BenPaddon.co.uk

Having just read Neil Gaiman’s blog, I find it hard to come up with a new year’s wish for you that does the trick. So instead I point you towards his latest blog entry. Gaiman says it far more elegantly than I ever could.

Happy new year.

Here is the email I received some moments ago:

Hello Ben,

Thank you for writing Xbox Customer Support.

I am sorry to hear that you are not satisfied with our customer support. I understand that you would like to change your account from a United Kingdom account to a United States account.

I am sorry, but this is not possible. You cannot change the country in which you want to be billed. After you have selected the country when you created the account, that field is locked and cannot be changed. If you want to be billed in another currency, you need to cancel your account and then create a new account by entering the appropriate country.

I deeply apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for understanding.

I am, of course, livid - I have no qualms now with playing the discrimination card.

This is an article I originally wrote for GamePartisan back in August. It appears that they’ve chosen not to run the article, probably because the Editor in Chief is trying to stay in Microsoft’s good books for now (tch), so I’m posting it here in its entirety. For reference, the issue still hasn’t been resolved and I’m on the phone with microsoft as I type this to get this issue resolved now.

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Immigrating is a huge undertaking. As well as all of the legal paperwork, you have the ordeal of uprooting your life and transplanting it into foreign territory. You say goodbye to friends and to family not knowing when you’re next going to see them. It’s difficult, it’s stressful, and it’s expensive. But, provided you’re doing it for the right reasons, it’s all worthwhile. I say this in confidence because on June 26th of this year, I moved from the UK to the US; from Luton in England, to Los Angeles in California. It took months of preparation, no less than two trips to London (one medical, one interview at the US Embassy), and a flight that ended up costing me three times as much as it should have done. But I’m here now, and I honestly wouldn’t change a thing.Perhaps the most difficult part of the transition has been telling companies that I don’t live in the UK anymore. I live in the United States, which as you may be aware is an entirely different country altogether. The iTunes store was remarkably easy - it took four clicks and less than a minute to enter my new address before I was registered as a US member. Microsoft, unfortunately, have not been so easy.I didn’t own an Xbox 360 in the UK, but my friend Chaz does. I set up an Xbox Live Gold account as he’d allowed me use of the console, and I was rather enjoying playing Gears of War online. I even bought some games on Xbox Live Arcade. All in all, I was pretty impressed with the service and the console as a whole, and I decided that after I moved to the US I would buy one myself. I did, and I bought a 1 Year Gold Membership Card at the same time, as I knew the Xbox Live website would only allow me to pay by credit or debit card if the card was assigned to a UK billing address.

Really, I should have seen that as the first warning sign.

After setting up my 360 and getting it online, I transferred my Live account to the new console and proceeded to cancel my old payment method and set up the card. Bizarrely, the card number was rejected. Confused, I decided to call up Xbox Support who very kindly informed me that as my account was a UK account and the card was purchased in the US, it wouldn’t work.

“Oh,” I said. “Well in that case, can we migrate my account to the US servers, or something?”

“I’m afraid not,” said the thickly-accented Support assistant. “Your account was set up in the UK and so you cannot access US-specific content.”

“Yes, and I’ve noticed I can’t access UK-specific content, either.”

“Indeed you cannot, sir.”

This wasn’t helpful. I asked for further information and was informed several times that it just “wasn’t possible.” I politely explained once more that I no longer live in the UK. I live in the US, and as such it would be peachy-keen if I could have my account migrated. The answer was the same. I asked, then, what I should do about the Membership card.

“I would take it back to where you bought it and get a refund,” suggested the Support assistant.

This rubbed me the wrong way. “If you ran a business,” I said, “And someone came into your store with a Membership card that they’d already Scratched To Reveal and said it didn’t work, would you give them a refund? I wouldn’t. There’s no way to verify it.”

“True,” said the assistant. Then there was silence.

I became frustrated at this point. I refused to believe that there was no procedure in place to allow customers who have moved from one country to another to migrate their Xbox Live account accordingly, and I told him so. He advised me that it’s a standing policy not to migrate accounts, and suggested I set up a new Xbox Live account of US origin. Ha! If I do that, I lose access to all of the Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve purchased, I lose all of my Achievements and Gamerpoints (not strictly speaking the most important thing in the world, but a loss is a loss especially when I’ve paid money for this account), and I lose my friends list. I estimated that I had spent approximately $300-500 which would be lost by discarding my UK account and setting up a new one.

The next brilliant suggestion - “Do you have a friend in the UK who can pay for your account for you?” That is great, isn’t it? Ring up a trusted friend or family member and ask them if I can have their credit or debit card details to pay for something for me which, let’s be honest, I should be able to pay for from my own bloody bank account. Infuriated and short-tempered, I demanded to speak to a Supervisor.

