All my devices have been deactivated

From NeoGAF:

I have 2 Ps4 and 2 Ps3. All listed as my devices. We have 1 ps4 set as primary console, one as guest.

Now, yesterday apparently all my consoles were deactivated. I did not do this. There is a Ps4 now activated as my primary console (but I do not own this console).

I dont know what to do, I have 2 Ps4's in the house and I cannot activate either as a primary.

I cannot deactivate all my consoles as they have already been deactivated on the PSN account page and it no longer gives me the option.

I contacted PSN support twice, and they say I have to wait 6 months, and that they seem to think I have given my PSN details to another PS4. I am claiming this must be account fraud.

However, PSN support say as this mystery Ps4 has made some free purchases (PS+ downloads) on my account then they dont believe me and say it is my doing. I ahve argued with the guy for hours, he will not let me speak to someone else and I cannot deactivate this unknown Ps4.

Help GAF, I am going nuts. PSN service is the rudest and most non-compliant and unhelpful support I have ever seen. I am the account holder and they will not help me and terminated the phone call. Unbelievable.

We all had issues with Sony's customer service (a compilation post)

With the increased exposure due to the Watchdog programme, people all over the Internet have been commenting on the stories, adding to the initial stories from RLLMUK.  These comments generally fall into four categories:

• I got a refund so I'm all right Jack
• Something irrelevant since they haven't read the situation properly
• Backing up Sony because of some sense of company loyalty
• Other horror stories

Here are some examples of the last of these.

Agent_Llama on Eurogamer:

My other half bought a game from PSN and, somehow, they managed to charge him 12 times for it. Refused to refund it, even though it's technically impossible to buy a game more than once on PSN. Eventually managed to wrangle vouchers out of them to use on PSN, but they flat refused to refund the excess charges.

wibbl on Eurogamer:

I have been trying to chase up 10 quid that I am owed for a PayPal promotion they were running throughout March that has never been honoured. PayPal actually refunded the money I was owed, but Sony then responded to this by banning my account.

I'm now embroiled in a tedious support saga trying to both get my account re-enabled and my tenner back.

All because two multinational corporations are incapable of running a simple promotion, and both are more interested in pointing the finger at each other than actually protecting their customers.

CliffPromise:

I was the victim of fraud on PSN. £34 in FIFA points that had been bought abroad. I had to chase them for months to get it back.

loadstone007:

I bought a DLC on the wrong store, which doesn't match the version of the game I have. This means I can't use that DLC - and Sony refused to refund me. I don't get it - I'm unable to use the DLC and it was made in error. They can block the license for that DLC on my system, so why not give me my money back? I spent $10 in vain.

redcrayon

Back in October, I used the 'add £50 via paypal and we'll give you £10 extra credit' promotion. After adding the money, PSN didn't credit me. I then contacted Paypal, who blamed Sony, and then Sony, who first claimed the promotion wasn't valid (it was, it had been emailed to me earlier that week) and then blamed Paypal. It took me a total of 9 emails to five different people to get the bottom of it, and even then only after I forwarded them a copy of their own promotional email, then the receipt from my paypal transaction. It was only a tenner, but even so, their immediate answer being 'not pur fault!' when I've just given them £50 and spent hundreds with them on my PSN account over the years was disgusting. My advice is to avoid any Sony/Paypal promotions like the plague.

berelain

Sony have terrible customer service; I was on the receiving end of it after my original 'fat' PS3 had the yellow light of death, and the refurbished one they replaced it with had the same yellow light within 24 hours of me receiving it, and the refurbished one the replaced that one with also yellow lighted within another week. It took a few hours of phone calls and a lot of frustration before they eventually agreed to send me a newer model PS3 instead of another refurbished 'fat' one, which clearly had a problem. That replacement is still going strong.

psaunder

Had similar issue here in Australia. Accidently purchased a PS Vita game on the master account, instead of my kids account , so had to purchase it again (not sure which way around) , either way I asked for a refund of the game I couldn't use. After a few emails, they stopped responding to me. Pathetic customer service.

beck1110

I bought the monthly plus games through the PS Plus section of the PlayStation website and was charged for one of the games due to a mistake of their pricing. I spent weeks getting in contact with Sony and got nowhere, it was only after I contacted several gaming journalist websites and watchdogs that I very suddenly and randomly got a refund.

