Why 'Coupon' websites are bad

I've just had my 3rd, and worst, negative experience with something I purchased from one of the many Coupon websites (Groupon, Wowcher, GoGroopie etc.) that seem to be gaining in popularity.

This represents almost 50% of my total purchases from Coupon sites and I'm now of the mind that the savings just aren't worth risk / hassle that comes with a bad experience.

The root problem is that the merchant is often a small one-man-band affair and so getting in touch with them if something is wrong can be difficult (assuming they actually want to help resolve the issue).

My first bad experience involved a so called 'fake' USB memory stick (8Gb presented as 32Gb) the merchant sent a replacement (Also fake) and eventually refunded me - I don't know if the merchant was knowingly selling fakes or not.

The second bad experience was with a portable phone charging battery pack. The pack was fine but supplied with the wrong type of USB cable to charge it. The merchant informed me a replacement would be sent but none ever arrived and they stopped responding to my emails - I let that one go.

I'm sure the incorrect cable wasn't the fault of the merchant, who is just moving boxes, but it does show they were ill prepared for any post-sales issues that might crop up.

My final bad experience was with a child's Android tablet where the power button failed less than a week in. The merchant (Locogadgets.co.uk/.com) initially replied to my email by requesting the order details but has ignored all emails/phone calls since in addition to deleting Facebook posts and blocking my Facebook messages - Pretty obvious they have no intention of resolving the issue!

Which brings us back to the coupon websites. In the first instance where I tried to advise Wowcher that the USB sticks being sold were fakes they had no interest whatsoever in protecting their customers or investigating a potential rogue merchant and GoGroopie have ignored all of my communications regarding Locogadgets.

I appreciate their margins must be small and as a result their customer service teams will be secondary to the sales teams but ultimately their business will live or die based on if the merchants promoted through their sites are reputable or not.

I'm not sure what the solution is but a good first step would be an eBay-esque feedback system where customer feedback on a deal is visible against all that merchants other deals

Until then let the buyer beware and don't pay more than you are prepared to lose!

My perfect game

Game UK have recently asked people to describe their perfect game.

My perfect game would be a massive multiplayer, online, seemless, sandbox, 1st person universe.

With the ability to walk/drive/fly across planetary terrain, fly up into space and dock at larger space craft/stations, walk inside and outside of them and then jump to another solar system.

On each planet and within each system there would be NPC encounters both hostile and not, as well as mission and trading opportunities as well as uncharted things to find by exploration.

Essentially it takes the scale of 'Eve Online' by CCP, seemlessly merges it with their upcoming FPS 'Dust 514' (but as an open world like 'Oblivion'/'Skyrim'), adds 'Wing Commander's' 1st person control in space and bolts on the trading aspect of the classic 'Elite' with the empire building of the 'X' series games by Egosoft. Larger ships would be managed along the lines of the player carrier in 'Carrier Command'.

The closest thing so far to this was the vapourware Online Universe from 3000AD but their offline single player Universal combat ticks most of the boxes.

Cloud Imperiums' recently announced Star Citizen comes pretty close as far as space is concerned.


This is an entry to the Perfect GAME competition for the chance to win a Wii U from GAME.

EA = Bad

And now I'm going to rant about Electronic Arts! (yep it's rant time again!)

It's notable how the negatives drive me to blog way more often than the positives. This time it about customer service at the hands of Electronics Arts (EA). I'd heard alot of horror stories about how terrible EA are, I've never really had an issue with them until now however!

Recently I purchased All Points Bullitin (APB) which I suspect everyone interested in the MMO arena knows went out of business not very long after lunch (the fastest close down in MMO history according to MMORPG.com)

[Un]Fortunately for me I never got around to breaking the factory seal before APB got switched off and I thought that was the end of it until I stumbled upon a post saying that EA were offering an alternative game to people who had purchased APB after a certain date (who would not have got their moneys worth online) and who's retailers would not take it back (as in my case).

I send in an email not really expecting much (there was also talk of EA tightening the eligibility screws due to attempted scams) but got a reply back saying that if I could send in photos of the game, manual (presumably to prevent mutiple uses of the same game key) and receipt I could choose an alternative game from the EA online store (I wasn't thrilled about this because, as you may know, I've had bad experiences with digital games distribution in the past but it's better than a kick in the knackers).

If you've been paying attention you'll already have worked out that I can't provide a photo of the manual as the game is still sealed and, to make matters worse, I'd binned the receipt pretty much as soon as I got home from the shops - "Never fear" I thought, "The receipt will only be needed to prove purchase date and since mine is still sealed it's obvious I haven't 'got my moneys worth' or that it's a duplicate key" oh how wrong I was!