I was then informed that it’s a standing policy not to migrate accounts - people, for example, set up accounts every day where they accidentally choose the wrong country, and they are told the same thing. Yes, all very well and good, but I hadn’t chosen the wrong country, had I? I didn’t accidentally select United Kingdom instead of United States. I had chosen the correct country, and then moved away from it some five months later. It’s not Rocket Surgery. I asked no less than twice more to speak to a Supervisor.

When I did get my Supervisor, he sounded exactly the same as the previous gentleman would sound if he were lowering his voice to try and sound like someone else. I ignored this and decided to repeat my plight. I was told again, in no uncertain terms, that there was no way in Hell I would be able to migrate my account. The Supervisor even offered the utterly ingenious idea that I go back to England! Such simplicity! The scales have fallen from thine eyes! Why hadn’t I thought of that? Here I am in the Land of Opportunity, mere days away from starting a job at one of the most prominent studios in Hollywood*, but I should throw all that in and move back to the UK because I can’t play Gears of War online.

I was more than a bit pissed off at this suggestion, laced with implicit racism as it was, and so I asked to speak to the Manager. I was promised a call back and, haha, didn’t get one. So the issue remains unresolved. I am utterly pissed off with Microsoft, who are in my opinion a confederacy of dunces whose sole purpose on this Earth is to make my life and the lives of people like me more difficult. All I want to do, and I don’t think this is a particularly taxing demand, is to be able to play the games I have bought online. Is that really such a huge request? I’ve given up trying to call them for now, but I imagine once the current Gold period runs out I will be forced to ring them once again, and I will probably end up in another game of verbal Ping-Pong.

Microsoft have caused me no end of grief. They have decided me continued use of goods and services I have purchased. They have offended me with potentially racist remarks, and they have, indirectly or not, discriminated against me as an immigrant. I am not a happy bunny. I am most certainly not an appeased lagomorph.

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* Well, I say Hollywood. Anyone who knows the Entertainment Industry knows that most companies are actually set up in Burbank. This is where I work, and it’s not too far from where I live. Fun, eh?

Checking to see what time it is just got more fun.

If you’ve ever read Jump Leads and thought to yourself, “Gee, I wish those worthless bastards would get some tee-shirts out there, or something,” you’re in luck! We’ve just opened the Jump Leads tee-shirt store! At the moment there are four designs with more on the way. They’re manufactured in the US, but fortunately PrintFection (the on-demand tee-shirt site we’re using for the store) offer international shipping. I have come to believe that this is inherently a good thing.

Will Smith has surprised me twice in the past week. He surprised me last week when we went to see I Am Legend and I discovered that he’s quite capable of doing actual acting, and what’s more he’s good at it. And he surprised me today by saying that Hitler was, at heart, a good person. His exact words, according to the Yahoo! News item I just linked to, are:

Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today’.”I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.

And y’know, I’m inclined to agree with him. I firmly believe that everyone is, at their core, a Good Person capable of Good Things. Hitler probably thought he was doing something Good, although the rest of the world completely disagreed with him, and still does to this day.

Still, Will Smith loses the argument because of Godwin’s Law.

It’s 4267-8010-0394-9990. Feel free to add it to your Friends List, although do drop me an email to let me know you’ve done so.

Huzzah! The print edition of Jump Leads #1 has arrived. I can’t tell you how utterly pleased I am to finally be able to hold the thing. JjAR’s art looks even better in print than it does on a monitor. Sublime. I was showing it off like a proud parent yesterday when we had some friends over.

I am thoroughly pissed off with Windows Vista right now. It has decided that the root of my Hard Drive is a folder containing photos, and refuses to let me change this setting the way I usually do when it arbitrarily decides that some folder is full of photos. I was quite happy with Vista until it did this. Now I am most agitated.

Paramount, in their infinite wisdom, have seen fit to fire every single person who works for StarTrek.com. How incredibly shitty of them - in the words of Philip J. Fry, “I’m literally angry with rage.”

I’m sure they’re going to try and blame the Writer’s Strike for this, too. It doesn’t make any sense, though - there’s always something going on within Trek fandom. There’s a new movie in the works. What the Hell are they thinking? What a bunch of wankers.

Following the recent news that Activision cockblocked the Rock Band PS3 update that would have allowed PS3 users to use the PS3 Guitar Hero III controller, I’ve added Activision to the list of companies that won’t be getting any more of my money. It’s a decidedly small list at present, comprising of GameStop and, well, Activision (and Microsoft, in theory - I won’t be buying any 1st- or 2nd-party Microsoft games until they sort my bloody account out, nor will I be buying any games flying under the Games for Windows banner), but nevertheless it’s made it slightly less short.

I don’t own the PS3 version of Rock Band, and I never will. But for Activision to consciously dick about with people who already have their game, simply because they’re scared that these people might end up using their controller to play some other musical rhythm game, is just dicky. I was going to pick up GH-III when the price dropped. I don’t think I’ll be bothering now.

Very nifty, eh? You can see more pics in the gallery.