Bad Support

Since I give technical support over the phone, in person, and via e-mail for a living, I feel plenty justified to criticize those who do so poorly. I noticed that Diablo II had a little yellow sheet of paper with it that mentioned that it might not work with Kenwood CD drives and that a fix was going to be available at Blizzard's web site. I looked for the fix, or any mention of the problem in their support area, and finding nothing, I e-mailed their tech support: From me:

I have a Kenwood TrueX 52 speed drive. I was a closed-beta tester, and had to install a different drive then to read the CD. I have the same problem when I try to use the final CD. The insert with my Diablo II CD that I got today claims that I can find a fix at http://www.blizzard.com/support to fix the problem with this drive (which I have since re-installed) but I can't find it. I don't really feel like ripping my computer apart again tonight just to make it work with this game. Can you tell me what I need to do to fix it?

And they replied:

If you are able to install Diablo II but then when you try to play it it gives you an error message "Please Insert CD To Play" or something similar...

You should contact the manufacturers of your CD drive for any firmware updates availble. If an update is available, install it and see if that helps. If no update is available, they should be able to tell you when such an update will be released. Also, If you are running Windows 2000, make sure you are logged on with Administrative Rights and if you have a virus scanner, make sure it is updated to the latest version.

If you still have problems after updating your CD-ROM drive, please reply with your system specs including what kind of CD-ROM drive you have (brand/model number) so that we can investigate the problem.

Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Regards, David N.

Obviously they don't teach reading comprehension over at Blizzard. Since this is clearly a known problem, as it was included on a yellow sheet with the game, you'd think he'd recognize that I said I had one of the Kenwood drives in question in the first line of my e-mail. I wound up installing the game from my 2X CD-RW drive. It takes a long time to install 1.5GB of data from a 2X drive...