Dear Sony,
Let’s talk about my experience this morning trying to give you money and why I want to throw my PlayStation 4 out a high window.
This morning I logged into PlayStation Plus on my PS4 to review the monthly free games and add them to my library. The first game had an “Add to Library” button, as I expected, so I clicked on it, but instead of adding it to my library it popped up a screen telling me to subscribe to PlayStation Plus. “That’s odd,” I said to myself, “I’m already a PlayStation Plus member.”
In fact, it turns out that my membership is currently inactive for reasons I’ll explain shortly, but this highlights Problem # 1: The “Add to Library” button should never have appeared on my screen since my PSPlus membership wasn’t active.
I wasn’t able to find anything on my PS4 to explain why my membership wasn’t working, so I took out my laptop and tried to log into my PSPlus account there. Problem # 2: Here’s what I saw after working my way through a stupid, annoying CAPTCHA.
Next I attempted to figure out how to contact you to find out why I couldn’t log in. You sure do make it difficult for people to contact you!
- Problem # 3: There’s no “Contact” link on your support page at https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/ .
- Problem # 4: Browsing all over your support pages there is no obvious way to contact you.
- Problem # 5: The “Trouble Signing In?” instructions on your login page don’t say how to contact you.
- Finally, by going to your @AskPlayStation Twitter page I was able to find a link to https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/playstation-support-contact-guide/ (Problem # 6: why the hell did I have to go to your Twitter page to find this link?).
- That page says “if you still need help, select contact us at the bottom of the page,” but Problem # 7: There’s no “contact us” at the bottom of that page.
- There is something called “Online Assistant” at the bottom of the page. I tried using that and managed to get it almost to the point of connecting me to an agent, but then it asked for my online ID and Problem # 8: Your Online Assistant wouldn’t accept my online ID because it has a “+” character in it and apparently your automation doesn’t understand that email addresses can have “+” characters in them.
Next I tried logging in on my phone instead of my laptop. Wonder of wonders that worked! Problem # 9: Why am I able to log in on my phone but not my laptop? I was able to determine on my phone that my subscription had elapsed because my credit-card number changed in the middle of last year (somebody still the number and my card had to be reissued) and I had forgotten to update my credit card number in my PlayStation account. Problem # 10: Why didn’t you notify me when my payment failed?
I tried to add my new credit card number to my account on my phone. Nope! Problem # 11: When I attempted to add a credit card to my account on my phone your web site brought me back to the subscription page instead of allowing me to add a credit card.
I was finally able to log in from my desktop computer (Problem # 12: Why was I able to log in from there but not my laptop, which is on the same network and running the same OS and browser?), renew my PSPlus membership there, and then restart my PS4 and successfully add this months free games to my library.
It should have taken my five minutes to deal with this. Instead it took over an hour. Nearly everything that could have gone wrong did. Why are you so bad at this?
Sincerely,
An unwilling customer who, because of garbage like this, wouldn’t be giving you a dime if my son hadn’t already invested thousands of hours in Overwatch and Apex Legends.