The lack of receipt was an immediate problem with the first line EA rep unable to deviate from policy stating the receipt was required. I don't have a problem with this as the guy is just doing his job so I just asked for the request to be escalated to someone with the authority to deviate from policy as surely the application of some common sense would see me through right? Nope!

The next line support (3rd tier apparently, no idea what happened to 2nd?) is where the real fun started.

It begins with the usual sympathetic opening and then launches right into the fact that the replacement policy had changed (no one appears to have told first line support!) and the forum post I am quoting is wrong (what the hell? I never quoted or even mentioned a forum post!) as they are now only offering an alternative to people who purchased APB from specific digital partners. It then closes with the predictable policy stuff which is why we're not giving you anything.

At this point I'm past caring about the game, what really gets me is crappy customer service. I really struggle to understand how the US, who in my experience typically have exceptional retail customer service, fail so utterly the minute you put the internet between the them and the customer.

So I reply pointing out the sudden U-turn and the fact that, as I made no reference to a forum post, it's pretty obvious I've been sent a stock reply and he hasn't even bothered to read the request and the fact the policy stuff came up again the new rep. doesnt have the authority to deviate from policy either so I request another escalation.

Another reply from the same guy, no apology or explanation for the U turn or not reading my issue, just a statement that he's as far as the escalation path goes but he does have the authority to deviate from the policy, only he's not going to.

Which of course just makes me more motivated to upset this apple cart!

At this point I realise it's pointless discussing the replacement game (which is a secondary cause now anyway) and just reply back pointing out the lack of apology or explanation and asking for the HR and complaints departments email addresses (as I'm not paying to send postal mail to the US).

His next reply just keeps on giving, I get a generic postal address (didn't see that coming) and a feeble explanation that the policy changed during the communication*. He did also mention that the issue would be passed on (as per my request) as an example of how not to deal with customers issues (which of course I believed /sarcasm). For good measure he added I'd still have needed the receipt anyway (because common sense isn't so common around EA but they obviously like to get in a parting shot when they can!)

*full disclosure: my original request was about 3 weeks ago but it turns out EA have a policy of closing an incident after 6 days of no reply, unfortunately I never got around to replying in time so had to start again 3 weeks later. However the first line rep never mentioned the policy had been changed since my previous request at any point during the second request so the U-turn stands!

So as it stands right now I've just gone back asking again for the email addresses and not bothered to engage him on any other points as it's obvious he's not going to be of any help. Unfortunately he's sticking to his guns that this is the only line of communication open to me. I've not given up exploring other ways to crack that particular nut open yet.....

My iPad

I might have mentioned that I won an iPad thanks to the guys over at www.bitterwallet.co.uk. Now I've been using it for a few weeks I figured it was time for my thoughts.

I have to say I've been very impressed with it, it's very polished and, unlike the iPhone, the battery life is really good.

In fact my only real gripes are that ios4 still isn't available for iPad (the multitasking would be useful), apps that haven't been written to use the larger screen look blocky when zoomed 2x (not really the iPad's fault) and that I've either got to buy any books I already own again in digital form or spend along time with scanner!

/joke - that wouldn't be remotely practical in addition to the fact that, unless you scan using OCR (and then proof read every page!), it's not going to work as an ebook.

I also discovered that alot of the books I looked for don't exists as ebooks yet and that those that do exist were not significantly cheaper than a physical copy which I find difficult to swallow although I can imagine what the publishing industry's justification for this would be!

Obviously the publishing industry have an advantage over the music industry with regards to digital since it's trivial for home users to convert their existing physical media to digital.

iPhone 4

Daddy's got the new iPhone!

I'll get the interesting bits out the way first so most of you don't doze off during my subsequent diatribe :-)

So what's the iPhone 4 like?

I have to say I'm been a bit underwhelmed, don't get me wrong I'm not disapointed but it's just not the groundbreaking experience your first iPhone was.

The high resolution screen is very nice and, compared to the 3G, its very fast to use with a much better camera. It's a bit early to make a call on battery life as I've literally only been using it for 24 hours now (which it's been connected to the PC for a significant portion of) and it got pretty hammered setting all the apps up but I'm at almost 50% in 5 hours so it appears that it might be better but not by a huge amount than the 3G.

I was pleased to see Apple have removed the cap on how many Exchange server accounts you can sync with (previously only 1) which is one less reason for me to jailbreak but I'm already missing SBSettings.....

The other new bits are pretty much just gimmicks:

Facetime isn't going to see much use if both of you need iPhone 4 _AND_ a wifi connection (I wonder how many people bothered with Skype voice calling on iPhone while it was only over wifi?)

