Effing Stellar Customer Service: OnLive
If you are a member of my closer circles of friends, you probably by now think I must be secretly working for the marketing team of OnLive. I’ve been a major shill for this company since I first encountered them at PAX 2009, and rarely a week goes by that I don’t spout out more OnLive propaganda, entirely of my own free will. A recent major technical difficulty that I’ve experienced with their service serves as yet another example of how awesome this company is, to me.
A while back, the Capcom game Dark Void went on sale for pretty cheap via the OnLive system, and I jumped on it. I’d played the original demo at PAX that same year, and I’d been wanting to give the full game a try for a while. I wasn’t disappointed, either: despite some fairly scathing reviews, I find Dark Void to be a pretty awesome action game. It’s more or less The Rocketeer, and I effing loved that movie.
Unfortunately, a critical game-crashing error has consistently plagued me at the very end of the first episode of the game (out of three). The error happens every single time I activate a crucial mechanic in the game. In fact, there’s no way to avoid the error, as that crucial mechanic is required to advance a certain scene and complete the end of the first episode.
Trial and error and a whole lot of guessing have led me to believe that the error is exclusive to the use of a game controller in that scene; mouse and keyboard work fine without issue. This wouldn’t be a huge deal for me (being a mouse-and-keyboard shooter fan on PC) if it weren’t for the fact that Dark Void is a much more enjoyable console-and-couch experience than a PC one.
The error is specifically limited to the OnLive platform, and their service team has been on the frickin’ ball with helping me resolve this. Believing it might be an issue specifically related to my own unique user data, the support representative assigned to the case even went so far as to play through the game from the beginning all the way just past the point that was blocking me, and then replacing my save data with his own. I would do terrible secret things if I were able to land a job that let me play video games in order to help out customers, all as part of a day’s work.
The error persists, unfortunately, but I can bypass it using the mouse and keyboard, for now. But their tech team continues to work on it, their support rep continues to communicate with me, and their response time and service level continue to wow me.
I’m impressed. Service teams today rarely do that for me.