The Gadgets Page

We love the video game, Rock Band, but as with any new hardware, being an early adopter has its ups and downs. In particular, the first guitars that shipped with Rock Band had a common issue where the strum button would stop working correctly:

• Kotaku: Rock Band Guitar Controllers Failing

Although this problem has been known since November 2007, our Rock Band game purchased in January quickly developed the problem: you could strum up, but not down. Since I only strum downward, this put a serious crimp in my already amateurish playing.

Fortunately, Electronic Arts has a convenient warranty page that promised to quickly set me up with a new guitar:

• Rock Band Warranty page

The warranty process took five minutes and a credit card number, which theoretically won’t be charged if you return the defective guitar. Unfortunately, I started this process on January 20th, and I’m still not happy with the result:

• I was immediately sent a UPS tracking number, but they never dropped off the guitar for shipping.
• A month later, they charged my card $125 because I never returned the old guitar. (I couldn’t, since they were supposed to send me the new one first.)
• After dealing with form-letter responses from their online support people for a month, I finally called EA. They were very helpful, apologized, and started the whole process over. This time the guitar was actually shipped, and I received it a few days later.

So now we have a new working guitar (finally!) but EA still owes us a $125 credit. I’ll have to spend some more time on the phone straightening this out.

Got a Rock Band guitar with a strum problem? Here’s my advice:

• Try to return it to the store where you purchased it. EA discourages this, but a good retailer should exchange it.
• Call EA on the phone rather than using their online service. They’re more likely to get it right. The number is 1 (650) 628-1001.
• You may want to consider fixing it yourself—this will probably void your warranty, and it seems like a waste of time to fix something that EA should replace, but I’m wishing I’d done it myself at this point.
• If you use EA’s warranty service, keep a close eye on your credit card.

I love Rock Band—it’s probably my favorite video game of all time—but when I pay $160 for a video game, I expect better customer service. Here’s hoping EA gets their act together in time for me to buy the sequel.

Here’s a video of us and our friends enjoying Rock Band together (with borrowed guitars):