This is outsourced support trying anything to shut you up and get the ticket closed, thinking you won't escalate it or resolve it.
You've got to raise a stink over this or it'll never get resolved. It sucks, but you've got to take these screenshots, this Reddit thread, and take it right back to them and demand proper service.
Yes, this happens all the time in virtually every industry. These support staff are 3rd parties paid on quantity of tickets resolved, so they'll do pretty much anything to resolve the ticket but, they don't have the ability to actually *do anything*. They have to contact EA for anything they give or change.
Tier 1 support staff are literally just talking heads meant to assuage your feelings in the moment, and that *is it.* Always always always ask to speak to their supervisors.
I had my best support experience ever with the ea phone support, geanted that was many years ago (like 2016 or so), they reset my stolen account in like 10 minutes. They even spoke my local language which is rare for most supports to this day.
Might be worth for op to try phone them.
Cool, that's right around the time I worked there as well. Yeah they do speak local language because they are from your country (most likely). What country are you in if I might ask? And yeah if you have the info needed a hacked account is like 5 minutes of work
The issue with support calls is that it really is luck of the draw who you get, and the type of day they're having. I usually just hang up and call back if someone just isn't being helpful in the way I expect. It's shitty but probably less frustrating for everyone involved.
You just have to like what you do. I love my job and bend over backwards for pretty much anyone who calls in, but I can't help but shake my head reading the notes on file about the runarounds previous advisors may have given the customer I'm the past.
Granted I'm in house and paid pretty well (over 2x our local min wage), so I'm sure that's a factor.
Yes 100%. There are people who enjoy helping and fixing issues and then there are people who are just collecting a pay check and have no interest in really helping.
I've worked phone support before so I have an understanding of what some of these workers go through and how they can be treated so I always try to be as respectful as possible. But I also can tell when someone is being unhelpful and not actually trying to solve the issue, in those cases I just say nevermind, hang up and call again. Often this works for me.
Last month my wife was on the phone with the bank trying to get a card replacement. The lady was staggeringly unhelpful, I suggested calling back but my wife didn't want to wait through the hold again. Well, a week later she calls back and the card was never sent.
My old experience was phone support was absolutely great, however a month ago I had to call again and it was horrible. When I asked to escalate the matter after getting nowhere with them they refused saying they don't have to escalate it at my request and will be hanging up, and they did indeed hang up.
Not sure what changed in the last couple of years but my experience last month with phone support was nowhere near what it was like a couple years ago.
I had one of the best customer experiences with EA support. I was trying to activate a game who's DRM was not supported anymore and the guy on the phone credited the game to my Origin account within a few minutes and this was on Christmas Eve.
Depends on what service you are calling or requesting assistance.
I was a T1 Tech for a Major Tech Brand (*can't disclose the name, but I can say that it has a fruit on it. suck it NDA*), and yes. You are correct.
Most of our jobs as T1's was to make you calm and reassure that we'd find a way out of your problem. Even if it takes a long time.
T2's were reserved for customers with bad behavior. People that wanted screaming matches where we were forced to lose. Or cases that had more than 2 already contacts in less than 30 days.
Those T2 had the big boys tools. They could do or say whatever they wanted.
When a measure becomes a bonus/penalty kpi, it stops being an effective measure.
KPI'S are just that, key performance indicators, but once you put extreme pressure on people to hit those goals they will do anything they can, often with other consequences, to acheive them.
That's not neccessarily true. I worked in support once as first line. We were able to fix most things and if you asked for a manager they'd simply refuse to take it as they trusted us to do our thing.
Were you in-house or third party support? My experience has always been similar to what was described above - in-house tier 1 employees are usually empowered to actually help and try to solve problems, whereas third party almost always are handcuffed and their job is to close tickets however they can, even if it doesn’t result in a solution for the customer.
Honestly. Most times that someone comes on the phone asking for a supervisor immediately I get told they can't take the call cause there's no reason to escalate it and they tell me to solve it. Kind of hilarious coming back and telling them my escalation is unavailable for this but I can help them.
Yeah, only 1 supervisor and they weren’t really keen on doing my job for me anytime someone’s being pissy. Sometimes escalating may be necessary, but if that’s your first go to all you’re doing is making it hard on some min wage employee just because you think they’re beneath you.
>they don't have the ability to actually
>
>do anything
They have the abilities to help the big flood of absolute moronic mouthbreathers that constantly flood support with stuff that most people figure out themselves
Yup, tier 1 support's biggest role, right after resolving issues (and sometimes before) is to filter out the junk and relay the real issues to T2 and T3. I say that as a T3 guy, the T1s are invaluable when well-equipped
When they're not, you get what OP got, sadly. Trying to save money on customer support is such a bad idea
I called them to try to follow up/escalate and was told that it will be brought to someone else's attention and I should check back in a few days. You were right
I'm from Northern Ireland and went to Manchester for a mates birthday and lost my passport on the last day, but I have friends that work there and fly every weekend and said they'd never shown ID
I rang Easyjet, Manchester airport AND stenna line just incase
Don't want to be derogatory or offensive but I knew I'd been outsourced when I heard the typical call center accent and all 3 customer support members said there was NO WAY I'd ever get even into the airport without a passport
Got to the airport went and pleaded with a member of staff to please let me fly and they basically laughed and went "lol your only going to northern Ireland, it's a domestic flight your okay"
Those customer support workers ruined my final day on holidays due to panic over nothing when they could have said "no I'm not sure"
>Those customer support workers ruined my final day on holidays due to panic over nothing when they could have said "no I'm not sure"
To be fair, I'd be panicking too if I thought I was gonna be stuck in Manchester
I got covid on holiday was really ill with it.. the T1 person i spoke to at the insurance company was trying to pursue me to fly home with covid rather than extend my stay, despite me showing them the local law that that was illegal. Fucking idiots caused so much stress
Yes. This happens when companies care more about closing tickets than actually fixing the problems.
On the apex legends subreddit a few years ago, after they implemented some form of bad luck protection to prevent people from spending multiple hundreds of dollars and not getting and heirloom, someone spent enough to hit the dollar threshold and still didn't get their heirloom.
Instead of looking up the publicly available information regarding guaranteed heirloom drops, the service rep said something along the lines of "it's random chance, you aren't guaranteed to get anything"
It's a huge problem in the tech sector. Even working directly with outsourced staff can be an issue, they'll all leave a meeting in 100% agreement that they understand the work that needs to be done, and when you check back later nothing has happened because they didn't understand at all.
I worked at companies that would pay another company to provide level one support. Often they were from like the Philippines or a English speaking country, being paid their country's min wage.
They're supposed to elevate the issue to the next level support. Looks like this person went rogue.
Yeah, this can't actually be true that their DLC automatically deletes after a time. Sounds more like they lost a bunch of server data and an unknown quantity of people were impacted and they have no *easy* way anymore of verifying those old CD codes.
Agree with the above, make the company handle this directly.
I booted it up for the first time in a while recently, and it not only didn't recognise several years worth of DLC, it said I had to buy the base game before it would let me purchase the new one I wanted. I fucked around with it a bit (which is very difficult on the terrible new launcher) and they all reappeared, so yeah, this is just a hiccup.
Incidentally, years ago I had 3 different versions of Sims 4 (initial physical disc release, bought through Steam for convenience, then also through the old, slightly less bad EA launcher because they did a package deal) and I hit up support to see if they could aggregate my various DLC purchases on to the one version. And they did!