The front facing camera is probably going to see little use because of the limitations of Facetime unless other app developers (Skype, Stickam) make use of it (and Skype voice over 3G isn't going to be free forever nevermind video!)

I have to say my biggest problem with the phone so far has been iTunes v9. This may sound odd until I give you a bit of background. Because I hate myself and have a tendancy to early adopt I've been running XP 64bit edition for the last few years, one of the downsides to this is that iTunes doesn't officially support XP 64.

I say 'officially' because, until version 8, you could simply take the Vista 64 version of iTunes, remove the launch condition on the executables using Orca and then install eveything piecemeal.

Unfortunately iTunes v8 prevented you from getting a 100% working install under XP64 as the iPod helper service refused to run, which was fine if you only have an iPhone (I probably ought to mention I have a 3rd gen iPod about now) so I stayed on v7. To round things off my old G4 mac (OSX 10.4) can only run an even older version of iTunes that won't even talk to my iPhone 3G so that wasn't an option either!

The new iPhone requires iTunes 9 (as does the iPad I have arriving any day now) so something had to give, I've been promising myself a new PC (on which I won't run XP 64) but that wasn't going to happen before I needed to sync my stuff to iPhone. Fortunately I have an XP 32 dual boot installed that I used before I got 'everything' working under XP 64 so I booted that up, installed iTunes 9, copied over my library (the music and video are already on my file server) and then ran out of disk space due to having multiple copies of all my apps (which insist on living under 'My Music' and in the previous iTunes library folder).

My second biggest problem was the lack of mechanism to copy app settings (not the apps themselves) from the old iPhone to the new (can it really be that hard Apple?), I did some searching but then only thing I could find was trying to restore an backup of my old iPhone to my new one. I doubt this would have worked even in the best of cases, it certainly wasn't likely to work for me considering:

a. My 3G is not running OS4
b. My 3G is jailbroken

So after all the apps had been sync'd I got to run each of them and enter all the usernames and passwords again, joy!

So how did I get one?

Well quite by accident I found myself queuing outside an O2 shop last Sunday morning that the O2 website claimed had some stock of the new iPhone 4 - I was considering going Saturday afternoon as the website had said it had stock at 8:45 that morning, but then the update around 13:00 reporting the stock level from 9:00 so I wasn't going to risk a wasted trip.

I say by accident as I failed to check what time the O2 shop opens on a Sunday so, rather than lose my whole morning to Star Wars lego with my son (as I had done the previous day), I dragged the pair of us into town 45 minutes before they opened........... and there were already 5 people in front of me!

The purchase of the iPhone 4 was relatively uneventful save for the store assistant telling me the SIM number porting was handled entirely by iTunes, which it isn't (I had my doubts but I wasnt about to waste even more time in the shop debating it with someone who obviously didn't know)

Why I don't like Steam

No particular reason for posting this now, just occured to me I haven't covered it yet.

A few years back I bought Half Life 2 off eBay, I buy 99% of my games off eBay partly because of a lack of disposable income and partly because I rarely have time to play most games fully due to spending my free time playing MMO's so just can't justify paying full price.

Now what I didn't appreciate at the time is that Steam games are tied to the Steam account they are registered to (there is a time-limited and seemingly tortuous transfer process which appears to be of little practical value) and that Steam accounts are not transferrable.

All of this is spelled out in the Steam EULA (which I suspect few gamers have ever read) and referenced on the exterior packaging of Steam games but obviously you don't find that out until the box arrives.

The point here being that, while the seller of a Steam game/account _should_ at least be aware of these points, the buyer (unless previously experienced with Steam) won't be aware of the unauthorised and risky nature of buying a Steam account,

Getting back to the story, Half Life 2 turns up with the account username & password, I change the registered email address and password but the username is fixed. Time goes on and I purchase afew other games and add them to the Steam account and then one day (over a year later) I can't login to Steam and get a message saying the account is locked because of suspected hacking.

Fortunately I still had the sellers email address so I email him asking if he's made any attempt to access the account. It transpires that he owned 2 copies of Half Life 2 and accidentally supplied the wrong copy for the account details he gave me. This meant that when he ran the serial number check for his remaining copy it replied back with the account name he supplied me, being unable to access this account (because I had changed the password & email) but being in possession of the correct serial number (and apparently having forgotten he had sold it) he was able to get Steam to lock the account out and investigate.

Unfortunately at the same time, I had contacted Steam informing them that I had purchased the account over a year earlier (in case my attempts to contact the seller failed) which gave them the excuse they needed to ban the account.

Eventually I was able to work with the seller to get Steam to unlock the account after jumping through some hoops but I suspect this is rare.