I was appalled at Sony's lack of customer service and lack of process for complaints. Each member of staff had a different answer and method to deal with my complaint. It took on average 4 days for an email to be responded to and nearly an hour to get through to a real person on the phone. Every one of their staff admitted the problem was with their website but would not issue a refund or even a credit voucher as it was against their policy.

Rpt81

Back when they gave out the 10% code for the Christmas outage, I accidentally ordered (via the web store) PS3 DLC where I actually wanted the PS4 version. Rang up, not expecting any joy, and was told that there was nothing that could be done about it, even though I hadn't actually downloaded the content at all.

PoliteElliot on Gamespot

In my experience Sony customer service was terrible! Purchases were made on my account fraudulently and I contacted Sony via their website. I reside in Norway and I had to email 3 different customer support addresses, all supplied by Sony, and each time I was asked to try another address! Eventually, unbelievably, I was asked to contact a Film company!!??

"Thank you for contacting Nordisk Film Distribution AS – Official distributor for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. We will return with more information to you as soon as we receive it from SCEE."

And I never heard anything from them after this ...

Eventually I just gave up - congratulations Sony, cutting down your support costs by making it so ineffective your dissatisfied customers give up. If it was as difficult to make purchases as it is to get customer service Sony would make very little money.

I can't remove my credit cards because the website doesn't work

I'm trying to sort out these toggles [to turn off auto-renew, remove my credit card] on the website - I got as far as it taking me here :

http://en.support.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/272/unknown-answer

With this message:

This web page has a redirect loop 

Well played Sony!

Sony renewed my PSN subscription even though auto-renew was turned off

Sony helped themselves to $17.99 of the $50.00 I had in my wallet which was actually to pay for another year; they took out just 3 months even though I have auto renew turned OFF.

Although its not disastrous ($5 loss) don't assume the auto renew OFF is OK.  It means they will take the funds if they are in your wallet but won't take from a card. I searched high and low on the site and can't see the option to not touch your wallet. It even says I have no subscriptions.

So in 3 months I will have to top up the $50.00 and purchase the year sub before they take the 3 months again.

I bought an extended warranty for my PS4 but when it broke Sony wouldn't repair it

A lengthy piece over at Bleeding Cool.

I heard my wife stirring and she ended up waking up and running downstairs in a panic thinking our house was on fire because she smelled the burning plastic smell. I told her I was pretty sure it came from the PlayStation 4, and she asked me if it was smoky in the house or if her eyes were messing with her since she just woke up. She confirmed our suspicions – it smelled smoky when she went upstairs, turned on the lights up there, and the smoke was fairly thick. Obviously, I was quick to contact Sony about this issue.

After setting up a service, now being a year and 3 months after my purchase date, but still well within my three year extended warranty, I waited a week for my shipping box that never came. I contacted Sony again to get an update on the situation where I was informed that I was NOT under warranty anymore and that my $60 extended warranty only covered my then second console despite what I was told. I got off the online chat and called Sony support directly where I was put on hold for quite a while until I was eventually informed that they would NOT cover the PS4 unless I paid for the service. All of this, despite the fact that it had the potential to burn my house down if I wasn't around to notice the smell and unplug it. I immediately traded in my console as a broken, defective system (lessening my trade value) and put my money towards some upcoming Xbox One releases.

Sony think that security of your PSN account is entirely your responsibility - do they also think that making sure your PS4 isn't dangerous internally and doesn't burn down your house is also your responsibility?  Maybe they want everyone to open their consoles to check they're safe ... which of course will invalidate the warranty.

I bought six games and only five work

This epic saga is also captured on a separate site at http://sonyfail.blogspot.co.uk/

I bought my son the Lego Vita 8 gig memory pack from Argos a few weeks back when it was in the sale. It has the 8 gig card and a voucher code for 6 Lego PSP games -  Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Batman 1 & 2, Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter.

Went to the redeem voucher screen on my vita and redeemed the code. All appeared to go through OK (well, it came up with a few connection errors but that’s not unusual for the PSN) but I quickly saw an error screen for Harry Potter before it disappeared. Invalid code or something.

Anyway, went to the transaction screen and 5 PSP games are queued for download. Apart from Harry Potter.

I start them downloading anyway and they all download fine.  But HP ain't on the list.  Next day I try the code again (in case it was a glitch). Nope, just shows the 5 I have already downloaded.  I search for HP on the store and it’s on there. It only has the ‘buy now’ option for £11.99.