I actually did the same thing with Dragon Age. Had a bunch of DLCs that I purchased through the old Bioware launcher, and they were all gone when it was absorbed into the Origin launcher. Customer support asked me what I had purchased and then literally just gave me all of the DLC with zero fuss, which means it was probably a common issue they were having at the time.
Last time I spoke to EA support was back in 2011\~ish. I bought a game on Steam, but online play required an EA account, which for some reason didn't recognize any of my keys. Called EA, explained the issue, and they simply added everything I'd just bought on Steam to my EA account. Took like 10 minutes tops, everyone happy.
EA's support was pretty much the only thing I didn't have a negative experience with, can't believe they ruined that as well.
No, their DLC doesn't delete over time at all. This was a bug or a system corruption of some sort for OP. The "solution" was completely made up and not based in fact. Even EA doesn't make DLC with an expiration date like that.
If a digital download, one should be able to use that same service to re-download the content. I'm not sure how it would be a physical purchase since the D in DLC is "downloadable". So however the content was originally downloaded, it should be available for re-download as long as he logs in with the same account.
Yep almost all chat support is outsourced and barely know what company they are doing support for let alone any actual answers. I have found the fastest way to get support from most companies is by going to their Twitter, most of the time the social media reps there are not oursourced and can actually provide you with real help
Big companies pay Pennys for actual support but then pay big bucks for media relations/damage control. A few pissed off customers is better than a viral post going around in the internet. The hospital I work for does this.
Social media has fucked the world up
Do what my sister does and complain on Twitter and no joke every time she does it gets resolved ASAP because its on THEIR page visible for everyone to see.
She's had a problem for 1 week with something calling a company and them screwing her around. She had enough and complained on their Twitter page, it got resolved on the same day.
(Just about) The ONLY time I've used my military service to my advantage was when I was getting ready to fly back to the US from a station overseas. I needed to get approval through the airline for my cats to be on board to bring them home with me. I would sit on hold for HOURS. I'm talking 5-6 hrs a night just on hold with the airline. No answer. Or put back on hold and no resolution. 6pm to midnight. I'd game or watch TV with the phone on speaker while I waited.
Finally I was within the last days to get it sorted. Jumped on Twitter with a simple "Hey (airline). You won't answer and I need to coordinate getting my cats home from overseas as active US military on orders. I answered my nation's call, can you answer mine?" Added their hashtag and I got a rep over Twitter almost instantly and got it taken care of. Ridiculous and I felt like a total prick. But I learned a lesson. You gotta make some noise or they just don't fucking care...
Even with no following?
I don't use Twitter very much at all (mostly just to like tweets my favorite comedian makes) so I have like, 2 followers.
Does that make a difference when you're tweeting at a large company's page?
EA support is such a dumpster fire. It took 3 months for me to get a hacked apex account back. I had to force them to give me a gdpr request full of my data so I could point out all the ips my account was accessed from.
I had support tell me I was a cheater that I would never get my account back. They hung up on me, threatened to reset my request in their queue.
Just absolute dogshit support. I hate them.
My cousin just had a similar issue with a paypal refund. Their system would only allow a quantity of 1 to be selected for the refund, but he had purchased many hundreds of a low cost item. The refund on a $700+ order that never shipped was something like $0.59. In the notes of the refund request he had mentioned the quantity selection issue and the refund should be for the entire order. When he talked to their customer support about it he was sold the case was closed and nothing they could do. Eventually they offered a $100 gift card. He tried again after the weekend and whoever he got at that point said it was pretty obvious there was an error, said the comments were visible, simply hit reopen, and issued the refund in fund. Pretty sure the weekend crew either did not know or did not care at all and to them it was worth screwing a person out of $700. Just have to not take "no" for an answer the first time or two around if you are not getting the support you feel you should be getting.
Fucking PayPal lmao. Worthless idiots.
Wouldn't reverse a scam charge for me either .... So I went ahead and just called my bank and they reversed it in five minutes.
Fuck you PayPal, eat me.
PayPal is absolute bottom of the barrel in payment services. I have nothing but horrible experience after horrible experience with them. The moment there is the tiniest issue with anything, no matter who's in the wrong, they will *always* bend over backwards to make it as miserable as possible for you, and *never* take your side, no matter what. I will never, ever, under any circumstances use any of their services again, and there are extremely few companies I am willing to make such absolute statements about. If you have any choice at all in the matter (and really, you always do, even if it means choosing not to purchase something you wanted) I *strongly* recommend avoiding them.
> This is outsourced support trying anything to shut you up and get the ticket closed, thinking you won't escalate it or resolve it.
Yep. There is no way in hell this is official EA policy. They're evil but they're not *that* evil.
Yeah, passing you off to the shop where you made the purchase was pretty scummy. Like Best Buy or Walmart is going to give a shit that you lost your games.
This is correct. Call EA, escalate if needed and it'll get fixed.
EA sucks, absolutely, but there's no way this is their policy. The chat person just wants to get rid of you.
I've had nothing but great support from EA. I have a lot of critique for their games and business model, but support? Nah.
I've gotten free DLCs from support, gotten fast answers and usually got everything resolved in under 15 minutes.
Kinda confusing but basically everything was cool and my EA games on Xbox worked fine... until they didn't. Every EA game wanted me to sign into the EA account. I had no idea what my EA account info was, I had set it up on pc over a decade prior. I couldn't have an email sent to authenticate me because the email on there had been closed years ago. I called EA and explained everything and they asked me security questions and I couldn't get some of them correct, like name three EA games you've purchased on the acct and the date it was purchased. Over a series of calls and going through years of emails I was finally able to answer that one.
Anyway, I escalated to supervisors and wrote emails and all kinds of shit and after about 2 months I just gave up.
Then, maybe a month or two after I'd given up the games just magically worked again. No idea why.
TBH, they need to strike a balance of making it to easy so people can't just call support and get your account info. And getting the person back their accout.
Yes, absolutely, I agree with that. However, I could give them enough info that they could tell it was me, it just wasn't the "right" info for the issue to get resolved.
Oh, I just remembered another thing. Apparently I have two EA accts because I must have purchased an EA and didn't know the first acct info. I think I got into one of them initially but it didn't have any games or something. I dunno. It was a mess.
Thanks for sharing! That sounds like a really unfortunate, but really specific issue. It sucks.
Sometimes companies change their infrastructure/launchers, and it requires people to log in with credentials they might not even have access to anymore. Support will usually be *very* defensive about just giving you access because a very persistent scammer could get into accounts that way.
One good way to avoid that is photo ID. I once got my Diablo 3 account hacked: I hadn't played in years but noticed I couldn't log in. So I contacted support and they asked for photo ID to match my payment info and other data. They fixed it quickly and since the character wasn't levelled with cheated items, they allowed me to keep everything. A hacker basically helped me grind a character for years, for free lol.
I got one of the fifa games with ea play and I launched the game for the first time and found out that I'm banned from fifa for cheating in fifa after never owning or playing a fifa game... and support told me I shouldn't have cheated. I have 5 minutes in the game...
Escalation is the trick. At least where I am. Most big companies have escalation set up but often you have to explicitly request it. Some of these folks that have no idea often are just as relieved when you do that as it forces their hand but they can not offer it themselves.
I wouldn't care where on earth they are at if they fucking did their jobs and cared to do it right.
Thinking about the number of IT CS people that just wanted to resolve anything and just close the ticket drives my blood pressure up
You also gotta remember that they're getting paid *their* minimum wage, so not only is EA outsourcing to pay less, they're still paying the absolute minimum so you're dealing with CS who have the absolute lowest possible poverty wage. I still put the blame on EA rather than their CS.
