Battlefield 3; Installation woes (can you say “EPIC FAIL EA”?)

So you book Battlefield 3 Limited Edition with an advance purchase, because you thought you’d get an early start and because you want to play it with your son.

And when it finally is released and you get it in your hands, you oversee your son installing it on his computer, enter all the correct information, and answer the question about his age truthfully. The installer (or rather, this new fabulous invention by Electronic Arts called “Origin”, something like their version of “Steam”) asks for an e-mail address to one of his parents. So he enters mine, again being honest. And he has all of a sudden opened a can of shit. And it is a can of shit because Electronic Arts cannot get their shit together, so they dish it out on us users instead.

So besides registering the game, including the entered game key, to MY EA/Origin account (or so I thought), it also “consumes” the key permanently. Realizing the mistake, we try to change my son’s Origin-account credentials only to find he’s already got an EA/Origin-account. So, we ask for a password reset for that account, which takes six ages and a half to appear (no, it’s not due to the spam filter, because EA and Origin are whitelisted there). When we finally manage to change his credentials and wait through the painful upgrade / update process of the Origin client and of BF3 itself, he can no longer play it, because – of course – the serial number we entered is no longer on his account. So, we open my Battlefield 3 box and use that serial number instead. That works! The game is up and running and my son is in la la land, enjoying himself.

So, now we get back to installing it on my computer. I already have a EA/Origin account, and we entered its e-mail address when we tried to install BF3 on my son’s computer the first run. So I enter that during the installation process and finally arrive at the moment when I’m about to enter my license key.

(What’s GREAT is that EA and Origin cannot seem to make up their minds about who I am and what credentials I should login with; in one place, it’s my EA ID, in another it’s my e-mail address, and in a third place it’s called Origin ID. According to EA, it’s all the same and they’re all transparent. Here’s a little secret for you, they are not.)

I thought I had tied the license key we initially entered to my account, since we used that e-mail address. I was wrong. My license key has now vanished into the EA / Origin void. So, I guess I’m stuck with a completely useless copy of the Battlefield 3 purchase.

You would think that one of the biggest game producers in the world, would have sufficient funds to sit down and test their stuff BEFORE making changes, and BEFORE releasing things to the public.

How hard can it be?

WTF!