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Vivendi Technical Support Scam

Today I want to vent about my recent experience with Vivendi Technical Support.

First, to give a little background, I have been a big fan of F.E.A.R. since the day it came out. Due to my love for this game, I bought the expansion back, F.E.A.R. Extraction Point. I hadn't gotten around to playing it until recently when I heard another expansion was about to come out, so I wanted to play through it to stay up with the story. If only I was so lucky. I was unable to get the game to install on my gaming machine. Thus began the horror of Vivendi Technical Support.

After disparately searching the internet for answers to the error code I was receiving, I had to give in and contact technical support. At first, the technical support representative seemed very willing to help me solve my problems. The only complaint I had at the time was that for every response I sent to their troubleshooting suggestions took a day for them to reply back to me. Eventually, the tech support representative by the name of Ethan deemed my disk defective. I had figured this out before even contacting them. That wouldn't have been so bad had it not taken them a week to make that determination. I could have forgiven these inconveniences had I not felt scammed by Vivendi.

Why did I feel scammed you ask? In my final email with technical support representative Ethan, he told me my disk was defective and revealed their replacement policy. He stated I would have to return the game and pay $10 to get replacement disks. What the... Why should I have to pay to ship the faulty disks back as well and pay an additional $10 just to get a set of disks that had no guarantee of working when it was faulty to begin with?! I might as well buy the expansion pack again and receive all of the goodies it has for just a couple dollars more. If you thought this was insane, to replace a console game it is a $15 charge. Oh, and before I forget, they also state it takes 4-6 weeks to deliver the replacement.

Replacement disks cost mere pennies. Why should I have to pay a $10 penalty for their mistake? Why does it take 4-6 weeks to copy two disks ship them? Last I checked, cd replicators nor the USPS was that slow.

Until Vivendi makes this situation right and changes their policies, I am calling for a boycott of their games!

Tell game manufactures to treat you right!

Ebay is Web 2.0 Gone Wrong

This weekend I spent part of my weekend shopping online for a new tv. While shopping I decided to do some price comparison on Ebay. After I purchased a Toshiba tv from Amazon, I went back to Ebay to look for some video games. When I got there, I realized the horror of Ebay's move to the new 'Web 2.0' movement. While I have been a fan of the Web 2.0 movement for some time as I believe it is user friendly, Ebay shows how you can turn the upgraded design into a consumer nightmare.

For those of you who haven't been apart of what I believe is a beta experience, it is a search nightmare. Since I am typically searching for video games to find old games or bargains, I will use that as my talking point.

The old design is far more user friendly as it had better subcategories. When you look up video games, It gives you several categories such as Accessories, Games and Systems. Under those you had subcategories to refine your search for specific platforms. If you wanted to do a generic search on Xbox 360 games, you would just click the Xbox 360 link under the games category. That ease is now gone.

Ebay has replaced this with just the overall main categories(Accessories, Games, Systems, etc.). Now if you go to look for a game, you don't get to filter by Console, instead all games are lumped together in the main category which returns over 150,000 listings. You now have the option to refine your search by things like ESRB rating, Genre, and price range. I will analyze each of these.

First, filtering by ESRB ratings is foolish. Each category still returns tens of thousands of results which makes it nearly impossible to find something that you aren't looking for. While this could certainly be useful for parents looking to get games for their children that are worried about their content, but unfortunately this is not a majority of users. When adding search features, you should target the largest majorities first before you cater to the smaller groups of users.

Next, filtering by Genre is practically useless. While I will admit it could be helpful for people who only like particular genres of games, it again does not target the majority. If like myself, you are looking for Xbox 360 games as their auction ends, you typically aren't looking for anything in particular and would not want to limit your results to a certain genre. This could be turned around to allow you to choose a series of genre's so that you can eliminate genre's you may not like such as puzzle games. This would be far more useful.

Last, filtering by price range is practically the most useless of all of the new filtering options. If you don't know what you are looking for, how do you know how much you are willing to pay for it? Also, if you are looking for something and now the approximate price it typically goes for, you could be excluding a lot of possibilities such as used items and bundles. There is more I could say about this nonsense, but I don't have that kind of time.

With subcategories gone in place of this new filtering system, Ebay is effectively eliminating the crowd of bargain hunters to target the smaller groups of searchers. While going back to the old system would be a great improvement over the current system, I believe that with a better search model, which allows you to select multiple subcategories at a time while using smaller details to filter the search would be a far more effective solution. Improvements on the old system can be made, but this is a huge leap back and likely to cost the auction giant numerous sales and customers.

Ebay, this is your fair warning: It is better to include rather than exclude.