So, with a drink in hand I decide to ring up the helpline. 55 minutes later I get through to someone. Give them credit, they were quite helpful and friendly but in a nutshell ...

“That shouldn’t happen, if the code is invalid it should be invalid for all the games, not one out of the six”

“Our system shows that you have downloaded POTC OK but it's in Russian”.

Rigghttt. I tell her over the phone that its not (I start the game while she’s on the phone to make sure).

She can't work out why HP won’t download and she’ll have to escalate it.  Could I take a picture of the screen that’s asking me to pay for it and she gives me a reference for the call to go to ‘stage 2’ or whatever. I make sure I read the reference number back twice to confirm.

She gives me an email address to send it to. I send an email to them with a picture of the screen and also a picture of the voucher code as well to cover all the bases.

18/1/2015

They reply “Unfortunately the reference number you have quoted is incorrect”

I reply “This is the number I was given, if you can't trace it, cant you use my PSN ID? If not, can you please ring me?” I give them my number.

20/1/2015

They reply “Thank you for your email. We are looking forward to hearing from you”

I reply “I have already replied, please see the email chain”

22/1/2015

They reply “thanks for your email, can see you are having some problems with your account. Unfortunately, the voucher code you have provided is not for the UK Region. Therefore, you will be unable to redeem this on a UK account.”

I reply “Suggest you recheck the situation and if it's not valid, how come I managed to download 5 out of the 6 games?” I also say that if they want, they can credit my PSN id with £11.99 so I can buy it directly.

24/1/2015

Thanks for your e-mail about your PlayStation Vita (PS Vita).

I'm sorry to hear that you've experienced an issue with you PS Vita. From the information you've provided, you may be able to rectify your consoles issue by attempting to place you console into Safe Mode. Safe mode is a start-up mode for your system that helps with solving problems. In this mode, only a few system functions are available.

In order to to start your system in safe mode simply follow the instructions in the link provided below:

[link removed]

I hope this helps, but if you have any other questions please contact PlayStation Support using the contact details below or by replying to this e-mail."

Does the Sony helpline have a safe mode?

26/1/2105

To follow your file, we have to ask you to contact first the game publisher, explain your problem and if they can not help, please ask them to provide you a file number so we can check with them later, this is mandatory for the concerned service which takes care of this type of demand.

Before calling us, please try to

• Re-install the game.

• Launch the download from a computer.

• Try safe mode and rebuild database (no data loss)

We won't be able to call you.

I've replied ripping apart all their suggestions 'Cordially'

27/1/2015

Thanks for your e-mail about your PlayStation Vita.

I apologize because of your situation.

I can see from your e-mail that you’re still having problems with your voucher. Unfortunately I’ll need more details before escalate your case to another level.

Therefore I’d be grateful if you’d contact PlayStation Support using the contact details below.

Sorry and thank you for your understanding

28/1/2015

Thanks for your e-mail. I’m sorry that you’ve had a problem with downloading Harry Potter for the PS Vita.

I have read through the previous E-mail and because we are unable to assist you through the E-mail and therefore require you to call us. We are an inbound contact centre and do not offer outbound calls so i apologize for the inconvenience this is causing you but if you would like this problem resolved i suggest you call us so we can assist you further.

I hope this helps, but if you have any other questions please contact PlayStation Support using the contact details below or by replying to this e-mail.

Trying to work out what good it will do to ring up the general number when they have told me they can't help and raised it what I presume to be second tier?


I won't bore everyone by copy and pasting the last 3 replies I've had from them but they are adamant that I need to ring them as 'they need to check a few details'.

I've asked them what they want to know as there is no point ringing the general number (and waiting for an hour to speak to someone) where I presume that the script readers on the front line wont be able to deal with matters that are 'at the next stage'.

Of course, I'm presuming that Sony have a tier system of escalating issues.

Let's recap

They have told me that my voucher was not compatible with my account. Yep, the one that I downloaded 5 out of the 6 games with. They have said I have to contact the game publisher. I've also been through about 5 different people in my emails, each of which either don't read the previous emails, understand the problem, or are just trolling.

Thanks for your e-mail about PlayStation.

We understand one of the games is missing from the pack and we are looking into the matter for you. One of our team will be in touch with you shortly to discuss it with you further.

Hmmmm.

Wonder if this is linked to a ranty blog I did yesterday and tweeted to various Playstation executives.