Raving Army recounts a recent experience with tech support trying to get one of his games to work properly.

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Raving Rant - Both Hands And A Flashlight

I'm not by nature a stupid man. Occasionally slow on the uptake, perhaps. A bit of tunnel vision once in a while which prevents me from seeing the obvious answer. I will freely admit to letting out a "D'oh!" when the obvious answer presents itself to a problem I've been grappling with. But I'm not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. And if there is one thing that utterly drives me into a foaming rage, it is somebody operating under the assumption that I am stupid, that I wouldn't be able to figure out the answer even if it was given to me with big brightly colored pictures and text written for a second grade reading level. I'm a geek. I may not know all the answers, but I like to find out as many as I can. I suspect that a lot of gamers are also like that. Not stupid, but occasionally slow on the uptake. As you can well imagine, a combination of high intelligence and low tolerance for condescending behavior leads to a very short fuse when it comes to the current intellectually parlous state of technical support when it comes to games.

During my efforts to review Empire Earth III, I ran into a curious technical problem. The game didn't seem to be functioning properly. In point of fact, the damn thing wouldn't even launch. It generated an error message about the Binkw32.dll file being missing. And sure enough, that particular file wasn't in the program folder. The solution seemed semi-obvious to me. Copy the file from another location (preferably the DVD it came on, but another program if that wasn't doable), then see what happens. As it was, I ended up copying it from another program. Did I expect it to work? Not entirely. If it worked, great. If not, I expected more information to be forthcoming. That's pretty much how I've used computers all my life. Poke it and see what happens. My efforts didn't get the game running, but rather returned an error message similar to the first, only the file that was missing was Mss32.dll. A repetition of the earlier action with the Mss32.dll also failed to get the game to launch. But there was a very different error message this time:

"The procedure _AIL_set_sample_51_volume_pan@24 could not be located in the dynamic link library mss32.dll"

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Now, while I may not be a programmer, I'm not unfamiliar with how to mix sounds on a computer or sound board. Given that the first message indicated a file related to the Bink video codec, the error message above suggested that this was a command used to set the initial volume for the soundtrack on one of the seemingly endless string of Bink

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manufacturer/publisher/developer/preferred video technology videos that we're all subjected to when we boot up a game these days. This particular problem bothered me greatly. I'd loaded up plenty of other games and they ran just fine. Bear in mind that I'm running WinXP x64 on my gaming computer. Also bear in mind that it had been running 32-bit applications with nary a hiccup for the last few months. Even the less-than-stellar Death to Spies had installed and run without any technical problems on my machine. So, my options were to troll the forums (which might produce a result), call into Tech Support (which might take a while, this was right before Christmas), or email Tech Support (which would be slow, but it would at least have the virtue of a paper trail). I went with option 3. I used Vivendi's help request screen. I dutifully attached copies of SysInfo and DxDiag, clicked the button and waited.

I received a response less than an hour later. The response told me it would be anywhere from 24-72 hours for an agent to get back to me. Naturally, the email also suggested I try looking through the forums. I did look through them and failed to find anything germane to the situation at hand. I did not post the issue on the forums because I wasn't even sure I would be playing this game much beyond the time it would take for me to review it, and it seems stupid as hell to create a forum profile just to ask a question about a single technical issue for a game which I might not even be playing in six weeks, much less six months. Seventy-seven hours and five minutes after my request went in to Vivendi Tech Support, the following email hit my box.

Thank you for contacting Vivendi Games Technical Support.
My name is Joshua. I understand that you are not able to install the game Empire Earth III.

To further assist you, we will need the following information from you please:

1. is it retail or download version of the game.

2. Were you able to play the game previously or did you make any changes to your computer before you started experiencing the issues with your game.

3. Please send us your computer system configuration. To get your system configuration, please follow the steps bellow.

DirectX Diagnostic Tool Information
-------------------------------------
To gather information related to DirectX:

1. Click Start, click Run, type "dxdiag.exe" (without the quotation marks), and then click OK.
2. Test the Display and Sound components:
oClick the Display tab and then click "Test DirectDraw", "Test Direct3D", and "Test AGP Texturing" (if available).
oClick the Sound tab and then click "Test DirectSound".
3. Click "Save All Information"
4. In the Save In box, click Desktop, and then click Save.
5. Click Exit.