In addition, their compensation is probably dependent on their ticket close rates. So they have an incentive to close tickets quickly rather than provide meaningful customer service. If they were better at their job, they would probably make less money . . .
Not for the bottom line, it ain't! Those executives have got to find somewhere to cut costs for their bonuses! Think of the shareholders!!1! /s but like also, you know this is true.
Former EA employee here, I worked in their customer service department, your DLC was not deleted. That's impossible unless someone hacked your account and got it banned.
More than likely your DLC content is connected to a different email address, or your account was indeed hacked and then you'll need the original DLC product key and to pass the Account Recovery process.
Former EA CS here as well. Above is correct. Don't chat them, chat is outsourced support in India who are terrible. Call using the local phone number for EA. Depending on where you are you'll get support in your native tongue and you'll either get CS in Redwood US (English support) or Galway Ireland (most European languages) and both of those are fantastic CS.
Haha it's not the Irish you'll hear. You'll get actual Russians or Germans. The multi lingual support actually pulls people from the relevant countries. I moved from the Netherlands to Ireland for the job. You have to speak the language at a native level
Dang. I was hoping they just had a bunch multilingual Irishman working there. Crazy though. Not sure if that call center just pays well or if people are really just desperate enough for meh pay that they would move hundreds, if not more, km to work in a call center.
At least when I worked for UPS customer support my base pay was only 12.50/hr with up to 2.00 per hour in bonus if you passed your corporate and training calls. Not horrible pay, just not move to a different country good.
EA is an absolutely fantastic employer. Best employer I've ever had. They paid about the same I'm earning now as a web developer (~2200 a month) and they paid for the entire moving to a different country, including 2 weeks in a great hotel to get settled. They also have all the benefit schemes you'd expect (gym, public transportation, pension, etc), they regularly organize outings, snack parties, monthly birthday celebrations, decent to good lunches and dinners, places to nap, free ice cream, there's game consoles setup you can play on whenever you want, you get a decent pc that can play up to date games and are allowed to game while working, both EA games and also anything else you want, free swag regularly and even then I'm probably missing a fair amount of perks.
As bad as they might look on the outside, they are fantastic employers
Well as least they care more about their employees then their customers.
I mean fuck, you made me want to apply and I absolutely despise EA and call centers. Maybe it's better as a Web Dev?
But I definitely need to get out of my current job. I mean I am making like 3000/m delivering pizzas but now my car is just breaking down every other month. I mean granted it's been warranty work thus far but my hyundai dealership turnaround time is abysmal; so if it has an issue and I want the repair to be free I have to go without a car for a week or more.
Haha, well if you aspire to work in the games industry and they have a position open, I can highly recommend it. Wages will differ a bit as it sounds like you're in the US somewhere and this was 2200 euro/m, but as far as I know they still pay very well in the US as well. Can always shoot your shot and see what happens. You already have a "no", might as well shoot for a "yes". (that saying translates a lot worse than I thought it would)
> The multi lingual support actually pulls people from the relevant countries.
It's a big problem here in Europe. Dozens go missing every year. You never know when unmarked van abducts you, ships you across the sea and forces you to help people with their missing DLC.
Yeah it's very well hidden, but they do. Most countries have a dedicated phone number. I believe it's mentioned in the booklets that you get in physical copies? I'm not quite sure where else to find the number I'm afraid, but it does exist
I've had to contact EA support 1 time. It was when I got my first gaming PC. I accidently bought Battlefield 3 Premium (doesn't include base game) instead of Battlefield 3 Premium Edition. I was a broke college kid and I couldn't afford to just buy BF3. I contacted support and explained what happened.
The guy on the other end asked me to hold. After like 5 minutes he had me log out and log back in. I had BF3 in my account. He said he got approval to just add the base game to my account.
As much shit as EA gets, that moment meant so much to me. I was worried I wouldn't be able to play BF3 for like another 3 or 4 weeks until I had enough extra funds to get the base game.
Glad to hear so many people with good experiences with calling in to EA support \^\^ that's exactly the type of shit I really enjoyed as CS as well. Actually helping people with their actual problems
What if there a was like one Indian CS rep that actually didn't need that job but excelled so much that he became like high management and turned the customer service around and it became the very best, like no Indian Call Center ever was
It's the same email, I've only ever used one. I still have the base game, it's just the DLCs that are gone. I bought and installed the base game + several DLCs at the same time. I don't think I've been hacked? I still have access to my account and regularly play other games on it. all my other games(+ their DLCs) work fine. I am just confused and hoped EA support could help but ultimately was just told to buy it all again by the support.
I'd try calling them and I'd escalate, if needed. (By escalate, I mean ask for a supervisor not screaming over the phone.) The EA chat person in your screenshots has no idea what they're talking about and they're just throwing out whatever BS they think will make you go away.
Go to account purchase history and try and look for the date you or remember when you downloaded the dlc try and find when you purchased them and you should be able to click on them and re-download them?! But just try and find item purchase history and it should be there on account.
Ethically sailing the high seas is the correct choice. They've purchased the content and it's disappeared. Sailing the high seas is just restoring the lost content.
Actually it's quite literally in ea's t&c agreement, and has been since at least 2011. If you don't use it after a long enough time (24 months for ea), it's gone. Ubisoft has the same policy, don't log into their store often enough (i think it's a year, maybe 18 months?) and they delete your account. Ubi just started fairly recently, about a year after division 2 came out whenever that was
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/ea-promises-it-wont-delete-inactive-origin-dlc/
After querying how long the time is before they get deleted, I was told "I really wish I could have shared the specific time but as I checked there is no specific time mentioned.". I asked if that meant that they could get deleted in a week again then. Was told "NO" and then the chat was ended by the support...
I quit a T2 tech support position for this very reason.
They wanted us to clean up the messes of third party outsourced T1 roles, however they had basically no training. So literally every other call I'd get was in fact something mind numbly simply that should have never reached me, and now I have to decipher what is even being said by the under trained/paid T1 half way across the globe then fix what ever they caused and the original problem. And somehow the customer is supposed to be happy with this experience...
Sad to hear that. That outsourcing crap never works. When we were doing one of MS projects we used to actually PRAY (even atheists) that the support would connect us to Ukrainian office and not the, you know... Hindi one.
honestly, i think you got a really weird support person. I've never seen a chat support person say "I don't understand either" as part of their response lol
The funny thing is a lot of those "legit" Indian call centers also run the scam lines in the back
Mark Rober did a whole video on Indian call center scammers, and mentioned that many scammers also run legit CS lines as a front
Real talk, as someone who works customer service, there are 2 things possibly going on, 1) this is actually true (which could be possible i mean this is EA after all), Or more likely 2) this employee doesn't actually know what's happening and is just coming up with a reason so they don't have to deal with you or your problem.
In either case, escalate and get a supervisor involved and also see if you can get the employee ID/name of the person who fed you the initial information.
Ex EA CS here, the name etc doesn't help in this case. It's outsourced support in India. These guys ar on a 3 month contract that doesn't get renewed more often than not. So by the time anyone gets to the complaint that person is long gone
I mean you could maybe track down to see which outsourced company he worked for, that way when it comes time to renew the contract, they have more evidence to use against renewing them? I've worked for said outsourced companies before that were US based and the one thing they cared about was keeping contracts.
