‘SimCity’ Developer EA Censors Own Support Number In Forums

Developer EA, creator of SimCity, has censored its own support number in its forums.

After the servers went down, upsetting myriads of SimCity early consumers to the point where people complaining about the service were getting banned, EA has gone one further and censored its own support number. In the EA forums, if you type the support number 866-543-5435 and submit, the site will replace the entire number with a string of asterisks, much as it does with swear words. Apparently if nobody calls, nobody can complain.

The censorship does not work with any other phone number; just the EA support number. Forum posters tried other phone numbers and they posted just fine. It’s just the EA customer support number they can’t post uncensored.

Friday, Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw proudly announced that EA is “hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality” of SimCity.

One has to wonder what would happen if someone called them and told them how wonderful the offline mod is in their game. This could unnerve some of the higher-ups, as they clearly stated yesterday that there will no official offline mode in SimCity.

This could have been a planned bit of foresight, seeing as they didn’t want everybody abusing the phone number and wasting the time of their CSRs. Or perhaps it was intended to keep the number from being spammed in the forums. But why just their customer service number? There are far worse numbers people could call, like the Better Business Bureau, to complain about EA’s SimCity issues.

Other methods aren’t possible to get ahold of EA’s customer service. There is no online help chat window, as the company is insisting that customers call the number to handle complaints. It almost seems like EA just wants to pretend everything’s fine and doesn’t want any facts to burst their bubble.

What do you think about SimCity developer EA censoring its own customer support number in its forums?

Stupid EA again… RT @destructoid: EA censors its own support number on its forums dtoid.it/YDHmNg

— MagicFeather (@M4gicFe4ther) March 16, 2013