RANT: Unhappy with EA, BF2

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I have really been looking forward to Battlefield 2 (BF2) since I played the Desert Combat mod on the original Battlefield 1942.  I installed it, and played about a week of single player games, trying to get used to flying and driving various vehicles before I went and got my butt kicked online by a 12 year old girl.  After adjusting my ISA firewall to allow the BF2/EA traffic, I finally got up the courage to go online and went to our own public, non ranked server and had a good time.

A couple days later, I wanted to play some single player and it wouldn't work.  I tried to start the map, it would dim the screen, music would get lower and it would try to start the map but go right back to the map select screen.  The only thing that changed on my system was the update to the latest version of iTunes.  Yes, I have a couple iPods, I am training for a marathon and they are absolutely necessary.

I called EA and after spending an hour between hold times and their tier 1 support (have you rebooted?) I was escalated to tier 2.  They spent more time looking at Direct X diagnostics, had me delete profiles, update drivers, uninstall/reinstall and basically said they had never seen the problem, contact our warranty group for a refund (transcript below). 

Huh?  Because you haven’t seen it you say give them their money back?  I would think that any software company would want to get to the bottom of any issue if it is easily reproducible on a clean, stable system.  I wrote them back (god forbid they ever pick up a phone and call me) and asked why they wouldn’t want to continue trouble shooting.  No response yet. 

Transcript:

Subject

ESCALATION.same issue

Discussion Thread

Response (Landon F.) 07/04/2005 10:29 AM

Hello,

I am very sorry, however unfortunately at this point there may not be a fix for this issue. It may be a conflict with a file, utility, program, or hardware setting that we are not able to find and/or check.

We do not issue refunds directly, however we can exchange your game for a sealed copy that you can return to the store from which it was purchased. You can contact our warranty department at (xxx) xxx-xxxx to exchange your disk for a new one.