True story - when I was on the phones doing support, prior to transferring to the Fishtank, where the 'real' EA guys worked (so named for being a concrete and glass mini-building inside the call center where the other guys were not allowed to go), WAR was launched. It was a disaster, and among the wreckage was the issue with game codes - codes kept coming up as being in-use. As it turned out, Mythic had exploited the databases to 'reserve' thousands of codes for their guys, friends, family, the random hobo sleeping in another city some guy might know...you get the idea.
Now, true fax - generating key codes for any EA game goes through a specialized database system, and requires authorization roughly equivalent to using nuclear weapons. Hence why new key codes for games are generated in job lot batches and loaded into the account management database. When those codes run out, a new job lot has to be generated, with the same ludicrous red tape. It took almost a week of yelling at Mythic to get them to sign off on generating new codes. And for about...I want to say six hours...the new batch worked. Then, mysteriously, codes were showing as in-use again.
We checked the account management system, and we saw what'd happened - Mythic was stealing codes for personal use again, including Collector's Edition codes that could not be regenerated, from the paying customer. When we confronted them about it, the liaison we talked to literally said "Fuck EA. It's our game, we'll do what we want. And fuck your CSRs, too. It's not our problem." Eventually it got sort of worked out, but we had to dig into some serious backstock in Warranty, find the very few boxes and CEs that hadn't had their codes stolen, and send those as replacements to customers. Naturally, some of them took the useless ones and sold them on EBay, prompting angry calls from Mythic, asking why we'd sent these guys new copies...
That's how Mythic acts.
Like what? You mean after the "tutorial" a gigantic Guardian face pops up and says LOL Just Kidding! Here is the real game...
