The power went out in my area about an hour and a half ago. After it was restored, I turned on my Wii U to find that the internal memory is shot, so the console is essentially bricked at the moment. After a few choice platitudes, I dialed Nintendo's technical support number.
Now, knowing the unfairly bad rep Nintendo's tech support has among the gaming community at large for some reason, I was planning to record my phone call to show you all how quick and simple it is to set up a repair. I have some recording software for my Blackberry that I had yet to use, so I set it up before making the call. However, whenever I attempt to copy it to Windows, it either fails or the file becomes corrupted and won't play in any of my media players.
So I'll just have to describe it for ya. I was on the phone for a grand total of 13 minutes and 37 seconds. It took about 90 seconds for me to go through the menu options and get to an agent on the phone. I gave him my credentials, he saw that I have a call history with NTS, I told hiim the problem and error code, he looked up the error code and verfied that the problem matched up with it, he told me I can send it in for repairs and told me the procedure, I asked about repair costs, he explained that this type of error would be free of charge, I verified my shipping address and information for him. He then placed me on hold to take another couple of minutes to enter and double-check all this information into the system to give me a repair order number and a reference number, and told me that my console would have two-day shipping both ways, and an extra 100 days warranty after the repair. Couldn't argue with that. Oh, and he let me spend a few minutes griping about Oklahoma weather and wondering why any of us still live here. The guy was very friendly and engaged. They always have been. I'm sure we've all talked to agents on the phone from cable/phone/PC/ISP services that we can't quite say the same about.
I've danced this dance before. Tomorrow, I'll print out the shipping label, take it to UPS, ship it off, and I'll likely have my console back in a week (I already know what the tech is going to do is easy-peezy; I'm an IT technician myself). I've sent off my Wii (twice) and my 3DS, both of them chock full of saves and downloaded games. I have never lost any data on them after getting them back. People are so scared of losing their data when sending it to Nintendo, but I don't think I recall ever hearing a testimony of this happening. I'm very confident that I won't lose anything on the Wii U.
TL:DR = Nintendo's Tech Support is great. Stop hating on it.