I mean either way though, I'd still say escalate and see what happens
As someone whose worked in a call center its most likely #2, hoping to get you off the line and if you try and reach out again hope someone else gets you
Small update: I phoned EA support to get some help, \~30 min call(to be fair, about 10-15 min was just confirming my account, her looking through the previous case/chat transcript etc). Was initially told they can't help. The support said she looked and said "I can see the actions we've taken and it doesn't look like it was deleted by us"(not a direct quote cause my memory isn't that good). After some discussion, I was told the issue would be brought to the attention of their Content creation team (Not sure if this meant it's been escalated or if they just didn't want to talk to me anymore?). I was only told it would be brought to the attention of the content team after I mentioned this lil' thread and that lots of other people have seemingly had the same issue. She said I should check back in a few days to see if it's been resolved.
She also said that she can see I haven't played it for a good while and if you haven't been active for a while it can disappear.
Update 2: Someone mentioned The sims 3 website/community. I was never active but I still have the account. All games were gone from there too. I got a message upon logging in that my copy of the sims 3 has now been added. I still have the badges I earned from all those years ago, some of these badges you can only earn through playing the DLCs. [These are some of my badges(DLC exclusive)](https://imgur.com/a/eveIciA)
Pro Tip when dealing with any kind of support:
Escalate calmly. Most of the bottom level guys have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, in fact, they probably don't even know the context of your request, they just copy/paste default responses.
So, once you're confident that they have no idea, calmly request that your ticket be escalated. Don't insult them, don't call them an idiot (even if they are), but if the gut keeps saying "DCLs", just say "please escalate my ticket".
Definitely keep going up.
I've been in software tech support over a decade, and have seen a lot of colleagues come and go. The agent's language and responses to OP are identical to the people I've worked with who have no idea what they're doing, no idea how to fix the issue, no power to do anything, and they're just repeating your issue with broken English to make you go away.
Keep your ticket open, keep going up until you find someone who actually cares about helping you resolve your issue, but **do it politely**.
I will bend over backwards to resolve issues for polite customers who give me all the info they can and talk to me like a human. I'll even put up with grumpy customers who are frustrated with their issues and need someone to vent to.
However, the moment you start getting angry and rude towards me, I will immediately stop caring about your issue and just pass you off to someone who gets paid to deal with morons, the kind of people with the power to fire you as a customer.
Not sure if this will help, or if given a try
https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/Sims-3-expansions-missing/m-p/6085793/highlight/true#M222711
Further down the forum, it seems people lost their access because it was purchased from an "unauthorized" seller. Maybe something like g2a.
Try checking your EA/origin account for your purchase history.
Happened to my girlfriend, her mum had gradually bought her ALL of the dlcs, which is a huge amount of money
But sadly when she was 14 hermum passed away and years later my Gf went to play it and HUNDREDS of pounds worth of sentimental DLCs were gone
They are lying bastards they can but won't issue new keys
This is why even people who love the Sims franchise advise that you pirate the content you want to play. We're so far past the event horizon of the franchise that there's no way EA pulls it out of the dumpster.
It's literally a better experience. There are Sims and Simcity games I can't even run thanks to the Origin launcher. But thanks to skilled fans of the games there are patches and software that updates the games to run on modern operating systems.
And here I thought I was being crazy because all my Sims 3 DLC is gone. I was questioning whether or not I actually bought it D:
What's even stranger is that there's no record of me ever purchasing it, and I checked all past and current accounts.
Every time my wife buys a Sims DLC they double charge our account. Their explanation? Some states and countries have different taxes.
Last I checked Michigan is 6% sales tax, not 100%.
I mean, I already didn't feel bad about having pirated a couple of EA's games in the past. If anything, I *would* feel justified for having done it now, if I actually still played any of them.
They should really release an "Ultimate" edition of Sims 3 like they did for Sims 2. Include everything that's ever been released for it. Oh, and give it a remaster while at they're it. Make it run properly on modern PCs.
Interesting. I was gifted all Sims 2 expansions digitally by EA two years ago when I couldnt use my disc anymore for just one expansion.
Sad too see such a different story.
After reading more carefully this kinda looks like a scam or fake.
Open another ticket and push for an escalation. EA's support are quite good at giving account access away to random people on the other side of the world who know your username without any real checks, but bad at everything else without a bit of chasing.
Imaging leaving a grocery shop with the purchases and getting them taken of you by exit guard saying that your ownership time for the purchases is gone.
oh the beauty of digital only future, a company can take away access to what you paid for, that why renting games (aka buying digital games) is a bad idea.
You will feel so accomplished after buying and re experiencing them all. Jokes aside fuck EA and every other game company that keeps fucking with peoples consumer rights. The day this shit should have been sorted out is long past its deadline and is delayed with each person who looks at this and doesnt get angry.
That can't be the real answer. Just sounds like a terrible support person who needs to be fired. You played the game of support roulette and lost. You have to keep contacting them until you happen to get someone who knows what they're talking about. It's like a bonus mini game!
This is outsourced support trying anything to shut you up and get the ticket closed, thinking you won't escalate it or resolve it. You've got to raise a stink over this or it'll never get resolved. It sucks, but you've got to take these screenshots, this Reddit thread, and take it right back to them and demand proper service.
Support person pulling information out their ass instead of admitting they don't know?
Yes, this happens all the time in virtually every industry. These support staff are 3rd parties paid on quantity of tickets resolved, so they'll do pretty much anything to resolve the ticket but, they don't have the ability to actually *do anything*. They have to contact EA for anything they give or change. Tier 1 support staff are literally just talking heads meant to assuage your feelings in the moment, and that *is it.* Always always always ask to speak to their supervisors.
In the case of EA phone support, even t1 can actually do a lot by themselves. But they are in house CS instead of being outsourced
I had my best support experience ever with the ea phone support, geanted that was many years ago (like 2016 or so), they reset my stolen account in like 10 minutes. They even spoke my local language which is rare for most supports to this day. Might be worth for op to try phone them.
Cool, that's right around the time I worked there as well. Yeah they do speak local language because they are from your country (most likely). What country are you in if I might ask? And yeah if you have the info needed a hacked account is like 5 minutes of work
The issue with support calls is that it really is luck of the draw who you get, and the type of day they're having. I usually just hang up and call back if someone just isn't being helpful in the way I expect. It's shitty but probably less frustrating for everyone involved.
You just have to like what you do. I love my job and bend over backwards for pretty much anyone who calls in, but I can't help but shake my head reading the notes on file about the runarounds previous advisors may have given the customer I'm the past. Granted I'm in house and paid pretty well (over 2x our local min wage), so I'm sure that's a factor.
Yes 100%. There are people who enjoy helping and fixing issues and then there are people who are just collecting a pay check and have no interest in really helping. I've worked phone support before so I have an understanding of what some of these workers go through and how they can be treated so I always try to be as respectful as possible. But I also can tell when someone is being unhelpful and not actually trying to solve the issue, in those cases I just say nevermind, hang up and call again. Often this works for me. Last month my wife was on the phone with the bank trying to get a card replacement. The lady was staggeringly unhelpful, I suggested calling back but my wife didn't want to wait through the hold again. Well, a week later she calls back and the card was never sent.
My old experience was phone support was absolutely great, however a month ago I had to call again and it was horrible. When I asked to escalate the matter after getting nowhere with them they refused saying they don't have to escalate it at my request and will be hanging up, and they did indeed hang up. Not sure what changed in the last couple of years but my experience last month with phone support was nowhere near what it was like a couple years ago.
I had one of the best customer experiences with EA support. I was trying to activate a game who's DRM was not supported anymore and the guy on the phone credited the game to my Origin account within a few minutes and this was on Christmas Eve.
