I was(am) one of the many unlucky people who had the "Unable to retreive patch data.Please check network connection" .

For those aware of this issue..well guess what?BIOWARE still hasn't solved it! There are still many players who have actually bought the game and STILL haven't played!!!

For those not aware of this , please just google the issue and you'll get many official forum pages with people still complaining about this. It is sad that connectivity issues from a badly designed launcher still lingers after so many months. It is 100% proven that it's NOT our fault. Besides i personally play online games all the time on my home pc.Lots of them. Never had such a persistant issue.

 Anyways i never got a reply from support back at beta.So eventhough i wanted to buy the game, this problem stopped me. Recenlty i received the 7 day trial. I took the chance. Problem still existed. I decided to communicate with support once more. To my suprise they quickly replied offering me lots of solutions.Of course i had to "try" and manually alter so many things on my router , firewall, create CMD files,DXdiag...you know...Sent them everything they asked for. Nothing from what they advised me to do worked. But i did actually tried the game a few times at my local internet cafe. But could never at my home pc.

Final support ticket ,3/19/12 , i was asked to sent them a Pathping.txt and a tracert.txt .I did. What i received a day later was :

Greetings ######,

I have received your transmission regarding launching the game client.
However, as the your 7-day trial has now ended, I am closing your ticket.

Thank you for your interest in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Keep an eye on www.swtor.com for future news on trial passes.

Please do not hesitate to contact us again if there is anything further we can help you with.

Galactic Support is our specialty...

Sincerely,

####
Star Wars: The Old Republic Customer Service

Are they serious? Did they actually think that the whole point into resolving a matter they should have generally resolved months ago was only about me playing the trial? I was actually thinking of buying the game! No matter if my trial was ending they should have at least try and help me one last time(since they already asked for thos 2 files which i immedietelly sent).

And at the same letter they say " Please do not hesitate to contact us again if there is anything further we can help you with"

Funny thing about all this. The person who last asked me for those two files in order to assist me was the same person that signed the mail above, interrupting his own support effort to a matter which is 100% BW own error.

Besides it makes no sence to actually have a trial account or a subscritpion when i have the "UNABLE TO RECEIVE PATCH DATA". This issue occures BEFORE the login process! Did support actually know that? I wonder...

Purely dissapointed here.

I'm curious, is it only European players having this issue or has it been happening in the US as well?

A canned response which is simply pastes from various things they have been authorized to say. Welcome to customer service!

I unsubbed this weekend.  I did raid and pvp, I saw mostly everything there was to see and do in the game.  There were a number of reasons that I decided to discontinue.  One of the lesser reasons was their poor customer support.  I was in a guild of over 100 people and I actually have seen people quit the game because the customer support is so poor- it was always the straw that would break the camel's back.  One of my guildmates and I had different problems with similar outcomes.  After 3 weeks of back and forth with customer service (because if they do respond it sometimes takes that long) both our problems got WORSE because they refunded us the wrong items. 

@OP if you do decide to play the game make sure you can play it first - it sounds like you are very smart in waiting and seeing.

I played on a RP EU server.

Three times i reported a player with an inappropriate name. I wont mention the name but it was against the RP rules set by Bioware.

Three times reported over a month period, three replies saiying they take this seriously and will act.

Nothing was done to change the name.

To answer your quesiton, no it would not. That is piss poor customer support.

Welcome to EA customer support service. If you get a good reply or even able to chat with someone, consider yourself lucky.

This game will be Warhammered.

Bioware should have never got in bed with EA...but then again what dev team can resist the big talk of $$$$$ publishers

As someone who works in customer service, I have to say that what people often fail to understand is that sometimes an issue just can not be resolved in a timely fashion. Not with the way support desks are set up anyway.

Support desks are typically separated into tiers.

Tier 1 is the person who typically has contact with the customer. The whipping boy that is the recipient of all that anger people want to unleash. They can solve minor issues like account and billing changes, password recovery and resets, and that sort of thing.

Tier 2 rarely works with the customers directly. They're usually just Tier 1's that have been at the company a lot longer, and typically help with less common issues that a Tier 1 can't figure out.

Tier 3's are the technical people. The ones that require a degree or some form of certification along with experience. They do all the programming and try to re-create problems in a controled environment to try and find the cause of an issue. This can take a considerable amount of time, and because unlike Tier 1's, they dont have people constantly yelling at them, they tend to take their sweet time. The customer, to a Tier 3, can easily become dehumanized because they never have any contact with them whatsoever, while Tier 1's become enbittered for taking all the heat for problems that are really beyond their control.

The system is horribly inefficient, yet its commonly used by multiple companies. At the very least, though, they should've given you your free trial back once the issue is resolved. You might want to call them directly and ask to speak with a supervisor about possibly having that done.

Originally posted by FrostWyrm

As someone who works in customer service, I have to say that what people often fail to understand is that sometimes an issue just can not be resolved in a timely fashion. Not with the way support desks are set up anyway.

Support desks are typically separated into tiers.

Tier 1 is the person who typically has contact with the customer. The whipping boy that is the recipient of all that anger people want to unleash. They can solve minor issues like account and billing changes, password recovery and resets, and that sort of thing.

Tier 2 rarely works with the customers directly. They're usually just Tier 1's that have been at the company a lot longer, and typically help with less common issues that a Tier 1 can't figure out.

Tier 3's are the technical people. The ones that require a degree or some form of certification along with experience. They do all the programming and try to re-create problems in a controled environment to try and find the cause of an issue. This can take a considerable amount of time, and because unlike Tier 1's, they dont have people constantly yelling at them, they tend to take their sweet time. The customer, to a Tier 3, can easily become dehumanized because they never have any contact with them whatsoever, while Tier 1's become enbittered for taking all the heat for problems that are really beyond their control.

 

The system is horribly inefficient, yet its commonly used by multiple companies. At the very least, though, they should've given you your free trial back once the issue is resolved. You might want to call them directly and ask to speak with a supervisor about possibly having that done.

Thank you for your advise. They did contact me again today apologising and "explaining" to me that they never had any intention on stopping their efforts to solve my issue. Unfortuanately they offered to me the same solutions which others had a few days ago , eventhough i HAD explained to them that i have tried all of that before! Don't they look up on support history? Can't they see my former support discussions?

Only fresh approach i had from last mail was advising me to turn my router on/off....Yeeyy that would help out launching a 250.000.000 $ mmo production.  I do that all the time with all my mmos!  JFC

I will eventually try and ask for a new 7 day trial, just to see what their answer will be...I have no need to beg. I can always create a new account...ON A NEW MMO OF COURSE !!!