I’ve been a bit mis-leading with the title of this post as the truth is I haven’t actually been able to play this game yet. 3 days after signing up.
The truth is the Sony Station site is either being run on a shoestring or by a bunch of muppets.
I really can’t fully express the frustration this site has caused me so far.
The troubles when, having signed up during the day at work, I tried to login later on from home but was unable to recall my password. I went the the Sony Station site and was promptly warned that the browser I was using was not able to “use all the features of this site”. Google’s Chrome isn’t good enough for Sony it seems. I attempted to use the password reset function and this died part way through. Probably the browser’s fault, no doubt. First fail, Sony.
So I switched to another browser and tried to use the reset password function again. Alas the previous attempt had progressed far enough to fail and trip the 24hour timeout but not far enough to actually succeed. Great coding guys. Second fail, Sony.
I eventually gave up, 2 days of my 14 day trial down the toilet.
Tonight I thought I’d try my luck again. Stupidly.
I headed for the Support site. This greeted me with a friendly SSL certificate warning:
You attempted to reach help.station.sony.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as *.custhelp.com.
Here’s where my theory about the shoestring budget arises. Bona fide SSL certs cost a hefty few hundred dollars a year.
Even with this set back I managed to post 2 support messages (seriously, any organisation that implements the ‘Right Now’ support system may as well put up a big “FUCK OFF!” sign whenever a client approaches) before the system failed with:
Warning: Header may not contain more than a single header, new line detected. in /cgi-bin/soe.cfg/scripts/include/init.phph on line 376
PHP fail, Sony.
Mind you, this process was interspersed with the occasional:
Authentication Error: There was an error with validating your authentication. Please try again later.
These helpful messages forced a re-login.
Feeling that the ‘official’ support channel was obviously not about to render any actual support I turned to the ‘community’ support channel, the forums. I managed to sign up (I think) but was then not able to figure out how to post a new message. The post function simply wasn’t present. You’d think that if there was some pre-requisite that prevented posting that it would be written in 20 foot letters of fire. If it was, I missed it. Another fail for Sony.
My final attempt to reach someone was using the live chat. This method resulted in the most epic fail so far:
Warning: include_once(enduser/live_ext_queue_defines.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /cgi-bin/soe.cfg/scripts/enduser/live.php on line 6
Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening 'enduser/live_ext_queue_defines.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/cgi-bin/soe.cfg/scripts') in /cgi-bin/soe.cfg/scripts/enduser/live.php on line 6
Error. Please try again later.
Error. Please try again later.
Error. Please try again later.
Error. Please try again later.
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /cgi-bin/soe.cfg/scripts/enduser/live.php:6) in /cgi-bin/soe.cfg/scripts/include/init.phph on line 376
After all that I still haven’t played any Matrix Online. Time for some WoW.
