The Shrine

This is actually amazing.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/gg/1916-inve ... vice-calls

Not Rockstar, but relevant:

I'm glad I didn't have any issues with GTA5 because Rockstar looks pretty awful in all this. When a game is brand new, it's worth noting that their support or 'fraud' departments that don't see hardly any activity for what's probably 1-2 years at a time see an explosion of activity during game releases. Should this be planned around? Of course it should. But it isn't wholly surprising when it isn't.

The fact that they just hang up is pretty inexcusable, though. The support staff was even pretty awful at reading the script. It sounded like Rockstar #4 was saying things like "review" and "troubleshoot" for the first time in his life. It's obviously not support's fault, but Rockstar is just being dicks about this. And if there's really a security issues with sessions staying open and people gaining access to accounts that way then Rockstar needs to get its shit together and make an announcement admitting such and how they plan to either fix it or just offer blanket refunds for everyone involved. This idea that they 'don't have the code' for something like this is ludicrous and there really should be a way for the middle-men (i.e. Steam/Amazon/GMG) to facilitate this kind of thing.

That said, I'm not really sure I've ever heard a story of a digitally sold product getting refunded going well. It's like trying to return a garment that you took the tags off or a toy that's been taken out of the package except that it doesn't have tags or packaging. Just corporations being dicks.

That's actually one area EA/Origin has Steam beat, their refund policy on digital titles is top notch and essentially painless.

Amazon as well, but then Amazon's CS is god-tier to begin with.

I've seen the option on Origin but I've never explored it and the one time I had an issue with Amazon they'd blocked the thirty party from charging me entirely, bypassing the entire refund process.

There's constant complaining about how Steam handles things like this though, which is kinda sad since it's probably one of their most common complaints and they don't seem to care about addressing it.

Steam customer service is god awful, I'm thankful I've had no issues that have required me to actually deal with them.

Can you imagine how bad companies would be if piracy wasn't an option....

As it is, this is why I don't invest heavily into Steam/PSN/etc. Laws need to change and companies need to be accountable. If I need to do a chargeback to protect myself from fraud, I don't need to take the chance of losing access to everything else I purchased.

kali o. wrote:Can you imagine how bad companies would be if piracy wasn't an option....

Because two wrongs make a right?

Never mind, Kal. You're never going to be a content creator, nor experience the darker side of everything piracy represents to content creators, yourself - so I'll stop asking you to have any concern for content creators.

Suffice it to say not everyone out there is Rockstar or EA...but people pirate everything out there as if small creators ARE Rockstar or EA. It hurts the small content creator far more than it will ever hurt EA or Rockstar.

And just as a note to everyone else - I am NOT sticking up for the corporations here at all, EA and Rockstar have both proven that they are utterly without ethics on this...but, as usual, it's never the big orgs that truly get screwed by pirates, either...just as in the music industry, the first people to be fired over piracy revenue losses are smaller engineers, publicists, and other people around the $30k-$50k level. Execs protect their salaries, and don't care about the little people getting shafted in the process.

It's part of why music is so terrible these days - with 90-95% of all music now pirated, no one can afford session players or an orchestra for their albums anymore.

There is an entire discussion to have there about how corporatism screws EVERYONE over, from the small content creator to the content consumer, in exactly the way this discussion is talking about - I'd love to see a system whereby smaller content creators could get a guaranteed living stipend and in return release their work into the public domain - but hey, that's socialism, and the country will never adopt it. The WPA and New Deal programs like that were long ago, after all.

Having seen the other side of it...Hollywood is spending billions a year now on DRM because they are terrified of ending up like the music industry, which has been utterly decimated by piracy. As a result, I imagine you stand little chance of getting laws to change and making companies accountable without the converse - consumers becoming accountable as well - I will say that much. And nobody wants to be.

By my rather unscientific estimation on Internet boards, about 80-90% of "consumers" now pirate a majority of their content, be it music, comics, movies, games, or what-have-you.

Personally I think we all should just admit that's what the nation wants, and introduce the public domain release system I was talking about...but that won't ever happen either, for it would obliterate the corps' revenues. And the corps are writing the laws...but hey! If you think you can get a law passed to prevent corporate abuses like this, I'm all for it, and all ears.

I think piracy has an effect of causing the retail methods of distribution to collapse which makes piracy the only choice. For example the bookstore I get my manga carries about 20-30 titles out of the hundreds of stuff that exist out there. I'm not even sure if there's a store I can order internationally for the Chinese version of Himouto Umaruchan, for example. I think I'm the only person that buys NPOT from the store and the one time some guy bought a volume of NPOT (#11) I didn't see it replaced for several years, and if NPOT isn't so spectucularly bad that just reading it online doesn't do it justice, I sure wouldn't have gone through the trouble to hunt down the volume I'm missing. If you can just order another book from Barnes & Nobles like Amazon I might be inclined to buy some stuff, but the last time I tried at the Chinese bookstore it took a long time and the guy processing your order generally has no idea what you're trying to get and there's always a chance they brought the wrong thing and expect you to pay for it. I know that back before the days of Internet the store I go to was more willing to import the more exotic stuff. Now they probably figure whoever is going to buy something weird would've just pirated it first because it's a lot easier to find the exotic stuff with piracy compared to buying the real stuff even if money is no object.

I looked this up for some closure on the issue because of the latest GTA5 fiasco during the Steam sale where they bundled a "DLC card" granting in game money in order to basically con Steam's refund policy and make it so that the game couldn't be refunded. After being called out on a clearly shady as fuck business practice, they took the 'bundle' off of sale and put GTA5 back up sans discount.

That aside, a link off the video posted in the OP said that Rockstar got in touch with them after they made the video and basically apologized and got their shit together. An e-mail exchange at the end of the article basically showed that Rockstar had started helping people in this predicament start recovering their accounts. They never really admitted to the problem with open sessions, which I guess is possible isn't even a thing, even if people were using complicated passwords that weren't garbo.