System Information
--------------------
To gather the System Information:
1. Click Start point to Run and type Msinfo32
2. Click OK.
3. Click File and then click Export.
4. In the Save as Type box select "Text File (*.TXT)"
5. In the Save In box, click Desktop.
6. In the File Name box, type "msinfo" (without quotation marks).
7. Click Save.

Submitting Files
----------------
After you generate the reports mentioned earlier please forward them to us as an attachment in your email

Best regards
Joshua
Vivendi Games Technical Support

You can visit our website for the latest information at:
http://www.sierra.com/

You may also visit our online support site at:
http://support.sierra.com/

Please be sure to delete all previous correspondence when replying. This will help us to process your response in a more timely and efficient manner.

Right off the bat, I'm bothered by the fact that the copies of those two files which I'd included originally somehow seemed to have gotten lost. I'm also bothered by the fact that it miscategorized the issue as an installation issue. The game seemingly installed without an error. It was launching the game after installation that the error occurred. More suspiciously, the entire body of the email looks like a form letter. The tone sounds like a form letter. And I couldn't help but get the feeling that "Joshua" was actually a guy named Jayant, sitting in a cube somewhere in Mumbai, with a bunch of Notepad windows open which he could copy and paste from. The lack of a last name at the end only strengthened my suspicions. Many moons ago, I worked tech support for various companies, and at no time was my last name ever missing from any emails ever sent to a customer. Now, I'm sure that somebody will argue that by leaving off the last name, the identity of the agent is protected from anybody who might wish to harm the agent after a technical support resolution was achieved. To this, I can only reply thusly: Bullshit. The vast majority of fed up customers are not going to come gunning for one tech support agent over lousy service. They have other ways of expressing their displeasure which they will undertake eventually. If somebody really went to the amount of trouble needed to track down and actually murder a tech support rep over a half-assed response to a technical issue, leaving off the agent's last name isn't going to be any help at all. Somebody that psycho would just go on a rampage and kill as many people as he could, and doubtlessly wouldn't stop once he found the offending agent.

I answered the questions posed to me, attached another copy of SysInfo and DxDiag, and sent the reply back. This was on the 26th (Christmas holiday, I wasn't at home, and wouldn't have had access to the SysInfo or DxDiag files for my rig). I didn't hear back from Vivendi Tech Support until January 3rd, when I received the following missive, again from "Joshua":

Thank you for contacting Vivendi Games Technical Support.
My name is Joshua. I understand that you are not able to launch the game Empire Earth III.

After reviewing your system information your computer easily meets the game requirements. However the operating system required to play this game is 32 bit but you have the 64 bit operating system installed on your computer.

The game was designed and tested on 32 bit operating systems and the game is not compatible with 64 bit operating systems. So if you want to play the game I suggest you to install the game on a 32 bit Windows XP/Vista operating system and then try playing the game.

Best regards
Joshua
Vivendi Games Technical Support

I refer you back to my earlier stipulation that various 32-bit applications had been running on my system quite nicely for some time before I attempted to install EE3. The statement that the application couldn't run on 64-bit operating systems simply because the game had been "designed and tested" on 32-bit operating systems lit the exceedingly short fuse that I mentioned towards the start of this article. It took somebody nine days to come back with possibly the weakest excuse I had ever heard. I could understand somebody saying that a 64-bit OS wasn't officially supported, though I'd have a hard time swallowing it because of the already proven capability of a 64-bit OS to run 32-bit applications. I might understand if there had been something resembling a decent technical explanation of why such a thing wasn't possible at the present time, though I'd have hoped to shout somebody would have been working on a patch to correct that issue. But to casually dismiss the issue like that after nine days was an insult to my intelligence. Nobody could have spent nine days to come up with that kind of answer unless they were unspeakably incompetent or incredibly stupid. If somebody had taken only an hour to come up with that reply, I'd have still argued the point, but I wouldn't have been so irritated as I was at that time. The response I sent appears below:

