Warning: Politicians May Be Abusing Their Powers to Make Gaming… Better?
by Dan Landis on August 3, 2008 at 7:19 pm
This story starts with a young boy and a subscription to the MMO Final Fantasy XI. After a few months with the game, he grows tired of it and decides he’s going to cancel. Great, so how do you do that? What seems like should be a simple task ends up an exercise in frustration. Little did Square Enix know — they just messed with the wrong guy.
When Frank Edwards wanted to cancel his son’s subscription, he had a hard time finding out how to go about it. The Final Fantasy XI community website supposedly had no link to cancel an account, and he was unable to locate a phone number until he checked his credit card statement. A call to this number resulted in an hour and 45 minutes of elevator music while he was on hold.
Rather than just put up with this bullshit, Frank Edwards calls up his good buddy Illinois State Representative Raymond Poe. You see, Frank Edwards just happens to be an alderman in Springfield, and he’s learned that having a friend with bill-writing abilities is a good thing to have.
Frank gets his pal, the Senator, to propose a law that fixes this horse-swaggle, and that law ended up just getting passed earlier this week. The law states:
So basically, it says: “That’s what you get for fucking with me, Square Enix.” It’s actually kind of funny how the law is written to specifically address Frank’s problem. To put things into perspective, though, Frank Edwards previously had asked Senator Poe to help him pass a law that “package delivery trucks are not permitted to park along the curb next to a driveway because the exhaust from said package delivery truck is harmful to the homeowner’s tomato plants and totally makes the homeowner’s wife angry.”
Okay, I made that up.
Having had a similar issue after canceling my World of WarCraft subscription a few years ago, it’s cool to think that I could do something about it if I decided to become more politically involved and make friends with a Senator. I won’t, but it’s still nice to know I could.
It’s strange to see videogame legislation pop up in the news like this and have it not throw me into a geekified rage. This one, however, seems to to be a win on both sides of the camp. What’s next, legislation that makes licensed games not suck?
Source: Silicon Alley Insider
 |
|
|
Related Posts:
- Breaking: British MP Sensible About Video Games
- Sam’s Club Fallout 3 Auction: Bid on an 8ft 120lb Brotherhood of Steel Statue
- Resistance 2 Latest Victim in Metacritic Douchey User Flames
- Make a Solar-powered DS
- Morbid Adventure Gaming Comes to the DS
- MS: Wii Controllers Are Gimmicks
- London MCM Expo next weekend, attempting cosplay world record
- Top Ten Most Badass Weapons in Gaming History – # 9 The Blades of Chaos
3 Comments » |
on August 3, 2008 11:58 pm
This is silly, it’s easy to cancel your Final Fantasy XI subscription…I’ve done it about 10+ times!
on August 4, 2008 12:46 am
Yeah, I kind of assumed it wasn’t as hard as the dude made it out to be, but I never played FFXI and couldn’t say how simple it may have really been. The moral of the story: If you are too stupid to figure out the instructions, get politicians to change the instructions.
on August 4, 2008 7:32 am
Now I just hope this law applies to Microsoft and their requirement to call a 1-800 number to cancel your Xbox Live subscription.