Y'know, I bought this marvelous game largely to reward the developers for what I thought soundled like their enlightened approach to copy protection. Unfortunately, the much-ballyhooed absence of restrictive anti-piracy measures seems to be more advertising hype than reality, and I cannot help but feel I've fallen victim to a bait and switch attempt to thwart my unfettered enjoyment of this product. The non-existent copy protection seems to have merely been swept under the rug, where it awaits to snare the faithful once they've put their money down.
I, like so many others, now find myself in the company of what appears to be a great many exhasperated owners who are suffering the ultimate in buyers remorse as they find themselves mired in the malfunctioning morass of "Stardock Central", trying desperately to contact any meaningful customer support so that they can find out why their perfectly valid serial numbers are constantly being rejected.
While I applaud Stardocks committment to support their product with groovy new features and free add-ons, it all seems a bit moot if they do not approach their customer service with same level of enthusiasm. From all indications, this is not the case. I've been prowling these message boards in hope of finding the answers to my own dilemma, and have only found more like me, all lamenting the inability of Stardock's customer service to respond in a reasonable amount of time or even solve their problem. This suggests to me that the long-suffering souls at the help desk are overloaded...a sure sign that something is very broken.
Personally, I would prefer being saddled with having to put a CD in my drive than spend hours of what should have been entertaining down time instead sending fruitless email to support, combing the message boards for answers or installing unwanted and apparently malfunctioning software just to download a patch. In my case, it is ONLY a patch I am being thwarted from downloading, and not the end of the world: I can only imagine the frustration of those who purchased their game online and cannot even get it to run at all because of user hostile remote activation.
I've personally sent three emails to both sales and support at Stardock, as well as pestering developers in Stardock's chat room, and after four days of this nonsense all I have to show for my efforts is one email telling me my mail has been forwarded to someone else.
Maybe the good people at Stardock should take a little time off from playing video games (oh, sorry...BETA testing) to address the enormous customer service debacle they've managed to create before they lose more sales to their own misguided copy protection efforts than the treacherous legion of software pirates that their industry regards with such dread.
Sorry, guys, I admire what you've made, and I know even the best intentioned efforts by good people can go terribly awry...but I'm pretty fed up with dealing with FAQ's and email to make my paid for products work as advertised. Wasn't there any room in that game development budget for an 800 number?
Yes, I'm bitter. Anyone else?
