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Online iPhone sales return to NYC
As Engadget is reporting, New York City residents can get back to buying their iPhones via AT&T's website after the strange outage that seemed to start yesterday kept them from doing so. It's been a rollercoaster of a story -- first we heard that they weren't being sold at all because of coverage issues, and then that was clarified to just online sales and only because of fraudulent online ordering. But as we predicted on the talkcast last night, AT&T didn't hold off on sales for long, and everything should be now back to normal. Unfortunately, we never actually heard what the fraud was, but that's not too surprising -- if there was a way to defraud AT&T's ordering process, it's unlikely they'd shout it from the rooftops anyway. And it's also not likely that we'll never know how many customers were actually affected. NYC is a big city, but there's no way we'll see official numbers on how many people couldn't buy iPhones because of the steps taken the other night. Considering that iPhone sales are off the charts in most markets anyway, it's doubtful that online sales in NYC missing for a day or two would make a dent in the numbers. In other words, nothing to see here. But just in case you were in NYC and trying desperately to buy an iPhone via the AT&T site last night, you can now go to it.
Blizzard gets an F at the Better Business Bureau
Looks like quite a few of those players who threatened to complain about Blizzard ended up doing so: over on the local Better Business Bureau website for Blizzard's region, our favorite game developer has earned an F. The BBB says that they've been given this rating "for reasons such as that they have failed to respond to complaints, their advertising is grossly misleading, they are not in compliance with the law's licensing or registration requirements, their complaints contain especially serious allegations, or the company's industry is known for its fraudulent business practices." Ouch. We don't really know that any of those things are true about Blizzard's way of doing business, but there are certainly many people on the forums every day who claim that the first two especially are major issues.Personally, I'm as big a critic of Blizzard as anyone when I think that there's something to complain about, but this rating hardly seems justified -- even if the BBB has received tens of thousands of complaints, that's still just a small portion of the playerbase. And despite the occasional downtime and various class nerfs, they hardly deserve an F rating, especially when a company that many people really do have issues with is riding along with an A rating. The BBB page also says that Blizzard's mass bannings have been a factor in many complaints -- there is probably no distinction made (or that can be made) in terms of complaints between people who have broken the ToS and people who have not.At any rate, even if the F rating is there, it obviously has very little effect on Blizzard's business -- how many of you ran to check the rating before you decided to subscribe to World of Warcraft? It seems like a few customers (who may or may not have broken the rules to begin with) have ruined Blizzard's reputation with the BBB, but it's fairly apparent that the BBB doesn't hold much sway among Blizzard's customers anyway.[Thanks ThisURLNotFound!]
