Im hoping Destructoid can help.

[bigkev79]

Hello all.

With Star Wars: The Old Republics release on the horizon, many users are getting ready for the release and preparing their accounts. However there seems to be a disturbing trend discovered, users who have pre-ordered the $150 collectors edition are receiving errors when they enter their pre-order keys that state the code is already in use.

Many of us have posted in the SW:TOR Customer Support forums after opening a support ticket with the team and received no response other than an automated email. Those who have received responses are given new codes that when entered produce the same error.

The issue seems to span multiple retailers so it appears that this is more than likely a issue with EA/BioWare handling the pre-orders poorly and not the retailers. So far we have users reporting the issue with pre-orders from GameStop, Best Buy and Amazon.

I have decided to hit Twitter, FaceBook and other more publicly facing sites hoping to get some acknowledgement of the issue and perhaps a reasonable explanation or solution to the problem.

What I am hoping is that we can get the industry talking and perhaps with the help of industry insiders like Destructoid, maybe we can make enough noise if we talk about it and EA/BioWare will be forced to respond to the issue rather than ignore it until after release.

I know I am not happy. I paid $150 for a Collectors Edition and pre-ordered so I could have "Early Access" to the game. However, it appears that what we were promised is simply not the case.


http://bit.ly/tKQoBK

[bigkev79]

As time passes and this is discussed more in the forum threads, this is starting to look like a much larger EA/Origin issue. Here is a post I made in another forum thread that explains what we are seeing and a possible explanation.

Hey folks. A friend pointed out something interesting as well. The other week his Deluxe Edition of Battlefield 3 disappeared from his Origin account. When he went to enter his product key he received the error "Key is already in use". It appears this happened for a lot of users of Origin, their games simply vanished from their account. He contacted EA and they would not tell him what the problem was, but they issued him a new key over the phone. The problem was all his progress and unlocks were gone.

When I was researching the issue for him, one of the possible causes I thought about was that EA had a massive database corruption issue or some similar event that cause the removal of the games from accounts and invalidated a large number of product keys. Perhaps this is a ripple of the same issue?

When heading over to the forum to post this idea, I noticed this thread which would fit exactly with the scenario I posted above, that there was a database issue that invalidated a large amount of pre-orders and product keys:

EDIT. I posted the wrong link earlier. Here is the correct one I meant to.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=513617


If this is the case, I predict a large amount of users will receive their product on launch day only to get the error "Code already in use" when they input their product key. I hope EA/BioWare is hard at work on fixing the issue in the background. Also, if this is the case it may explain why support essentially "Vanished" in the last part of November. It seems they were fairly responsive before the "Missing games in Origin account" issue occurred.

I wish that EA/BioWare was more transparent with their support and customer service issues such as this.