To be fair, an Origin dev did provide a workaround (http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/6528996.page), I'm just checking to see if it works.

Their support is top notch, only second behind Amazon. You can activate any game from any source there, as long as it is new enough. And for the older games, you can get support to activate them.

They had a bad start due to their ToS making them sound like spyware.

That's nice to hear. Btw. can one turn it off, aka is it optional or does it have to be on when you start a game?

It does what it is supposed to do, it's EULA and account shenanigans are now worse than Steam's.

The only reason to hate is if like me you think it offers you nothing, or if you hate EA because... well... they're EA.

Their customer service is pretty damn good compared to their competition (Steam, Uplay, Impulse, etc.)

I'd say they have the best customer service period, for a gaming client. The problem is their support is inconsistent, you may have to go through multiple reps to get an issue solved, but when you DO come across a good rep, you can expect good support and the wait period for getting in contact with them is very short compared to Steam which can take weeks to get a response from.

Origin has a lot of negative rep, because EA is behind it, and a lot of the games on Origin have extra DRM, such as securom and solidshield. Other than that, it's not a bad client. I'd say it's the third best client, with Steam and Desura being 1st and 2nd best.

My support experience with Origin has been just as bad as Steam. I tried activating several games and got told that I may only activate one of my retail titles. Not because the others weren't supported, no, just that company policy was to only allow one.

Just checked, the workaround doesn't seem to work.

So they offered you a special service for one game and that is bad?

You aren't entitled at all to have those games activated, you know? Some of the games simply can't be activated. Eg, Crysis one is a real piece of work due to it's regional retail licensing deal.

What games were the problem?

I was in English support and the guy - an Indian using an anglicised name I think - barely spoke English. There were real communication problems. Crysis, Mass Effect 1 and C&C 3 I think were the issue.

As I say, it wasn't specific games, they just said pick one and that was it, and did not mention this fact on the Help page before I ended up waiting 15 minutes for an advisor.

I'm less annoyed about the fact that I couldn't activate the games than I am about the incompetence of the customer support there.

They outsourced it to india some time ago. I only tried Crysis from the games of this list. (The war chest actually), Took them a bit, about 20 min, but then I had two games on my Origin.

They recently updated their "automatic acceptance" of games on the service. (eg, you can now also activate Bulletstorm without going through support). Might be worth trying.

Edit: And while they weren't the first to offer that service, it was most noticeable with EA as they simply have the most games. When Valve did it with their games, there wasn't really much to activate ... This is why, imo, they established this as industry standard which lead to GOG and uPlay following in their wake.

ITT: langourmonkey trying to get some rep back. Seriously, starting random threads in hopes of getting some rep?

I see that the reaction is the same as for GR's posts, already downrepped lol

Have you used offline mode recently? They updated something, it works just fine for me now.

My Steam password was saved, I killed the internet and launched Steam: it said there was no internet, would you like to start offline mode? Yes thanks.

Boom, offline mode just started and my gaemz were ready to play, I didn't switch to offline mode before turning off the internet, it worked out of the box, I just had to save the password.

Well not too bad, it took years but I don't have to worry anymore about my connection when rocking steam stuff. =)

That's how it's been working for a long time already (years). It's just that it required everything to be properly set up and that there were pretty common bugs that could prevent it from working properly.

The most common one probably being the one where Steam didn't shut down properly if you shut Windows down with it running because Windows shuts down Steam's shutdown process prematurely, which makes Steam *require* a login to the internet to fix itself the next time, which would negate the offline mode. That's the one they fixed recently (supposedly).

Steam's offline mode works. It's just nowhere near as hassle free and newbie proof as Origin's is. They need to work on that.

Happy to hear that offline mode was just fine for you but that wasn't the case for me.

Before that update I had to start offline mode before turning off my PC. I tried to close Steam before closing Windows but it didn't work as expected. The only way to be 100% sure: re-start Steam in offline mode and then I was fine.

My connection is pretty bad, I'm dealing with it since I started using Steam (two years ago) and I know how unreliable it was for me.

Now it works as you say but it used to be different. =)