Epic Warranty Fail (PS3 in this case)

So you know how, most of the time, warranties aren't worth it? Since statistically they tend to only cover periods of time a unit is not likely to fail, and even if it does, it can be a huge hassle trying to get the people you bought the warranty from to actually pony up?

This is the story (check that... saga) of a guy who wouldn't stop trying to get the jerks to pony up.



BUYING THE UNIT

The grand-daddy of PS3 SKUs (of which there are now... uh... 8, I believe?) was the 60GB model, that being the model that had the PS2's Emotion Engine in it for full backwards compatibility, to go with 4 USB ports and more media card readers than you can shake a stick at. It retailed new for a whopping $600 (plus tax). I felt very smart for getting it off of eBay for $491.03, with... a $50 third-party warranty (from a company called SquareTrade) that covered me up to the original purchase price of the unit for 3 years. I don't usually buy warranties, but I figured it was cheap, so why not?

***Very important note: how the warranty was supposed to work was that my $50 payment gave me $491.03 worth of "coverage". So, if the unit failed and they repaired it once at a cost of $150 to them, that would mean I had $341.03 of coverage left, and I could never be reimbursed more than what was left of my coverage amount.


INITIAL FAILURE... YELLOW LIGHT OF DEATH!

The unit worked nicely for a good 2.5 years... right up until Friday, October 2nd.

I got the "Yellow Light of Death" (YLOD). What this means is, there was some kind of hardware failure where my game of Madden 10 froze, a yellow light flashed, and the system would then nno longer turn on.

Soon after this, a few design flaws of the PS3 became quickly apparent. First, the nifty disc-slot trapped my game. Who builds a slot-loading drive without an emergency eject? 2nd, DLA is tied to the motherboard, not the hard drive. So if your hard drive fails, you lose all your data. And if your motherboard fails, you also lose all your data. Gee, that's so much better than tying DLA to the hard drive. They doubled the ways you can lose your data forever! Wheeeeeee!

So the first thing I do is call Sony, because on 2nd thought I decided I didn't really trust a sketchy 3rd-party warranty company to make sure I got my data back intact. Well, it turns out Sony almost never repairs units, they just take your unit and then send you back a factory-refurbished one. So I wasn't going to save my data that way.

To the SquareTrade folks it is, then.

In a sign of things to come, I missed the end of their M-F business hours by about 10 minutes. When Monday rolled around, I got on the phone with SquareTrade, and they had a place called Professional Satellite Repair send out a box for my unit. The box came fast, etc etc, I sent the thing off and figured it would be taken care of.

Unit comes back, and seems to work. Data all intact, etc etc. I backed up everything I was able to an external drive (much of it was copy-protected, though).


2ND FAILURE... YELLOW LIGHT OF DEATH AGAIN!

Unit fails in the exact same manner 3 days later. Since the documentation said to call PSR first with any problems, I call PSR. They tell me that they only certify their repairs/work for 24 hours after I received the unit, and I'd need to pay to send it in again. Yeah, right, great. Further discussion with these folks seemed to indicate to me that they weren't the brightest of bulbs.

So I call up SquareTrade, and tell them how PSR are a bunch of greedy incompetent bastards. The repair attempt had cost me $145 off my coverage. I insisted they send the unit somewhere else to be repaired. So they offer to have me send it in to Sony to be repaired. At this point I'm okay with that, seeing as I backed most of my stuff up. Well, I get ahold of Sony, and since the unit was "repaired" by a "non-certified repair center" they would never touch the unit again. Great.

SquareTrade then tries to find other places they could send it for repair, and couldn't seem to find anyone. They even tried calling Sony and asking where "certified repair centers" were located, and Sony gave them the same "f-you" they gave me.

SquareTrade now insists that I send the unit back to PSR. I re-iterate that I think PSR is a bunch of idiotic, feces-hurling monkeys. I tell them that I'd much rather take the remaining $346.03 of my coverage and call it a day. They insist again. I point out to them that their crap repair center has now hobbled my ability to get the unit repaired by Sony in future, and that I absolutely would not accept sending it back to PSR, having it break again, and then being left with a tiny reimbursement.

