EA customer service don’t know what they’re talking about

A strong title, I’ll admit. But, as you’ll see, I’m not wrong.

I’ve been a massive fan of Battlefield 4 since it first came out. I bought it for the PlayStation 3 and then upgraded to the PlayStation 4 version, when I got that. I played it for thousands of hours and hit the top rank.

I ran the website bfmedic.com for many years, which gave news and tips about Battlefield, and crafted gameplay videos on YouTube.

Yeah, I was a fan.

Recently, I’ve been getting the itch to return. I don’t have a PlayStation 5, so can’t play Battlefield 6 and BF4 was definitely the best, more recent version of the game. Sadly, BF4 is dying. Not surprising considering its age. But there are just a handful of official game servers left and a sprinkling of other servers, often just playing the same map on repeat.

So, I thought I’d rent my own server.

How renting a BF4 server works

At this point, let me talk about the “other” servers, as this is important to this story.

In BF4 you can rent your own server and then run it how you want. If you’re playing on PC you can go to one of many third party companies who can provide it. On consoles, though, EA themselves provide them. On PS4, you rent the server through the PlayStation Store (as you have to do with everything), but they’re just the money handler. EA themselves are responsible for the technical aspects of the server rental.

For example, on the official EA Battlefield blog, they mentioned the following after some initial issues with the role-out of the option to rent a server…

If you rented any servers on Xbox One and are experiencing issues please contact EA Customer Support

Not from EA themselves, but there’s this confirmation from other users in the official EA forum…

…on PlayStation, all user support including server support has to be delivered by EA themselves. 

What happened when I rented one

So, I decided to rent my own server. I looked at what maps over the years have been rated as the fan favourites and created my own map rotation based on that. Just to see if people would be interested I hired a server for just a week, with the intention of renting it for longer if needs be. As it turned out, I’m glad I did it for just a week.

I set the server up, joined and it looked great. I created a banner and did everything I could to make it look like a legitimate and useful server for any BF4 gamers on PS4 to enjoy. I spread the news to my old gaming clan, along with players on Reddit.

And it was Reddit readers that soon alerted me to a problem. They couldn’t find it. The server browser, available within the game, wasn’t listing my server and, therefore, nobody could join it. I checked my own game and, sure enough, it wasn’t listed.

I went into the my server settings and it showed it working just fine. I changed some configuration, which made the server restart. It then appeared on the browser list again. Soon after, though, it was gone again.

This continued over the first few days, with it never staying on the list for long. It seemed to be working but just wasn’t available for others to find.

So, I contacted EA through their online chat support.

What EA told me

The first person I spoke to couldn’t get a handle on the issue at all and was asking me for screenshots of how it wasn’t appearing in the server list. I asked the reasonable question of how to provide a screenshot of something that was missing. How do you prove a negative?

Anyway, they passed me onto someone else who quickly told me… it wasn’t EA’s responsibility. I had to contact Sony.

Nope. No.

I was forceful but not rude. I repeated the issue and explained how I knew that they ran the servers, not Sony. They stood fast. I explained how long I’d been playing the game, my background with it and the fact that I’d rented servers from them in the past. They wouldn’t budge. It was Sony, they insisted.

I told them their customer service was terrible. Which it is.

Back on Reddit, I’m told there are known bugs with the server rental and you have to let it expire if EA won’t help you. Now, if I’d rented that server for a much longer period, I’d have been pissed. As it is, I’ve lost a little over £5.

It will lapse after a week and I won’t renew. I thought I’d help the BF4 community, but that doesn’t look to be possible. EA have given up on the game and go as far now as to openly lie about what support they’re responsible for.

Such a shame.

Here’s the worrying thing

I think the customer service agent threatened me.

After I told them they were wrong they sent me what appeared to be a cut/paste script warning me about sharing my account and how I can be banned from all EA services if I wasn’t careful. I asked what they were referring to, as none of the conversation was about my account, let alone any kind of sharing. They just said it was related to who is responsible for the server. Which it wasn’t.

Either they cut/pasted the wrong thing and didn’t realise or this was a warning to me that if I continued to give them a hard time about this, they could close down my account, claiming I was sharing it (which I’m not).