Aeterna's Blog

The problem at hand:

I ordered a copy of Dragon Age 2: Signature Edition on dec. 10 ’10 and ordered a copy for Bustedwitch on jan. 7th ’11.

I then received an e-mail quoted below (Only stripped the header and the footer):

We are writing to advise that your recent order(s) at www.play.com
requires further verification before we are able to dispatch.

240536632 – Dragon Age 2: Signature Edition

To verify your order please log into your account where you will be
presented with a ‘verify now’ option. We will hold your order(s) for a
further 24 hours. After this period the order will lapse.

So I logged into my account to verify since I certainly didn’t want to lose a copy; however…. there was no option to verify the order. Both orders had and have the status “Pre-ordered”.

Helpdesk employee #1

So not wanting my order to vanish; I acted. I was initially told that my order was cancelled and they wouldn’t be able to ship it. The reason for this being that they didn’t get stock. Bit weird but.. I decided to talk to bustedwitch about this and after some looking around; it became evident that people who ordered later still had their order. So their statement about this was a lie, since as they say they work with a first come – first serve basis.

Helpdesk employee #2

I then called them again with bustedwitch on skype so she could listen in and didn’t take no for an answer and when it became very noticable that the woman who I was talking to wasn’t going to tell me anything, she just kept repeating that they couldn’t ship the order. I demanded to speak to her manager/boss. She flat-out refused and told me this was not possible at all, so I told her I know that’s bullshit and I just wanted to speak to him/her, waiting for that was fine. So she gave in and put me through immediately.

Junior Manager

So I finally got through to A manager.. or that was the idea. This guy didn’t have any clue either and kept changing his story, telling me that  they weren’t able to ship 1 copy, to being able to ship both without issue and also telling me that both were cancelled. So much for clarity. I even specifically asked him to tell what he DID know as he kept using “maybe’s” and similar terms. It amounted to more maybe’s so I wanted to speak to his boss. Again he just told me it’s impossible and that he could put me through to another manager on his level but I asked what more they could tell and… he kept quiet. So I told him to put me through to his boss.

Senior Manager

So after some more waiting I actually spoke to a brit, a clear line and good english compared to the indian-outsourced-callcenter that I had to deal with before. Certainly a lot more promising. I spoke to him explaining the situation and I even had to explain why the item was no longer available in the shop, he didn’t know how limited editions worked for games. So after clearing that up I asked him what his take was; he was rather confused by the e-mail I mentioned and I sent it to him. He then agreed that the order should indeed be ready to dispatch and I should get both copies, if they get stock. I then mentioned that people from BioWare have publicly stated that there is no problem shipping Signature Editions to Europe and that play will have no problem with the stock they’re receiving.

After I told him this he agreed to contact their contacts about this directly. I however pointed out that I’ll have no way of telling he did and wanted to speak to him the following day after he’d done so and he will tell me more then. I got a direct number and his name to not have to deal with the india-outsourcing employees again. I am somewhat hopeful that he’ll manage to do something, but in reality; there’s no reason for this.

Sidenote: This guy tried to get me to back off with a coupon.