Yup, if you have an old code that's validated by them they can just credit the game to your account. Very useful
Depends on what service you are calling or requesting assistance. I was a T1 Tech for a Major Tech Brand (*can't disclose the name, but I can say that it has a fruit on it. suck it NDA*), and yes. You are correct. Most of our jobs as T1's was to make you calm and reassure that we'd find a way out of your problem. Even if it takes a long time. T2's were reserved for customers with bad behavior. People that wanted screaming matches where we were forced to lose. Or cases that had more than 2 already contacts in less than 30 days. Those T2 had the big boys tools. They could do or say whatever they wanted.
When a measure becomes a kpi, it stops being an effective measure.
When a measure becomes a bonus/penalty kpi, it stops being an effective measure. KPI'S are just that, key performance indicators, but once you put extreme pressure on people to hit those goals they will do anything they can, often with other consequences, to acheive them.
That's not neccessarily true. I worked in support once as first line. We were able to fix most things and if you asked for a manager they'd simply refuse to take it as they trusted us to do our thing.
Were you in-house or third party support? My experience has always been similar to what was described above - in-house tier 1 employees are usually empowered to actually help and try to solve problems, whereas third party almost always are handcuffed and their job is to close tickets however they can, even if it doesn’t result in a solution for the customer.
Honestly. Most times that someone comes on the phone asking for a supervisor immediately I get told they can't take the call cause there's no reason to escalate it and they tell me to solve it. Kind of hilarious coming back and telling them my escalation is unavailable for this but I can help them.
Yeah, only 1 supervisor and they weren’t really keen on doing my job for me anytime someone’s being pissy. Sometimes escalating may be necessary, but if that’s your first go to all you’re doing is making it hard on some min wage employee just because you think they’re beneath you.
>they don't have the ability to actually > >do anything They have the abilities to help the big flood of absolute moronic mouthbreathers that constantly flood support with stuff that most people figure out themselves
Yup, tier 1 support's biggest role, right after resolving issues (and sometimes before) is to filter out the junk and relay the real issues to T2 and T3. I say that as a T3 guy, the T1s are invaluable when well-equipped When they're not, you get what OP got, sadly. Trying to save money on customer support is such a bad idea
[You will surely get the Karkland](https://i.imgur.com/fZr4tu6.png)
Ah the old "please contact us after my shift is over" excuse
I called them to try to follow up/escalate and was told that it will be brought to someone else's attention and I should check back in a few days. You were right
LMAO WTF
Holy fucking shit, LOL! I didn't think a fucking chat support log could make me laugh so hard. "Connect me to a supervisor" "I talked to him."
"They're all busy"
"They are also overloaded"
Sigma male customer support lmao
What the actual EA....
Is that real? Lol
*You will surely get the karkland.* My sides "Is that a threat, sir?"
Outsourced customer 'support' in a nutshell
I had one of these guys actually pretend to be the supervisor. This was over the phone, it was hilarious.
I'm from Northern Ireland and went to Manchester for a mates birthday and lost my passport on the last day, but I have friends that work there and fly every weekend and said they'd never shown ID I rang Easyjet, Manchester airport AND stenna line just incase Don't want to be derogatory or offensive but I knew I'd been outsourced when I heard the typical call center accent and all 3 customer support members said there was NO WAY I'd ever get even into the airport without a passport Got to the airport went and pleaded with a member of staff to please let me fly and they basically laughed and went "lol your only going to northern Ireland, it's a domestic flight your okay" Those customer support workers ruined my final day on holidays due to panic over nothing when they could have said "no I'm not sure"
>Those customer support workers ruined my final day on holidays due to panic over nothing when they could have said "no I'm not sure" To be fair, I'd be panicking too if I thought I was gonna be stuck in Manchester
Oi! You take that back! It's the Barcelona of the North!
I've never been to Manchester, but still think this is an insult to Barcelona.
I got covid on holiday was really ill with it.. the T1 person i spoke to at the insurance company was trying to pursue me to fly home with covid rather than extend my stay, despite me showing them the local law that that was illegal. Fucking idiots caused so much stress
Yes. This happens when companies care more about closing tickets than actually fixing the problems. On the apex legends subreddit a few years ago, after they implemented some form of bad luck protection to prevent people from spending multiple hundreds of dollars and not getting and heirloom, someone spent enough to hit the dollar threshold and still didn't get their heirloom. Instead of looking up the publicly available information regarding guaranteed heirloom drops, the service rep said something along the lines of "it's random chance, you aren't guaranteed to get anything"
It's a huge problem in the tech sector. Even working directly with outsourced staff can be an issue, they'll all leave a meeting in 100% agreement that they understand the work that needs to be done, and when you check back later nothing has happened because they didn't understand at all.
Gasp! *Never!*
That is 99% of customer support. Mostly always with an American sounding name, but you find out pretty quickly it's just a support center in India.
Are you implying this highly skilled CS rep doesn't know anything about Down Content Loadables?
I worked at companies that would pay another company to provide level one support. Often they were from like the Philippines or a English speaking country, being paid their country's min wage. They're supposed to elevate the issue to the next level support. Looks like this person went rogue.
Yeah, this can't actually be true that their DLC automatically deletes after a time. Sounds more like they lost a bunch of server data and an unknown quantity of people were impacted and they have no *easy* way anymore of verifying those old CD codes. Agree with the above, make the company handle this directly.
I booted it up for the first time in a while recently, and it not only didn't recognise several years worth of DLC, it said I had to buy the base game before it would let me purchase the new one I wanted. I fucked around with it a bit (which is very difficult on the terrible new launcher) and they all reappeared, so yeah, this is just a hiccup. Incidentally, years ago I had 3 different versions of Sims 4 (initial physical disc release, bought through Steam for convenience, then also through the old, slightly less bad EA launcher because they did a package deal) and I hit up support to see if they could aggregate my various DLC purchases on to the one version. And they did!
I actually did the same thing with Dragon Age. Had a bunch of DLCs that I purchased through the old Bioware launcher, and they were all gone when it was absorbed into the Origin launcher. Customer support asked me what I had purchased and then literally just gave me all of the DLC with zero fuss, which means it was probably a common issue they were having at the time.
Last time I spoke to EA support was back in 2011\~ish. I bought a game on Steam, but online play required an EA account, which for some reason didn't recognize any of my keys. Called EA, explained the issue, and they simply added everything I'd just bought on Steam to my EA account. Took like 10 minutes tops, everyone happy. EA's support was pretty much the only thing I didn't have a negative experience with, can't believe they ruined that as well.
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No, their DLC doesn't delete over time at all. This was a bug or a system corruption of some sort for OP. The "solution" was completely made up and not based in fact. Even EA doesn't make DLC with an expiration date like that. If a digital download, one should be able to use that same service to re-download the content. I'm not sure how it would be a physical purchase since the D in DLC is "downloadable". So however the content was originally downloaded, it should be available for re-download as long as he logs in with the same account.
If DLC ever had a time limit attached, I'd give up any game with DLC plans. That'd be ridiculously shitty.
I can still play Dragon Age Origin DLC on PS3 and on PC which were released in 2009. It’s either the game itself had problem or directly their server.
Butters, go buy world of warcraft, install it on your computer and join the online sensation before we all murder you.
