To put it bluntly the actual process of registering was simple and straightforward. However there is a ton of bad and outdated advice in the official forum help posts. Customer support, I'm afraid to say offered equally useless and flat out incorrect solutions. Together they obfuscated the actual process and wasted hours of my time by sending me to several dead ends and wild goose chases.
The official help posts and customer service said I should install the gamestop app then make an account and then link it to your stardock blah blah blah. THIS IS INCORRECT. I did not need the gamestop app, I never needed the gamestop app. It is flat out impossible to register a retail cd serial with the gamestop app, and it is equally pointless to attempt linking a gamestop account to any other account.. Just trying to update via gamestop and attempting to link stardock with gamestop wasted hours of my time.
2ndly this link that was given to me for me to register with stardok (https://services.stardock.net/accounts/createaccount.aspx) DOES NOT WORK. After filling in my details it just sent me to a blank page, with no indication of wheather my account was created (it wasn't). Again I wasted hours fiddling with this broken webpage before I figured out I should actually register on the actual stardock homepage.
Thirdly even though the create new account feature on the previously mentioned link doesnt work, the register product link does. I thought the page was a stub left over from a website redesign, but no it is functional but badly coded. Thus I didn't even consider returning to this awful page to register the serial after I successfully made a stardock account.
Sean, I want you, as my customer service agent, to know that stardock and it's customer support has left me extremely disappointed. The utter apathy and indifference stardock treats both it's published titles and their customer's welfare is galling. Especially when I called your help number I was told by a robot that you don't speak to "non-corporate" customers, and especially to a consumer who made the morally laudable choice of purchasing a 5 year old indie game instead of torrenting it on thepiratebay.
It seems like official forum advice and the canned customer support replies were all written years ago, and no one has bothered updating them since. Doing a quick google search I can see many many many people have had the same issue as me. Looking at how those threads ended, I can only guess that after being continuously frustrated they just kicked themselves for making a bad consumer choice and vowed never to purchase from stardock again.
In the year and half since gamestop bought impulse it seems like no one has bothered checking weather the first draft of the sins help guide actually worked, and the sad thing is no one at stardock seemed to give damn.
I've replied to you not because I feel obligated to in response to the stellar assistance I received or because I want to help stardock better their abysmal consumer relations. At this point I wouldn't buy another stardock published game/software and nor would I advise my friends to. I just want to wash my hands of the matter and play sins of a solar empire (which I have nothing but praise for in itself).
I've replied and detailed my ordeal so that any future schmucks who may have bought retail sins might find some answers in this post rather then been led in circles by the inadequate and incompetent support offered.
