To Whom it May Concern: I’ve now become sufficiently enraged by Electronic Arts (EA) to write down my complaint and paste it everywhere appropriate on the web, to contribute to what I’m discovering is a deluge of consumer frustration with yet another company that’s “too big to fail” so they have relegated their Customer Service to illiterate unintelligible outsourcing partners, and abuse the very customers they purport to serve. My issue pertains to the game Simpsons: Tapped Out, which I have always played on my Apply iPad. The game is intrinsically flawed, in that the most appealing and interesting parts and contingent on expensive in-game doughnut purchases. Then the game play is set up so that players invariably accidentally redeem their doughnuts to “speed up” game play, because the redemption button suddenly appears right where one is tapping (per the name of the game) in the course of customary play. So it’s inevitable that players waste their money on doughnuts and waste their doughnuts by redeeming them accidentally. However that’s not what happened to me in this case. It has happened to me in the past, and I’ve wasted plenty of money and doughnuts that way, but this is much worse: I could go back a while, insofar as I have been frustrated several times by this dynamic and wastefulness in the past, but I’ll cut to the chase. Fortunately, after losing enough I managed to habituate clicking the “Cancel” button that the general tap-action button turns into for about 1-2 split seconds before the accidental redemption occurs. For a while that kept things manageable. Then it got worse… About a week ago I was playing the game and accidentally clicked an “hurry action” redemption – specifically for a chair production in the luxury Springfield area. I managed to click “cancel” fast enough to cancel the action and a chair never appeared – but the game still took my Doughnuts nevertheless! So now, shy two doughnuts and mildly annoyed, I decide to reach out to EA to remedy the situation. I logged onto their chat option (as it was the weekend and their phone lines were not active). I labored through the petty small talk and went back and forth with the guy ad infinitum, when he ultimately asked me for my game’s mayhem number. I warned him that looking it up on an iPad would likely disconnect us, and of course it did! So I logged back into the chat room. Another rep went through the same nonsense with me again, telling me that the first rep should have given me a case number when I warned him of the risk of disconnection. Then that second chat got disconnected too. The third chat rep couldn’t understand the problem. In spite of explaining it very clearly, he represented it to his specialist colleagues inaccurately, telling them that I had accidentally redeemed the doughnuts for something in the game – and if he really wanted that fantasy to stick he should have insisted that it was in return to “hurry an activity” since that’s completely ephemeral and leaves no trace. When I endeavored to rectify his misunderstanding, he basically implied that I was lying, and kept asking me to investigate my game items to find the one that I got in return for the missing doughnuts. I eventually gave up on him, but not before telling him off. Today, just now, I was compelled to pick up the game again, and it inspired me to reach out to EA again. This time I used the phone service and had one of their reps call me. I just got off the phone with him. We went through the problem and this time I kept it simple so there wouldn’t be any room for confusion. I just said that doughnuts went missing and got him to request a specialist. However, this time, before we connected with the Specialist he warned me that if the specialist investigated my account and couldn’t find the missing doughnuts that they would restrict me from using the game altogether! Of course if it’s a choice between getting ripped off by a terrible company that treats its customers poorly, and not being able to play a game I enjoy, I’ll opt to hate the company forever and still play the game. Rest assured, I’ll never buy any doughnuts or a raffle ticket in the game ever again! Moreover, anything I can do to malign EA and its employees will be my eternal pleasure! I urge anyone playing The Simpsons Tapped Out not to ever buy doughnuts – instead look for cheats and hacks online instead. I’ll do the same. Furthermore, beware of EA and don’t waste your time with their terrible offshore Customer Care reps. They don’t care, they barely speak English, and they will not be able to understand, let alone remedy your problem. If anyone knows how I can crack the game to get more free doughnuts please email me at ez2recall [at] mail [dot] com. Likewise if anyone has any more ideas for how I can get back at EA for wasting my time and stealing my doughnuts please let me know. Thanks!
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