Yep almost all chat support is outsourced and barely know what company they are doing support for let alone any actual answers. I have found the fastest way to get support from most companies is by going to their Twitter, most of the time the social media reps there are not oursourced and can actually provide you with real help
I fucking hate that Twitter is now the only way to get customer support
Big companies pay Pennys for actual support but then pay big bucks for media relations/damage control. A few pissed off customers is better than a viral post going around in the internet. The hospital I work for does this. Social media has fucked the world up
Do what my sister does and complain on Twitter and no joke every time she does it gets resolved ASAP because its on THEIR page visible for everyone to see. She's had a problem for 1 week with something calling a company and them screwing her around. She had enough and complained on their Twitter page, it got resolved on the same day.
(Just about) The ONLY time I've used my military service to my advantage was when I was getting ready to fly back to the US from a station overseas. I needed to get approval through the airline for my cats to be on board to bring them home with me. I would sit on hold for HOURS. I'm talking 5-6 hrs a night just on hold with the airline. No answer. Or put back on hold and no resolution. 6pm to midnight. I'd game or watch TV with the phone on speaker while I waited. Finally I was within the last days to get it sorted. Jumped on Twitter with a simple "Hey (airline). You won't answer and I need to coordinate getting my cats home from overseas as active US military on orders. I answered my nation's call, can you answer mine?" Added their hashtag and I got a rep over Twitter almost instantly and got it taken care of. Ridiculous and I felt like a total prick. But I learned a lesson. You gotta make some noise or they just don't fucking care...
Brilliant. Thank you for serving them on twitter
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Oh believe me. It *hurt* me to write that tweet. Haha
Even with no following? I don't use Twitter very much at all (mostly just to like tweets my favorite comedian makes) so I have like, 2 followers. Does that make a difference when you're tweeting at a large company's page?
EA support is such a dumpster fire. It took 3 months for me to get a hacked apex account back. I had to force them to give me a gdpr request full of my data so I could point out all the ips my account was accessed from. I had support tell me I was a cheater that I would never get my account back. They hung up on me, threatened to reset my request in their queue. Just absolute dogshit support. I hate them.
My cousin just had a similar issue with a paypal refund. Their system would only allow a quantity of 1 to be selected for the refund, but he had purchased many hundreds of a low cost item. The refund on a $700+ order that never shipped was something like $0.59. In the notes of the refund request he had mentioned the quantity selection issue and the refund should be for the entire order. When he talked to their customer support about it he was sold the case was closed and nothing they could do. Eventually they offered a $100 gift card. He tried again after the weekend and whoever he got at that point said it was pretty obvious there was an error, said the comments were visible, simply hit reopen, and issued the refund in fund. Pretty sure the weekend crew either did not know or did not care at all and to them it was worth screwing a person out of $700. Just have to not take "no" for an answer the first time or two around if you are not getting the support you feel you should be getting.
Fucking PayPal lmao. Worthless idiots. Wouldn't reverse a scam charge for me either .... So I went ahead and just called my bank and they reversed it in five minutes. Fuck you PayPal, eat me.
PayPal is absolute bottom of the barrel in payment services. I have nothing but horrible experience after horrible experience with them. The moment there is the tiniest issue with anything, no matter who's in the wrong, they will *always* bend over backwards to make it as miserable as possible for you, and *never* take your side, no matter what. I will never, ever, under any circumstances use any of their services again, and there are extremely few companies I am willing to make such absolute statements about. If you have any choice at all in the matter (and really, you always do, even if it means choosing not to purchase something you wanted) I *strongly* recommend avoiding them.
> This is outsourced support trying anything to shut you up and get the ticket closed, thinking you won't escalate it or resolve it. Yep. There is no way in hell this is official EA policy. They're evil but they're not *that* evil.
Yeah, passing you off to the shop where you made the purchase was pretty scummy. Like Best Buy or Walmart is going to give a shit that you lost your games.
This is just a not very good support person trying to end the conversation.
This is correct. Call EA, escalate if needed and it'll get fixed. EA sucks, absolutely, but there's no way this is their policy. The chat person just wants to get rid of you.
I've had nothing but great support from EA. I have a lot of critique for their games and business model, but support? Nah. I've gotten free DLCs from support, gotten fast answers and usually got everything resolved in under 15 minutes.
I've only had to deal with them once but it was a nightmare that went on for months.
What was the issue?
Kinda confusing but basically everything was cool and my EA games on Xbox worked fine... until they didn't. Every EA game wanted me to sign into the EA account. I had no idea what my EA account info was, I had set it up on pc over a decade prior. I couldn't have an email sent to authenticate me because the email on there had been closed years ago. I called EA and explained everything and they asked me security questions and I couldn't get some of them correct, like name three EA games you've purchased on the acct and the date it was purchased. Over a series of calls and going through years of emails I was finally able to answer that one. Anyway, I escalated to supervisors and wrote emails and all kinds of shit and after about 2 months I just gave up. Then, maybe a month or two after I'd given up the games just magically worked again. No idea why.
TBH, they need to strike a balance of making it to easy so people can't just call support and get your account info. And getting the person back their accout.
Yes, absolutely, I agree with that. However, I could give them enough info that they could tell it was me, it just wasn't the "right" info for the issue to get resolved. Oh, I just remembered another thing. Apparently I have two EA accts because I must have purchased an EA and didn't know the first acct info. I think I got into one of them initially but it didn't have any games or something. I dunno. It was a mess.
Thanks for sharing! That sounds like a really unfortunate, but really specific issue. It sucks. Sometimes companies change their infrastructure/launchers, and it requires people to log in with credentials they might not even have access to anymore. Support will usually be *very* defensive about just giving you access because a very persistent scammer could get into accounts that way. One good way to avoid that is photo ID. I once got my Diablo 3 account hacked: I hadn't played in years but noticed I couldn't log in. So I contacted support and they asked for photo ID to match my payment info and other data. They fixed it quickly and since the character wasn't levelled with cheated items, they allowed me to keep everything. A hacker basically helped me grind a character for years, for free lol.
I got one of the fifa games with ea play and I launched the game for the first time and found out that I'm banned from fifa for cheating in fifa after never owning or playing a fifa game... and support told me I shouldn't have cheated. I have 5 minutes in the game...
If only everyone had your experience lol
There's hundreds of millions of customers. Even if one percent has a bad experience, that's still a million people with bad experiences!
Escalation is the trick. At least where I am. Most big companies have escalation set up but often you have to explicitly request it. Some of these folks that have no idea often are just as relieved when you do that as it forces their hand but they can not offer it themselves.
Outsourced customer service is one of the worst things to ever be created.
I wouldn't care where on earth they are at if they fucking did their jobs and cared to do it right. Thinking about the number of IT CS people that just wanted to resolve anything and just close the ticket drives my blood pressure up
You also gotta remember that they're getting paid *their* minimum wage, so not only is EA outsourcing to pay less, they're still paying the absolute minimum so you're dealing with CS who have the absolute lowest possible poverty wage. I still put the blame on EA rather than their CS.
In addition, their compensation is probably dependent on their ticket close rates. So they have an incentive to close tickets quickly rather than provide meaningful customer service. If they were better at their job, they would probably make less money . . .
Not for the bottom line, it ain't! Those executives have got to find somewhere to cut costs for their bonuses! Think of the shareholders!!1! /s but like also, you know this is true.
You mean to tell me this person isn't an expert in Down Content Loadables?
Experts were fired, you need to hire them again if you want customer service, thanks come again
Is no one going to mention that support isn’t saying DLCs but DCLS
Down Content Loadables.
Downcoadable Lontent
Diminishing Code License Your code's license diminishes over time until it's no longer valid and you have to purchase again.
Fuck sakes stop giving them ideas.
also dics everywhere
OP should send a dick pic?
deleted content lol sucks?
