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Miscellaneous Madness Raving Rants

Gaming, Interrupted

Last Wednesday SoE surprised everyone with the rollout of GU48 in EQ2. We knew it was coming but everyone figured it would either be later in the week what with Fan Faire taking everyone’s time and energy the previous weekend. This update added a ton of content that Lore and I were looking forward to so Comcast deciding to help us celebrate the release by having our internet connection drop off was NOT appreciated.

 

It was just the internet connection, cable still worked just fine, so we called, they checked, it was working intermittently but at much slower speed so they were going to send someone out…on SATURDAY!. Suddenly, on Thursday it was back, though we did still get the occasional drop, and I got an automated call saying it might have been fixed remotely and asking if I wanted to cancel the service call. Needless to say I declined. It appeared to be working Thursday night and Friday night but on Saturday morning it was back to dropping offline. I called, naturally while I was on hold it came back on, and they said the earliest the could send someone was Sunday afternoon. Lore had to do some testing for her project at work on Sunday so she called them back, told them Sunday was unaccepetable, especially considering we had originally had an appointment for Saturday that we had canceled because they had "fixed it remotely". They agreed to try and get someone to come out that afternoon and promised her a call back by 2:00 PM to let her know if it was going to be possible. After getting no call by 3:00 she called back only to first find that they could locate the call tracking number she’d been given and then when she finally got through to someone they told her sorry the earliest was going to be Sunday after all.

By this time the cable is back to mostly working and it continued to mostly work all day Sunday. Sunday afternoon the guy shows up, checks everything in the house, replaces one connector where the cable comes in the attic but I think that was just for show. When he goes to check the connector box, in our neighbors yard, he finds that the cable has been damaged, probably by a weedeater. He ends up replacing the cable run from the junction box to the house due to the fact that water had gotten into the damaged section of the cable. I’m still not 100% convinced that was the problem since, as I said, we would go for hours at a time with no issues and the TV never had any issues.

Not that it matters, since we’ve had connectivity issues with them before and since Comcast has announced this whole bandwidth throttling thing Lore has been down on them for awhile now. With this round of issues we’ve decided to switch back to Speakeasy DSL. It’s not quite as fast but it’s fast enough, we very rarely had any connectivity issues with them and when we did they were always upfront about the problem and very responsive. The only reason we switched was because Comcast offered a good deal on the TV/Internet combo which has long since expired. As an example of the difference, when we called Speakeasy offered us $20.00 a month off the regular price if we signed up for a year and an additional $10.00 off for being a returning customer and waived the installation fee. They’ve also sent us daily updates about where the install stands which to me is more important than the discounts since it shows a willingness to communicate with their customers.

I was actually able to get some gaming time in this weekend so I’ll update that later.

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