This seemed to make the SquareTrade agents very uncomfortable. At this point I get passed back and forth between 3 or 4 different people (some of whom are "management", as I understood it).


SQUARETRADE'S BIG MISTAKE... THANK GOD FOR STUPID PEOPLE!

They decide to get my persistent butt off the phone by promising to reimburse me the FULL purchase price if they attempted 3 repairs and it still broke within the warranty period.

Really now? I think to myself "much as warranty companies make a living off of gambling... this so will not end well for them." I ask them to send me this proposal in writing. Done and done.

I send it back to PSR and make it clear they need to REPLACE the motherboard this time, instead of what they call a "repair" that lasted 3 days.


3RD FAILURE... THEY ATTEMPT TO CHEAT ME!

So I get the unit back. On my way home from work I thought to myself "you know, those motherboards with the Emotion Engine chips on them are probably in short supply. I wonder if they'll try to slip a lesser board in under my nose."

I get back from work. Test the unit. PS3 games work fine. Major PS2 titles work fine (I tested FFX). Then I tested Crazy Taxi... no dice!

Oh yes, they had tried to cheat me, giving me a lesser board with less compatibility, and hoped that I wasn't a hard-core collector with lots of dearly loved obscure titles (statistically good gamble for them). How very wrong they were.

So I call SquareTrade and tell them how unamused I am with PSR. I quickly get passed to management. Management tells me they'll have PSR call me back when they're done reaming them out.

Hour later I get a pleasant call from PSR. They swear up and down that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and they just SWEAR they'll get it right if I send it in one more time. I told them that they either intentionally tried to cheat me, or they were grossly incompetent, and that I didn't like either one. And then I hung up.

I call SquareTrade back and tell them there was absolutely no chance I was sending the unit back to PSR. I knew they had tried and failed to find an alternative repair place, so they'd need to give me my money back. They hem and haw for awhile, and after I repeatedly reminded them of our little arrangement, they agree to refund me the full amount. Not only that, but the foam packaging for the box I had to send the unit back to them was so tight, there wasn't even any room for a controller. So I ended up getting their consent not to send any of the accessories that originally came with the unit.

So out of SquareTrade I got a free controller, and more than enough money to pay for another like unit. Gee, that was so much better than giving me my remaining balance after the 1st repair attempt, right?




So now it's over, right? Oh no. It's so not over...


4TH FAILURE... SONY'S INCOMPETENT TOO!

So I went on Amazon and found myself a unit that had just been factory refurbished by Sony themselves. I buy it, it gets to my place. Looks brand new and shiny.

Except one tiny problem. It didn't read discs of any kind... CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays. Nothing. Apparently they considered reading discs a non-essential feature not worthy of testing.

It was hard to be mad anymore, because this was so epic it was funny. Sony sends me a box, I send the unit in, and I finally get back a working unit today... two months after the original unit broke.



And now, I'm betting this one will spontaneously combust in a month. But hopefully that's the end of the saga.



Anyone else got any painful warranty stories?

 

Yeah, that'll do it. Even though mine had plenty of breathing space I'm told it's likely that it overheated.

Demon's Souls and Valkyria Chronicles say you're wrong.

Huh, that IS weird.

I did hear that... I just wish I didn't like so many obscure games, it makes it harder to justify not just buying a slim and a new PS2 instead if the 80GB wouldn't support all my games... hence sticking with the 60GB.

Yeeeeaaaaaahhhhh, ummm... so not to make you nervous or anything, but you can't. Demon's Souls saves are copy-protected. If your motherboard dies, you're hosed no matter what.

HOWEVER, you can do a full system backup, which copies even copy-protected saves and downloaded games. That will protect you against a hard drive failure at least... but non-copy-protected saves and downloaded games are the only things you would ever be able to move to a different unit if your motherboard ever breaks like mine did.

It really is, which is why I'm clinging to this SKU. I've gotten too used to the smoothing and HD upscaling, and internal memory cards.

I'm seeing a common Madden theme here.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Madden is always storing replays to the HD to show as highlights? That can't help the overheating issue. And the only way I can think of that could fix the issue is a SSD, and that's an expensive fix.