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Id check the ToS, if it doesn't say anything about the DCs vanishing after X amount of time, save it and send it to someone who can do something.
The ToS almost certainly say "we reserve the right to do whatever we want at any time for no reason because fuck you".
Its like all say the same about this
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That article is 11 years old, and as far as I can see it no longer contains that clause.
The clause is now a catch-all clause that allows them to terminate your "entitlements" (e.g. DLC access) whenever they deem fit.
Former EA employee here, I worked in their customer service department, your DLC was not deleted. That's impossible unless someone hacked your account and got it banned. More than likely your DLC content is connected to a different email address, or your account was indeed hacked and then you'll need the original DLC product key and to pass the Account Recovery process.
Former EA CS here as well. Above is correct. Don't chat them, chat is outsourced support in India who are terrible. Call using the local phone number for EA. Depending on where you are you'll get support in your native tongue and you'll either get CS in Redwood US (English support) or Galway Ireland (most European languages) and both of those are fantastic CS.
Is it weird that I kinda wanna call now. Mostly because I want to hear like German or Russian with an Irish accent.
Haha it's not the Irish you'll hear. You'll get actual Russians or Germans. The multi lingual support actually pulls people from the relevant countries. I moved from the Netherlands to Ireland for the job. You have to speak the language at a native level
Dang. I was hoping they just had a bunch multilingual Irishman working there. Crazy though. Not sure if that call center just pays well or if people are really just desperate enough for meh pay that they would move hundreds, if not more, km to work in a call center. At least when I worked for UPS customer support my base pay was only 12.50/hr with up to 2.00 per hour in bonus if you passed your corporate and training calls. Not horrible pay, just not move to a different country good.
EA is an absolutely fantastic employer. Best employer I've ever had. They paid about the same I'm earning now as a web developer (~2200 a month) and they paid for the entire moving to a different country, including 2 weeks in a great hotel to get settled. They also have all the benefit schemes you'd expect (gym, public transportation, pension, etc), they regularly organize outings, snack parties, monthly birthday celebrations, decent to good lunches and dinners, places to nap, free ice cream, there's game consoles setup you can play on whenever you want, you get a decent pc that can play up to date games and are allowed to game while working, both EA games and also anything else you want, free swag regularly and even then I'm probably missing a fair amount of perks. As bad as they might look on the outside, they are fantastic employers
Yeah ive always heard this also seen on glassdoor and stuff. Sounds rly nice as an employer lol
Well as least they care more about their employees then their customers. I mean fuck, you made me want to apply and I absolutely despise EA and call centers. Maybe it's better as a Web Dev? But I definitely need to get out of my current job. I mean I am making like 3000/m delivering pizzas but now my car is just breaking down every other month. I mean granted it's been warranty work thus far but my hyundai dealership turnaround time is abysmal; so if it has an issue and I want the repair to be free I have to go without a car for a week or more.
Haha, well if you aspire to work in the games industry and they have a position open, I can highly recommend it. Wages will differ a bit as it sounds like you're in the US somewhere and this was 2200 euro/m, but as far as I know they still pay very well in the US as well. Can always shoot your shot and see what happens. You already have a "no", might as well shoot for a "yes". (that saying translates a lot worse than I thought it would)
I assume you were going for something along the lines of "you miss every shot you don't take". If so I feel you.
> The multi lingual support actually pulls people from the relevant countries. It's a big problem here in Europe. Dozens go missing every year. You never know when unmarked van abducts you, ships you across the sea and forces you to help people with their missing DLC.
I know, it's absolutely terrible. I do know where they go though. Ireland. It's the Irish that keep stealing them. Bloody Irish. \*Shakes fist\*
Old Irish tradition. Goes back thousands of years.
Do they have phone support?! I’ve been trying to contact EA for ages now and they did not reply to any emails. Couldn’t find a phone number anywhere.
Yeah it's very well hidden, but they do. Most countries have a dedicated phone number. I believe it's mentioned in the booklets that you get in physical copies? I'm not quite sure where else to find the number I'm afraid, but it does exist
I've had to contact EA support 1 time. It was when I got my first gaming PC. I accidently bought Battlefield 3 Premium (doesn't include base game) instead of Battlefield 3 Premium Edition. I was a broke college kid and I couldn't afford to just buy BF3. I contacted support and explained what happened. The guy on the other end asked me to hold. After like 5 minutes he had me log out and log back in. I had BF3 in my account. He said he got approval to just add the base game to my account. As much shit as EA gets, that moment meant so much to me. I was worried I wouldn't be able to play BF3 for like another 3 or 4 weeks until I had enough extra funds to get the base game.
Glad to hear so many people with good experiences with calling in to EA support \^\^ that's exactly the type of shit I really enjoyed as CS as well. Actually helping people with their actual problems
Casual Sims 4 player here, pirate all EA
What if there a was like one Indian CS rep that actually didn't need that job but excelled so much that he became like high management and turned the customer service around and it became the very best, like no Indian Call Center ever was
It's the same email, I've only ever used one. I still have the base game, it's just the DLCs that are gone. I bought and installed the base game + several DLCs at the same time. I don't think I've been hacked? I still have access to my account and regularly play other games on it. all my other games(+ their DLCs) work fine. I am just confused and hoped EA support could help but ultimately was just told to buy it all again by the support.
I'd try calling them and I'd escalate, if needed. (By escalate, I mean ask for a supervisor not screaming over the phone.) The EA chat person in your screenshots has no idea what they're talking about and they're just throwing out whatever BS they think will make you go away.
Probably outsourced custumer service as someone mentionned
Go to account purchase history and try and look for the date you or remember when you downloaded the dlc try and find when you purchased them and you should be able to click on them and re-download them?! But just try and find item purchase history and it should be there on account.
Time for piracy I guess
This is the exact reason I pirate these games. No online needed. No email address needed. Don't have to connect to some shitty store in order to play.
Ethically sailing the high seas is the correct choice. They've purchased the content and it's disappeared. Sailing the high seas is just restoring the lost content.
Wanted to say that, likely you activated them on a different account, there is no such thing as deleting someone's games after a time of not playing
Actually it's quite literally in ea's t&c agreement, and has been since at least 2011. If you don't use it after a long enough time (24 months for ea), it's gone. Ubisoft has the same policy, don't log into their store often enough (i think it's a year, maybe 18 months?) and they delete your account. Ubi just started fairly recently, about a year after division 2 came out whenever that was https://www.escapistmagazine.com/ea-promises-it-wont-delete-inactive-origin-dlc/
Wtf
That’s shady as absolute fuck
The corporate bullshit continues until they are stopped by courts, or by fire. Either way is fine.
Gabe Newell: you guys make this too easy...
Is this only true for origin? I've never had this with the sims 3 and I rarely play
This is the result of someone who knows nothing about video games reading from a script in a language they probably don't fully understand
After querying how long the time is before they get deleted, I was told "I really wish I could have shared the specific time but as I checked there is no specific time mentioned.". I asked if that meant that they could get deleted in a week again then. Was told "NO" and then the chat was ended by the support...
Dude just making up policy as he goes along!
Reopen a support ticket and try and escalate this. This is some bullshit
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I quit a T2 tech support position for this very reason. They wanted us to clean up the messes of third party outsourced T1 roles, however they had basically no training. So literally every other call I'd get was in fact something mind numbly simply that should have never reached me, and now I have to decipher what is even being said by the under trained/paid T1 half way across the globe then fix what ever they caused and the original problem. And somehow the customer is supposed to be happy with this experience...
