Annoyed: the problem w/support forums and lack of communication

ok. this post is a rant more than anything. i myself work in tech support for my real job and am very proud of the level support and customer service i deliver. i work with my users who have issues or problems and will stick with them until its either figured out or we have an alternative solution/route. this is what i'm paid to do and in turn what i deliver.

this leads me into my rant. we live in a world in which information flows at an amazing rate. look at any internet meme? within hours, a single topic or fad or event can catch the net on fire. we can tweet or facebook or rant on a blog or site or in a forum. communicating information couldn't be easier or cheaper either.

so.. why is it that a company that offers services to users who in turn pay for feel that they don't need to let the users know when there are problems? my example is a current one that i'm very annoyed with: EA's Madden 2010 servers went down last night around 7pm CST. at that point, i was kicked off of my wildcard online franchise game and in turn have not been able to connect to since. this is now over 24 hours. yes, i know taht doesn't seem that long but when you are the commissioner of a online franchise of hardcore madden players; thats an eternity. and add to that the fact that my game is the last game before everyone else gets to play. yeah, not cool.

like any geek, the first place i hit up was the forum boards over at EASports. i notice that there are several threads strewn about with issues w/connecting to the servers. most issues seemed to be pretty similar, kicked from a game and can't connect. however, in every SINGLE THREAD, I DIDN'T SEE A SINGLE REPLY BY ANYONE FROM EA.

really??? what the f@$(k year do we live in??? i hate when companies have a forum support board but no one from the company ever monitors or even makes a post hardly. why can't ea just say that "Hey, we're having intermittent issues with the Franchise servers. We are working on a fix." and then keep us posted on that thread?

is it really too much to hire a college intern to be in charge of monitor the forum boards and replying to issues? hell, i'd take a tweet that just confirmed they knew of the problem.

all we want is just to know that someone is aware and working on the issue. i talked to tech support online and they were the most hopeless group yet. are they in the USA even? sure seemed like a ton of canned responses. telling me to unhook my cable modem? wtf?? did i not just tell you i can get online via my ps3 browser and have connected to madden servers JUST fine until the last 24 hours??

sorry. it just annoys the hell out of me that we pay companies millions of our dollars for even a subpar product yet they don't think its important for us to know when there is an issue. you better reply soon, or you may have a forum board of pissed off madden fanboys. they're worse than sonyfan boys.. just playin


/Rant