A Playful Misconception, A Childhood's Dream

This here is going to be a long rant. I can feel it already.

Ordered my copy of WAR from ETA at the Mall and I didn’t expect to get it until next week but they called me up last weekend and said it’s here. I’ve had my suspicion, especially when they told me the price was $133. I let me self feel excited all the same.  Who knows, maybe WAR is THAT hot.

But when I got there, the staff pulled out what looked like a piece of black colour card at first sight. There and then I knew something was wrong. All it said on the front was Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The back was a sticker saying something like do not accept if it is void.

I had no choice but to open it, which translated into me purchasing it. Sure enough, the specially made sticker showed “VOID” after I, as gently as I could, lifted it up. And behold, a few serial numbers are written there. The Open Beta code, Head Start code, and the bonus special items code. And on top it said, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Collector’s Edition.

I only have a brief and very vague idea of what this is. So I went home and check and signed up on a few forums just to ask what is going on. Fortunately I found gameaxis.com which is a Singaporean dominant forum (ETA told me they order their stock from Singapore). And they explained that, in a nutshell, I needed to exchange that card in order to claim the Collector’s Edition (or CE for short as I’ve come to learned), which came with a comic book and a miniature. And after the game launches, I only have 7 days to enter the code from the box in order to continue playing.

I then called the same staff and explained to her the problem. A Filipino, she had a hard time grasping my explanation and it was very obvious she has no understanding of these things. But basically, I told her I didn’t order the CE and they had sent the wrong thing. She said she will get back to me, of course.

Not wanting to risk it, I decided to explain myself through sending an email to the address on the business card. And just an hour later, I got a call from the owner of ETA, who is also in charge of the cinema. I was quite surprised to get his call, needless to say. This almost never happened in Brunei.

He promptly apologised to me regarding this and explained to me that he will call his Singapore distributor to get it cleared up. And minutes later, he called again with the response. He informed that the distributor, EA Singapore (again, a surprise as I didn’t knowo EA would bother with such a tiny market like Brunei directly), whose usual staff taking care of Brunei side, was on sick leave the day they shipped the order to Brunei. The other staff who took over didn’t know that that wasn’t the game to be sent here.

So now they have couriered my card back to EA and hopefully EA will courier the CE soon. Depending on how you look at it, that day when the staff took a sick leave was an unlucky day for me, or a lucky one because no pre-order collector’s edition has ever sent to Brunei for sale, or not that I have ever heard of.