I have since opened my own Steam account but have yet to purchase anything through it or register anything against it (or my purchased account for that matter) due to my experience. That's not to say Ive avoided Valve games as I've simple purchased then on XBox (although XBox Live can't really do Teamfortress 2 justice!)

The lessons to be learned here are that firstly you don't really own software purchased through or registered on Steam as they can stop you from using it even though you have the Media and even if it's a single player, offline game.

Secondly it's very very easy to get scammed on eBay when purchasing a Steam account because the seller has the power to get the account locked even if he can't get it back (because the buyer can prove he has the serial number)

Finally I wonder what the legal position is (in some countries) with respect to ownership and resale rights (since you effectively don't get either)?

My love/hate relationship with my iPhone

It's been said by some that I'm the only person they know that complains about the iPhone so I thought it was probably time for my definitive list of gripes having had it a year now.

Battery Life:
My biggest complaint, my battery life is truely terrible. I'm charging on average twice a day, a full charge before I leave for work and then, depending on usage, another one by late afternoon or in the evening to make it through the night (mainly to stop me having to charge it from flat in the morning or turning it off)

I identified my poor battery performance fairly early on and took the issue up with O2, who referred me to the Genius Bar in the local Apple Store. The Apple staff member simply instructed me to turn off push email on 3G when not using them (I originally got the iPhone to eleminate the push email data charges of my old phone so I'm always using push email and therefore 3G!)

Camera:
Theres no denying the quality of the camera in the iPhone is awful. Low megapixel count, no flash, no zoom and no video, all things that were pretty standard on phone before the original iPhone came out (never mind the 3G).

I do find it odd that Apple haven't added video or zoom in any firmware updates especially in light that the 3Gs gets them, a paid for zoom app appears to be available in the app store but I'm pretty sure you need to Jailbreak to get video.

Windows XP64 bit support:
I realise I'm one of the few people probably running XP64 but given that iTunes for 64bit Vista runs fine on XP64 (once you modify the install file to not check OS versions) I don't understand why it can't just support XP64. Prior to getting the iPhone I was running an older version of iTunes under XP64 that didn't have the OS check on install but the iPhone required a newer version of iTunes to work with.

Unfortunately, while iTunes works fine for sync'ing with the iPhone the driver support doesnt allow me to do firmware upgrades, restores or access any of the photos on the phone. Fortunately I have an XP32 laptop I can do all this on.

Interestingly the iPhone box doesn't come with any 'minimum system requirments'!

Picture Messaging:
This was eventually addressed in a firmware update but the lack of integrated Picture Messaging from the outset was a significant oversight on Apple's part. Incoming picture messages arrived as a normal text message with a link to a web page where you could view the picture message (data connection notwithstanding) but the only way to send outgoing picture messages was initially only through Jailbreaking the iPhone and installing a non-approved application or later by installing an approved application that wasn't able to use your tarrif and sent picture messages had to be paid for via PayPal.

Sat Nav:
Ok I realise that Google Maps isn't really Sat Nav but it was pretty obvious it was going to be used as one until something like TomTom came out (price notwithstanding). It really needs to have a caching options (such as caching the route of directions it's providing) because the minute you lose data connectivity you end up looking at a blank screen with a line and a dot showing your location (and you won't even know how zoomed in you are) and it needs to override the screen lockout setting. Asking it to speak the directions so you don't have to keep looking at the screen [while driving] is probably expecting too much.

Interestingly the new iPhone 3Gs has turn-by-turn in Google Maps but I don't know if any other issues are addressed. Alternatively you can Jailbreak and use xGPS.

Photo crash/reboot:
I wasn't the only one to report this but I suspect I'm in a minority of people who encountered this problem. I got sent about 3 high resolution photos via email which I attempted to save to the phone with the 'save all' function. It turned out that only the first image actually saved (saving each individually worked ok) however when you attempted to view these photos on the phone it would reboot the phone. Removing the photos from the phone proved difficult (in light of not being able to access the photos under XP64 as mentioned above) but in the end I was able to invoke the delete function before the photo had finished rendering and caused the reboot.

This was confirmed by Apple to be a known issue however, as their firmware update notes are as detailed as 'bug fixes' I have no idea if this has been fixed yet.

Notes sync:
Again this was addressed in a recent firmware update but initially the iPhone didn't sync notes when connected to an Exchange server for push email.

The Dock connector:
With the iPod Apple introduced us to the Dock connector. It would appear that even Apple cannot maintain a 'standard' either because accessories that worked with devices that previously sported the dock connector (such as the car charger for my iPod and even reportedly accessories made for the original 2G iPhone) are reported as not supported by the 3G iPhone forcing you to buy new accessories!