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You know you've done wrong by your customer when

Starting immediately, we will be upping the activation count to a 5 by 5 plan. We will be raising the maximum amount of computers a user can have BioShock installed on simultaneously from 2 to 5, and allowing a user to reinstall BioShock on each of those computers from 3 times to 5 times

Oh, something is wrong with your install?  Reinstall.  Hmm, still not working, reinstall.

Have these people even seen the inside of a software support center?

Reinstall is step 2 in the four-step customer blow-off plan for bad techs.

For those at home, the four-step plan is this:

1.   Did you reboot?  Will that take a long time?  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

2.   Did you reinstall?  That will take a long time!  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

3.   Did you install Patch X+1, [where x is the version the customer has and +1 is a cosmetic update]?  The download will take a long time.  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

4.   I’m sorry, I don’t support that operating system, let me direct you to the correct agents, thanks for calling!

At least twice in any long-term support issue, a customer is going to be forced to reinstall.  If they have done so on their own they are already buttressing against these imaginary limits.

Let customers who have physical media or downloaded “unlocked” media reinstall as they want, if you are trying to lock stuff down to prevent piracy, REWARD paying customers with content that is only available through online activation of keys, make the enhanced content online only and activated only through an SSL encrypted keying system.

Ta Daaaa!

Revenue stream saved

Published inComputersVideo Games