posted
So after freshly installing Windows 7 (which, may I say was both quick and easy) I tried to re-download Dragon Age from Direct2Drive. I'd bought it and tried it out some weeks ago, but foreseeing the necessary reformatting, I didn't invest too much time in it.
Downloading the game was...tricky. Immediately after beginning the download in D2D's Download Manager, I would receive an error message that said "could not initialize file". I made sure the firewall was allowing access to the manager, but it still didn't work. So I opened a support ticket. Here's what the response was:
quote:Hi Matt,
Thank you for contacting us! I'm sorry to hear that you are having some trouble with your game.
Since this game is a EA game you can try downloading your game through the EA download manager. You can use the following link to the EA download manager:http://eastore.ea.com/store/ea/html/pbPage.welcome?resid=OWdtbAoBAkgAAG6uocoAAABC&rests=1260296163126
If you have any more questions please let me know.
Regards,
[Dude's name here] Customer Support Specialist Digital Distribution – Customer Service
Aside from the fact that this "solution" did not work, I do not consider it to be good customer support to basically tell your clients "Sorry our service isn't working. Here, try our competitor." Well, it could be good customer service if, after some time spent attempting various fixes, and no resolution in sight, I was referred to another service. As a first line of support? Not so much.
I WAS able to find a solution on a forum that involved installing and running the Download Manager using the "Run as Administrator" option in the context menu. My game is downloading now. Dear D2D, this is what a solution looks like.
posted
I wonder if D2D is just a redistributor - or maybe even less, a mirror to EA's site. If that's the case, then they probably don't want to be bothered trying to deal with tech support on a game they don't own, so they're sending you back to the people that are responsible for it. That actually does make some sense.
They should, however, care about their own site's functionality, so in that respect I can understand being frustrated about being told to go back to EA.
Posts: 4515 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Oh, Direct to Drive. I've heard them described as anything from "those jerks" to "those minging, urine-soaked bagheads" — they have caused monster headaches for some of my friends, almost as if they were designed to turn people permanently off the whole digital distribution idea.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Steam is, to put it mildly, leaps and bounds and worlds better than D2D. The only reason I don't use it is because so many of the games are tied to the Steam client.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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posted
Sadly, Windows 6.0 (Marketing name: Vista) and 6.1 (Marketing name: 7) both have that lovely quirk that if you don't use the "run as administrator" when installing things that they often fail. Ran into that today at work, actually. I and my co-workers are admins, but a co-worker couldn't get a program to install off a dvd. . . until I told him "run as admin!" He's all "But I AM an admin!" I told him it didn't matter.
So, somehow, there was a registry key for the gamespy arcade that my virus scan just caught as adware. And I'm not really sure how I downloaded it. And it's not at all suspicious given that both Gamespy and D2D are owned by IGN...
...who I just noticed is owned by News Corp. Fun.
Posts: 2907 | Registered: Nov 2005
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