this sore loser irritates me

http://www.gamingangels.com/2011/03/review-haloreach-defiant-map-pack-giveaway/#lf_comment=958161

loser post:

XanatosGambit
Protip: Next time you guys do a contest for Xbox DLC, have the contestant enter via xbox live. They entrees can be submitted to an account that you own and thus you can weed out the those people who A) Don't own an Xbox; B) Don't own the game; C) Haven't played the game recently. Few other easy things could have been done to improve the contest.
Anyways, might just be me being pessimistic, but I expect that 1 or 2 of the codes handed out in this contest ended up in the hands of people who don't play Reach and will just end up selling the code on Ebay for a few dollars. I could rant more, but it will probably get ignored.
~XG

my response:

Nietha
@XanatosGambit "might just be me being pessimistic" -- pessimistic/cynical/a sore loser, take your pick. I'm assuming you didn't win a code and therefore are upset and for some reason, near demanding that GA makes a policy or changes how they do contests or something.
Making it a requirement to own an Xbox, have a Gold account, own the game, and play the game within a certain period of time are all *ridiculous*. What other contest on the planet has such stringent (and multiple) requirements? GA wants to reward their readers and participants, and that's as simple as it is.
I don't know if you have a Tim Horton's near you, but every year they have a Roll Up The Rim contest on their drink cups - you can win all sorts of prizes. Do they demand that you are a Tim Horton's customer? Or prove that you drank the beverage out of the winning cup? How about contests inside chocolate bar wrappers or beer cases? Are you required to be a chocolate eater or a beer drinker? No. How about a contest for a car? Should you have to have a driver's license to win a car? Should you have to actually KEEP and DRIVE the car in order to keep your prize or should they take back the car because you're going to sell it?
Personally, if I didn't have Reach I wouldn't have even entered this contest cause I couldn't be bothered to make up a story (no matter how brief). If it was a straight up draw with no requirement of a story, sure I would have entered... and if I had won and didn't have the game I would have given the code to one of my friends who does have the game. Maybe I'm not normal, as you seem to think everyone would sell the code on eBay.
I can't believe I'm wasting all this time replying to you, but my advice for you is, if you want to whine about not winning, then save it for a personal blog or something. I don't want you influencing GA to re-think contests simply because cry babies will come out of the woodwork when they don't win.

fucking xbox support

email sent to xbox support:

A) You don't allow someone to delete their credit card from their account, only to edit their payment information or add a new payment method. Ridiculous.

B) Hold time for Xbox Live support? 20 seconds, awesome. Getting transferred to the billing dept? over 20 minutes.

(with no hold music btw, just "please wait" repeatedly) I figure maybe there's a chance the transfer didn't go correctly, hang up, call back, 20 seconds wait time to get a regular customer support rep, fine.

C) I ask the rep if there's perhaps a better time to call - a different day, a different time of day perhaps? No, your billing dept is apparently THAT BUSY ALL THE TIME.

D) No option of a CALL BACK for customers that are calling and are facing EXTREMELY LONG HOLD TIMES. Many companies offer the ability to leave your number so that they can call you back once its your turn but a huge company such as Microsoft can't manage to do this?

Fine, I get transferred again, again wait over 20 minutes, at least this time there's hold music, but guess what, my phone locks after 30 minutes of no use and - I guess my bad luck - it stupidly ends my call when I press the power button to unlock it.

So now I'm back at square one without my problem solved, frustrated beyond belief, 60 minutes of my daytime phone minutes gone for nothing and there's no fricking way I'm calling back today because one of your customer service reps would get a lot of screaming in their ear.

Oh, which also raises the question - XBL support can obviously handle their call volume just fine whereas your billing dept is backlogged WHO KNOWS how much......

E) Why don't you just train your regular customer service reps to do BILLING? It can't be that hard! Frickin ridiculous.

So you tell me, what can YOU do for ME? I'd be surprised if a person responded at all, and I'd be even MORE surprised if they said something more, or other than, "you'll have to call our support at blahblahblah".

Thanks for wasting my morning and pissing me off.

this night just can't get any worse

1. I got a new phone 2 days ago, an Acer Liquid E, it's awesome, I love it, however one small thing was bugging me (and rightly so) - all text messages I received showed a timestamp of 5 hours previous to the actual time I received it. So, for example, if I received a text at 9pm it would actually show 4pm. Outgoing texts had the right timestamp and my phone showed the right time, so I was stumped.
   
   Called Rogers tech support, the guy confirmed I was running Android 2.1 and that they had this same issue on a couple other Android phones and it was fixed by updating to Android 2.2. Fine, how do you do that. He said he'd email me instructions to follow. Great.
   
   I get the instructions, and they start with assuming I've already downloaded the update.... uh.... where do I get the update...? Thanking Rogers silently, I head to Acer's website, the maker of my phone.
   
   Long grumble short, I downloaded and attempted to install the wrong update and it fucked up my phone totally. Couldn't even get it to boot up.
    
2. Shooting virtual people in the face is a good method of stress relief usually, so I play a bit of Black Ops before switching to my favourite FPS, Battlefield Bad Company 2. My friends are only able to play with me for an hour or so then I'm left on my own to rack up kills.
   
   Not too long after they go offline, EA's servers go down and I can no long play BC2. Grr.
   
   
3. Okay next-best-thing currently is playing Diablo 2. Started playing again in the last few weeks after at least a couple years hiatus... and this time playing hardcore cause there's really no challenge in softcore.
   
   So far I've lost 3, maybe 4 characters, all below lvl 25. No big deal. I finally make a solid character (Paladin with Holy Freeze) and get good gear for him and he seems almost invincible. I had cruised along with no fear for his life at all, all the way up to Mephisto in Nightmare. That was just where I stopped playing the last time I was in the game with him - I knew Meph would go down easy enough.
   
   So I resume my gameplay, take down Meph, he drops crap of course, and continue on to Act 4. I'm playing on my own in a private game because I hate most players I run into in public games. It's safer in 2 aspects - no potentially hostile pvp'ers (player killers) and the monsters don't have extra health cause there's only 1 player in the game (me).
   
   I'm in Plains of Despair searching for Izzy, only having to use a health potion occasionally because my lightning resist isn't that high and the monsters like to throw lightning my way, when BAM in what seems like a total of 1 second, I'm cursed (meaning I take double physical damage) and I'm DEAD.
   
   Hardcore means once you're dead, that's it, that character's done, gone and everything they had is gone as well. The very most you can do is save the gear that your character is physically wearing IF you have a buddy in the game and IF you had allowed that buddy to loot your corpse. And you can only set looting while you're alive so even if by chance I had a friend online in a different game that A) played hardcore and B) could access Act 4 in Nightmare, they still couldn't loot my body because they would have joined the game after my death.
   
   Motherfucker. My level 52 Pally was gone and for seemingly no reason. What killed me was actually a champion abyss knight and I didn't even realize they were champions. It was a different monster that cursed me. But it all happened in a split second. Sigh. My highest character with all my best gear. Gear that took a lot of time and effort to create/find.

So that's my frustration on top of frustration on top of frustration (and disbelief). I quit Diablo immediately, not even re-making the character or switching to a different character. Too depressing.

But it did make me look into my phone issue again and thankfully I solved it myself by doing some research online. I'm still rightfully pissed at Rogers though. How fucking hard is it to tell me where to go to get the right f'in update for my phone. Lazy bastards.