EVE Online sent an e-mail to me recently telling me that I could come and try the game again for five days to promote their new Tyrannis expansion/addition. The offer genuinely interested me and I was excited to see what had changed. I was thinking that I might even get back into the game. What I didn't know is that I would be in for one headache after another in order just to get past the login screen...
First step, download the client. This would take the longest so it made sense to do it first. For the most part, this step went without issue. It just took a few hours but encountered no problems... until the patcher. After the installer had finished downloading the last of the binaries, I was informed that the data was corrupt somehow. Frustrating at first, until I thought that perhaps it had a recovery mechanism. They may be able to just patch the data... and yes, I was correct! Though I'm not sure that patching actually saved me any time, since the program seemed to fail at it's sole purpose. After running in an endless loop for a while due to a confirmed bug that prevented the program from actually fixing any data, it either gave up or got lucky, but either way the patcher finished. Who knows if the game would actually work though, but on to the next step for now.
First step, download the client. This would take the longest so it made sense to do it first. For the most part, this step went without issue. It just took a few hours but encountered no problems... until the patcher. After the installer had finished downloading the last of the binaries, I was informed that the data was corrupt somehow. Frustrating at first, until I thought that perhaps it had a recovery mechanism. They may be able to just patch the data... and yes, I was correct! Though I'm not sure that patching actually saved me any time, since the program seemed to fail at it's sole purpose. After running in an endless loop for a while due to a confirmed bug that prevented the program from actually fixing any data, it either gave up or got lucky, but either way the patcher finished. Who knows if the game would actually work though, but on to the next step for now.
After clicking the link that I was given in the e-mail, I came to a web login screen. They wanted my username rather than my e-mail. Fairly standard I figured... except there wasn't a "I've forgotten my username" link. Well alright then, I put in my e-mail anyway to see if the system was smart enough to figure it out. It seems it was. However, the next screen to come up was one saying that I was logging in from an unverified location... Seriously? You'd think after I'd spent a year or two out of the game that my IP might have changed once or twice, but the problem wasn't that it recognized this change. It was that it wanted me to validate myself by providing a character name on the account.
Maybe that wouldn't be a big deal if I were a more serious player when I originally played, but I wasn't. I liked the game, but not enough to subscribe and dig in. Suffice to say, I had no idea what my character's name was from so long ago. I did know that I invested a good month or two into leveling it though, and I was not about to start from scratch.
This headache brought me to the wonderful CCP petition system, since this was the only listed solution for not being able to log in. A few minutes later and I had submitted a slightly caustic message about not being able to log in for the above reason. The problem was that I had no idea what the wait time would be; It turned out to be a full day before I heard back, but I'll forgive that since most petition systems are just as terrible with turnaround time.
The GM was nice enough and gave me my login information. She also stated that I may need to reset the password, which I did end up having to do. This process generates you a password which you must copy and paste into a different screen, and if you're lucky you won't have copied something else into your clipboard after that because it requires that password again when you decide to change it to something else. Avoidable by the user? Sure, but what's so hard about asking the user to change the password without having a pointless copy-paste step in-between?
All I had left to do before playing was activate the account for play. I did think at least this step would have been straight forward. Once I was logged in to the account on the web side, I noticed there weren't many options. The activation section gave me a choice of using four different types of payment information. There was nothing mentioned about being active under the promotion. No big deal, I figured, if they had already activated the account for me and it wasn't something the system displayed.
Thinking that the activation step was out of the way, I opened the game client. I had no issues getting to the login screen, but my luck wouldn't last. I entered my information only to receive a dialog box to the gist of the below text.
Account [edited out] has been disabled
Last Login: 2010.11.20 00:34
Number of Visits: 75
reason: Account subscription expired!
Cue the face-palm. My subscription has expired... even though I was supposedly given a five day guest pass to login without a subscription. False advertising? Sure, I suppose. Biggest problem though? The number of issues that I had in getting just this far. I don't know if I'll even be able to try the game out, but I don't think it would matter much at this point since I've witnessed how incapable their company is at managing something as basic as an account management system. I could be wrong, but I won't really know unless I can see the game and it looks like that won't be happening any time soon.
Update 1
Well it turns out that the expert engineers at CCP didn't put a lot of thought into their account system. The reason that I was unable to login to the test server was due to a inability for their test server to authenticate against the same database as their live realm. Their fix? Post in a hard-to-find thread on their forum and wait a few days. Their solution could be worse, or they could not have one at all, but at the same time it's pretty pathetic for such a supposedly sophisticated game company to require such manual approaches to things that are commonly automated by competitors such as Blizzard.
Even after asking to be "enabled" for the test server, my request was granted after a few days of waiting. I presumed that since this was a manual process that I could at least count on it being done correctly, but I was mistaken yet again. Even after reading my own character name in the list of processed activations, I was still unable to log in to the test server.
Given the number of failures, one would think that perhaps the user (me) is simply incompetent. Part of me wishes this were the case, but I assure any readers that it is not.
At this point, I have no remaining interest to play now or even consider playing in the future.
Update 1
Well it turns out that the expert engineers at CCP didn't put a lot of thought into their account system. The reason that I was unable to login to the test server was due to a inability for their test server to authenticate against the same database as their live realm. Their fix? Post in a hard-to-find thread on their forum and wait a few days. Their solution could be worse, or they could not have one at all, but at the same time it's pretty pathetic for such a supposedly sophisticated game company to require such manual approaches to things that are commonly automated by competitors such as Blizzard.
Even after asking to be "enabled" for the test server, my request was granted after a few days of waiting. I presumed that since this was a manual process that I could at least count on it being done correctly, but I was mistaken yet again. Even after reading my own character name in the list of processed activations, I was still unable to log in to the test server.
Given the number of failures, one would think that perhaps the user (me) is simply incompetent. Part of me wishes this were the case, but I assure any readers that it is not.
At this point, I have no remaining interest to play now or even consider playing in the future.
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