The operating system is not likely to be the issue. WinXP x64 is able to run programs in a 32-bit mode, effectively emulating the 32-bit version of WinXP. Given that numerous other programs have run without any difficulty on this particular operating system, including programs which could not possibly have been "designed or tested" for 64-bit operating systems at the time of their release, I find your explanation for this issue totally unconvincing. The first error message indicates that a file, Binkw32.dll, is missing. The fact that it is missing suggests that it was not included on the disc itself or somehow failed to install properly. After copying the file from another location, a second DLL file, Mss32.dll , reports to be missing. Again, the suggestion would be that the file is missing from the disc or failed to install properly. After obtaining a copy of the Mss32.dll file and copying it into the Empire Earth 3 folder, a new error message was generated:

"The procedure _AIL_set_sample_51_volume_pan@24 could not be located in the dynamic link library mss32.dll"

If the Mss32.dll file was originally missing or somehow failed to install properly, such an error could occur if the system was attempting to load a Bink video file. I request that further research on this issue be performed. Should you find this request onerous, I request you escalate the issue to your superiors so that they may investigate further.

Two days later, the following message appeared in my inbox:

Thank you for contacting Vivendi Games Technical Support.
Thank you for writing back to us.

We are researching this issue, please allow us 24 - 72 hours to reply. I appreciate your support for Vivendi Games.

Best Regards,
Ron
Vivendi Games Technical Support

You can visit our website for the latest information at:
http://www.sierra.com/
You may also visit our online support site at:
http://support.sierra.com/

Still sounds like a form letter. Getting the suspicion that "Ron" is in fact Ramakrishna from Mumbai. But it seems as if the request that the issue get escalated actually did go through, for all the good it will do. At the time of this writing, fifteen days after my request for escalation, "Ron" still hasn't gotten back to me.

By now, my review of Empire Earth III should probably be up and readable on the PC Reviews section of the site. And how, do you ask, did I review a game which I couldn't get to run properly on my computer? The day after I sent my response to "Joshua," I had one of those "D'oh!" moments that I mentioned earlier. Normally, when you install a 32-bit application on WinXP x64 (and, I would also theorize, the 64-bit version of Vista), the system seems to automatically detect that it's a 32-bit application and runs it with the appropriate 32-bit emulation. In this case, however, the setup program for EE3 didn't get that emulation automatically, which in turn caused the program to fail to install properly. By going into the Properties window of the setup program, you can choose to run it an emulation mode (the original WinXP had this for programs which were designed for Win98/ME). Once the proper emulation was set, the game installed and ran without any sort of crashing or error messages popping up. So why didn't I share this information with Vivendi Tech Support? Send an email saying "Oh, hey, I fixed the problem!" and just get on with my review? There are a couple of reasons. First, at no time did I mention to them that I was working for the Armchair Empire. To them, I was just another person who bought a copy of their sub-par game. Secondly, if I was going to maintain the illusion that I was just another person who bought a copy of their sub-par game, I would have to operate under the theory that the likelihood that such a gamer would stumble across the same answer I did would be rather remote. Admittedly, I may be guilty of the same sort of assumption that I believe Vivendi Tech Support made, that such an average gamer was too stupid to know what they were doing, but I also have to consider the distinct possibility that there are folks out there who bought a 64-bit OS because some sales monkey convinced them that 64-bit is better than 32-bit and that they would have no problem running their old programs on it. As a general rule, that is true. XP 64 and Vista 64-bit both have one of the few genuinely useful features that Microsoft ever put into one of their OS products: the ability to keep running older programs till new 64-bit versions came out.

I had not contacted any publisher's tech support for several years prior to this experience. And if this is the quality of service that the average gamer can expect from publishers today, then I am deeply frightened. Blowing off your customers when you yourselves can't seem to find your own backsides with both hands and a flashlight is unforgivably stupid. It is my fervent belief that you owe your customers some brutal honesty when they come to you with a problem about your product. I believe that if you're going to take a position that a game cannot be run on technical grounds, you damned well explain yourselves fully after you do some serious research. I believe that if you're going to have tech support agents handling requests via email, they need to take the time to actually craft an intelligent answer as opposed to simply cutting and pasting chunks of form letter and hoping that customers will actually swallow it. Vivendi Tech Support dropped the ball on this one. And all it takes to hurt any company is one truly dissatisfied customer.

Raving Army

February 3, 2008


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