EA will never get my money again...

[JumBie]

So I caved in and purchased Battlefield 3 through origin on the 15th, its now the 19th and I still haven't been able to download the game. I'm not sure why origin being in the current state it is, is even forced upon the public to be used as a download and games manager. Its terrible in comparison to steam, and its not even fully working.

Everytime I start downloading BF3 my download goes up, and then it starts to go back down backwards, and the cycle continues, for example:

Download reaches 20% then falls back to 14% then to 7% and the cycle continues forever, its a constant waste of my bandwith and time.

I have contacted EA's "customer support" multiple times to no avail, and have asked for a refund to which I was told the best they can do is exchange it for another game on the origin store, which is something I don't even want to bother with. I have troubleshooted this problem for 4 days now and have not had any success. Their live chat reps and advisor's constantly repeat steps that I have already tried, and they provide no other means of help or advice.

I have essentially wasted 45 dollars on nothing, I doubt they will ever solve this problem because a lot of threads I have read about people having this problem, there were no replies and no answers or solutions to the problem its self. Oh well, bye bye EA you will NEVER get my money again, and btw ORIGIN sucks.

I have a thread on the EA origin forums here:
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/8819321.page

Excuse the ridiculous English and sentence structure that I put together on the EA forums, I was tired and angry as hell.

 

[Kelvrick]

credit card charge back

 

[JumBie]

Paid through paypal balance.

 

[BladeVenom]

Good luck getting your money back.

#1 Rule of Acquisition: Once you have their money, you never give it back.

 

[KMFJD]

Torrent it, install it where origin wants, run origin and it will update to all the correct files

/method works with steam as well

 

[Texashiker]

install it where origin wants, run origin and it will update to all the correct files

/method works with steam as well

Besides the torrent part, that is what I do with a lot of my steam games.

I will buy myself a game, and 2 more copies for my kids. Download the game to one computer, they copy the files across the lan.

Steam recognizes the game files and downloads a fraction of the whole game.

When I bought skyrim during the steam sale, I copied the game files from my sons computer. I bought him skyrim right after it came out.

OP, will the game activate on steam?

 

[frozentundra123456]

Sorry that you are having problems. I have not had any technical problems with Origin. My problem with EA is what they and Bioware did to KOTOR (cancelled KOTOR 3 for an MMO) Dragon Age and Mass Effect as games themselves, so I will be very reluctant to buy any more games from EA/Bioware until they are bargain basement priced.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Besides the torrent part, that is what I do with a lot of my steam games.

I will buy myself a game, and 2 more copies for my kids. Download the game to one computer, they copy the files across the lan.

Steam recognizes the game files and downloads a fraction of the whole game.

When I bought skyrim during the steam sale, I copied the game files from my sons computer. I bought him skyrim right after it came out.

OP, will the game activate on steam?

If you are talking about playing single player, it is more simple than all that. Just download the game on Steam to each computer and play in offline mode in all the computers but one.

 

[JumBie]

Torrent it, install it where origin wants, run origin and it will update to all the correct files

/method works with steam as well

I cant find the proper torrent for it...If anyone could help me in that regard I could probably get this up and running.

 

[Gibsons]

Sorry you're having problems and all... but that thread on their forums got pretty funny at the end.

Please talk to live chat if you have a problem with my post.

 

[JumBie]

Everytime I see that download bar go from 24% to 17% I want to smash my computer....lol I hate origin.

 

[BD231]

Poor EA, their customers are the biggest bunch of babies known to man. Contact support, MAKE IT HAPPEN. Let the DL sit overnight if you have to, Origin support rocks.

 

[JumBie]

Poor EA, their customers are the biggest bunch of babies known to man. Contact support, MAKE IT HAPPEN. Let the DL sit overnight if you have to, Origin support rocks.

I HOPE that's sarcasm.

 

[Gibsons]

Origin support rocks.

Read the thread linked in the OP.

 

[greenhawk]

OP, will the game activate on steam?

nope. EA had a fit with Steam/Valve with regard to some licencing rules. It is basically the reason EA created Origin (with a previous title at the time?) then forced all battlefield games to be Origin only now.

 

[stevty2889]

I feel your pain, I had to deal with a game that would install, but no matter what would not launch, it was entirely related to Origin, because the steam version of the game was fine. I got sent through the same loops, over and over, neither the live chart nor the forums was any help. I finally gave up, and I too, will never buy anything from EA again, for fear of having to deal with there so called customer "support".

 

[thespyder]

Good luck getting your money back.

#1 Rule of Acquisition: Once you have their money, you never give it back.

As a side note, that quote was originally intended to be a dig at Paramount as they owned the Star Trek and DS9 franchises. Apparently there was a lot of bad blood and ribbing that went on and someone decided to get the last laugh. The stars all agree it was intentional.

 

[Maximilian]

Oh man the live chat people are f**king useless... Heres my interaction with them trying to get BF2 on origin:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2203396&highlight=live+chat

Just wait, an EASupport guy will show up at this forum like a white knight and making everything okay for the OP attempting to paint EA in a good light just like what happened before. See here:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2232317&highlight=live+chat

Attempting to make people think "Oh well they came to the forum and solved it in the end what nice guys EA are" when to be honest i think more along the lines of "How about not having a problem in the first fking place?" or "Why does someone need to complain on a forum unrelated to EA to get actual customer support from EA??"

Okay mini rant over, ive been there with these live chat morons so i know its a pain. Hope you get it sorted OP, if you keep trying you eventually get somewhere but it really depends how much your time is worth to you.

 

[ImpulsE69]

:ninja:Or he'll ban everyone in this thread from their forums and games

 

[JumBie]

Anyone got a link where I can download BF3 from somewhere else other than origin. Someone gave me a link to the server which is provided by akaimai. I downloaded the 17gb file but it was corrupt when I tried to extract it.

 

[cmdrdredd]

That's not exactly legal, yes we understand you bought the game but sources outside retail and origin are not considered legal I wouldn't think.

This is still why I like having many games on DVDs to install from. No worrying about broken downloads, server issues downloading and activating, and other nonsense.

 

[JumBie]

Actually I found the link to the actual download file. EA uses Akamai as a content delivery system. Through the Akamai servers I found the link to the file that origin is trying to download. The file is the same file that shows up in the "manifest" file that is in everyone's battlefield 3 folder:

http://ams.akamai.cdn.ea.com/eamaster/s/p/eagames/bf3/bf3_patch_ww_20120620.zip?sauth=

(after sauth= you put your auth number which is found in the manifest file)

I downloaded the file twice, and for some reason it downloads a lot slower than it would download if you were downloading it off origin. That aside I finished downloading it and tried to extract it, and it had a bunch of corrupt files. I downloaded it again, and found the same thing.

My conclusion? The file on the server is corrupt and origin is trying to re-download it constantly but running into a bunch of corrupt files as it goes along, thus it reverts backwards until it reaches that corrupt file again.

 

[Markbnj]

First reply from Origin support in the linked thread:

Hi JumBie ,

Did you have installed latested origin(version:8.6.3)??
also can try to turn off some anti-virus/spam software in your PC,

And do it again

I really don't think it's necessary to read the rest of it.

 

[JumBie]

First reply from Origin support in the linked thread:



I really don't think it's necessary to read the rest of it.

LOL I'm not sure how I managed to continue the thread after that point.

 

[cmdrdredd]

That's right out of a book on "troubleshooting customer computer software issues". Any antivirus software worth anything won't interfere, and honestly I doubt most people even use it these days.

Latest version, doesn't origin update itself?