The People's Republic of EA

Even Vicodin can't save you from this pain...

EA announced last week that there are isolated incidents where consumers who purchased Red Alert 3 received a "defective" serial card.  The "defect" comes in the form of a missing last digit of the registration code required to install and play the game.

Normally, a company that has such a "defect" would consider a replacement, email, or a simple web utility that allows for the consumer to enter in the correct portion of the code and it will generate the last digit for you.  Instead, in EA's infinite wisdom and benevalance, you the consumer, their customer, someone who's paid good money for a game instead of pirating it, is told to simply "guess that last digit.  Sure there's only 36 possible combinations (26 alphabet + 10 numbers) but that's certainly not something you like to hear when pirates don't even require a real code to play the game.
The fact that EA did this is not surprising to me at all, especially knowing their track record for game support.  I recall playing Battlefield 2 during the time 1.4 patch came out.  That patch essentially broke most player's machines and reduced multi-player to a bloody mess (which IS the game).  It took EA a whole month and then some to finally patch the game to a stable point.  Some of the support suggestions were to uninstall the game and reinstall, other more outlandish ones had you hacking the EXE commands to execute a certain resolution size only.  I never installed the 1.4 patch but at the Internet cafe I played at they did install 1.4 and I wasn't able to log into my account (which was one of the symptoms).  At this point, I gave up on the game and after 1.5 months of not playing, I never went back.

Currently, the only EA game I have installed on my machine is Mass Effect and that's because I have no choice but to play that game on the PC due to my penchant for motion sickness in FPS games on a console.  But I will not be buying Red Alert 3 until such time a steam version is available without Securom or another version with relaxed restrictions.  I guess we should all thank EA for not charging their customers $5 for shipping and handling to get a new code.