At this point I can only hope Spore dies a quiet death on the back burner. I don't even want to know what it would be like once EA had their shot at removing all the life from it. Better to have it aborted early, than still born.
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