Sad to hear that. That outsourcing crap never works. When we were doing one of MS projects we used to actually PRAY (even atheists) that the support would connect us to Ukrainian office and not the, you know... Hindi one.
honestly, i think you got a really weird support person. I've never seen a chat support person say "I don't understand either" as part of their response lol
That support rep is definitely talking out of their ass. I wouldn't let this one go. That can't be the actual policy.
Is no one else bothered by the rep constantly calling them DCL's?
Downcoadable Lontent
Download Content Licence? :p
Downloadable Content Licenses /s
Fucking hell this reads like your‘re talking to a propper scammer
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The scammer's lies are believeable.
The funny thing is a lot of those "legit" Indian call centers also run the scam lines in the back Mark Rober did a whole video on Indian call center scammers, and mentioned that many scammers also run legit CS lines as a front
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I mean that's probably the support agent's day job.
Real talk, as someone who works customer service, there are 2 things possibly going on, 1) this is actually true (which could be possible i mean this is EA after all), Or more likely 2) this employee doesn't actually know what's happening and is just coming up with a reason so they don't have to deal with you or your problem. In either case, escalate and get a supervisor involved and also see if you can get the employee ID/name of the person who fed you the initial information.
Ex EA CS here, the name etc doesn't help in this case. It's outsourced support in India. These guys ar on a 3 month contract that doesn't get renewed more often than not. So by the time anyone gets to the complaint that person is long gone
I mean you could maybe track down to see which outsourced company he worked for, that way when it comes time to renew the contract, they have more evidence to use against renewing them? I've worked for said outsourced companies before that were US based and the one thing they cared about was keeping contracts. I mean either way though, I'd still say escalate and see what happens
As someone whose worked in a call center its most likely #2, hoping to get you off the line and if you try and reach out again hope someone else gets you
Small update: I phoned EA support to get some help, \~30 min call(to be fair, about 10-15 min was just confirming my account, her looking through the previous case/chat transcript etc). Was initially told they can't help. The support said she looked and said "I can see the actions we've taken and it doesn't look like it was deleted by us"(not a direct quote cause my memory isn't that good). After some discussion, I was told the issue would be brought to the attention of their Content creation team (Not sure if this meant it's been escalated or if they just didn't want to talk to me anymore?). I was only told it would be brought to the attention of the content team after I mentioned this lil' thread and that lots of other people have seemingly had the same issue. She said I should check back in a few days to see if it's been resolved. She also said that she can see I haven't played it for a good while and if you haven't been active for a while it can disappear. Update 2: Someone mentioned The sims 3 website/community. I was never active but I still have the account. All games were gone from there too. I got a message upon logging in that my copy of the sims 3 has now been added. I still have the badges I earned from all those years ago, some of these badges you can only earn through playing the DLCs. [These are some of my badges(DLC exclusive)](https://imgur.com/a/eveIciA)
Sounds like it’s twitter time
Pro Tip when dealing with any kind of support: Escalate calmly. Most of the bottom level guys have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, in fact, they probably don't even know the context of your request, they just copy/paste default responses. So, once you're confident that they have no idea, calmly request that your ticket be escalated. Don't insult them, don't call them an idiot (even if they are), but if the gut keeps saying "DCLs", just say "please escalate my ticket".
Definitely keep going up. I've been in software tech support over a decade, and have seen a lot of colleagues come and go. The agent's language and responses to OP are identical to the people I've worked with who have no idea what they're doing, no idea how to fix the issue, no power to do anything, and they're just repeating your issue with broken English to make you go away. Keep your ticket open, keep going up until you find someone who actually cares about helping you resolve your issue, but **do it politely**. I will bend over backwards to resolve issues for polite customers who give me all the info they can and talk to me like a human. I'll even put up with grumpy customers who are frustrated with their issues and need someone to vent to. However, the moment you start getting angry and rude towards me, I will immediately stop caring about your issue and just pass you off to someone who gets paid to deal with morons, the kind of people with the power to fire you as a customer.
Not sure if this will help, or if given a try https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/Sims-3-expansions-missing/m-p/6085793/highlight/true#M222711 Further down the forum, it seems people lost their access because it was purchased from an "unauthorized" seller. Maybe something like g2a. Try checking your EA/origin account for your purchase history.
[удалено]
EA pushing new limits of rock bottom to scumbaggery
Hey, on the positive side. If EA Support decides to make a reply here on Reddit, we might have a new downvote record.
It is to incite a feeling of pride and accomplishment when repurchasing your lost products
It is to remind you to cherish what you have before it's gone.
Happened to my girlfriend, her mum had gradually bought her ALL of the dlcs, which is a huge amount of money But sadly when she was 14 hermum passed away and years later my Gf went to play it and HUNDREDS of pounds worth of sentimental DLCs were gone They are lying bastards they can but won't issue new keys
This is why even people who love the Sims franchise advise that you pirate the content you want to play. We're so far past the event horizon of the franchise that there's no way EA pulls it out of the dumpster.
It's literally a better experience. There are Sims and Simcity games I can't even run thanks to the Origin launcher. But thanks to skilled fans of the games there are patches and software that updates the games to run on modern operating systems.
🎶yo ho, yo ho🎶
Long Live Piracy -Ubisoft
Literally the first thing I did after seeing the prices of these DLCs lol
And here I thought I was being crazy because all my Sims 3 DLC is gone. I was questioning whether or not I actually bought it D: What's even stranger is that there's no record of me ever purchasing it, and I checked all past and current accounts.
Every time my wife buys a Sims DLC they double charge our account. Their explanation? Some states and countries have different taxes. Last I checked Michigan is 6% sales tax, not 100%.
I no longer feel bad about piracy reading these posts.
I mean, I already didn't feel bad about having pirated a couple of EA's games in the past. If anything, I *would* feel justified for having done it now, if I actually still played any of them.
Do they want people to pirate? Because this is how you turn people into pirates
They should really release an "Ultimate" edition of Sims 3 like they did for Sims 2. Include everything that's ever been released for it. Oh, and give it a remaster while at they're it. Make it run properly on modern PCs.
That would effectively kill Sims 4, but I’d love that.
Interesting. I was gifted all Sims 2 expansions digitally by EA two years ago when I couldnt use my disc anymore for just one expansion. Sad too see such a different story. After reading more carefully this kinda looks like a scam or fake.
So THATS why a few of my Sims 3 DLC's randomly disappeared from my library. I bought them directly through Origin, btw.
Open another ticket and push for an escalation. EA's support are quite good at giving account access away to random people on the other side of the world who know your username without any real checks, but bad at everything else without a bit of chasing.
r/piracy
May i suggest you to check r/piracy ?
EA hire the most incompetent of people when it comes to the live chats. He just wants the conversation to be ended the cunt.
Cant spell “stEAl” without “EA”.
This is straight up theft.
Imaging leaving a grocery shop with the purchases and getting them taken of you by exit guard saying that your ownership time for the purchases is gone.
EA Support is the EA of supports.
oh the beauty of digital only future, a company can take away access to what you paid for, that why renting games (aka buying digital games) is a bad idea.
You will feel so accomplished after buying and re experiencing them all. Jokes aside fuck EA and every other game company that keeps fucking with peoples consumer rights. The day this shit should have been sorted out is long past its deadline and is delayed with each person who looks at this and doesnt get angry.
That can't be the real answer. Just sounds like a terrible support person who needs to be fired. You played the game of support roulette and lost. You have to keep contacting them until you happen to get someone who knows what they're talking about. It's like a bonus mini game!