What just happened is completely strange to me and I dont trust what's going on here, but maybe Ive been missing out on some new practice within the FS community?

Has anyone else ever been asked to show proof of purchase, in other words an invoice with information that is personal between the buyer and the seller, for other purchases, from other companies than the product you're asking support for? To me this seems very weird, I dont see any reason why support for one product would have any need for any information about a product that is not the product, or is even from the same company, than the product I'm asking support for. I dont trust this one bit., to be honest.

Unfortunately, there are people that pirate the software and then try to get support for a product they didn't pay for. I totally understand if the developer asks for your order number and where you purchased their product before giving you free support. Think of the money they would lose if they didn't verify your purchase.

Oh yes, that I totaly understand, but I assume you're talking about product A, from manufacturer X, where manufacturer X asks for purchase information about product A. However, what I'm talking about is that I ask support for product A, from manufacturer X and manufacturer X asks me for purchase information for product B, from manufacturer Y. Lets say that my Big Mac at McDonnalds has a problem and I ask about it at the counter of McDonnalds, I dont expect them to ask me to show proof of purchase for yesterdays Whopper I ate at Burger King...

(Because I'm not sure what's going on here, I dont want to discredit anyone wrongfully and therefor I wont mention any actual names)

obvious question - does product b have any interaction with product A? I agree. it sounds really strange. Perhaps in some convoluted way mfgr Y put in  some anti piracy code in product B that affects product A and mfgr X is trying to determine if you have a pirated copy.

A BIG stretch for sure -  you could edit your proof of purchase to not show any addresses or credit card info - just registration name and see if that flies.

Vic

 

They have indeed interaction, and I can understand a lot of questions about technical details about that interaction, but to be asked for prove of purchase? A copy of proof of purchase is in most cases enough to get the corresponding account 'retrieved', like you've lost your means of access. So what they ask can be used to steal someone's account, with all purchases on it. Because of that, in my oppinion is as much sensitive information as a password and we all know you shouldnt give your password to anyone, so prove of purchase would fall in the same category, I'd say.

Maybe my paranoia has been stirred up by all those infomercials about internet safety, on TV... :P

I had accounts hacked or stolen from me before, so I'm quite protective, nowadays.

I don't know who or what you're referring to specifically, but in general terms -- until I started getting involved in helping support FS software I had literally no idea of the absolute proliferation of 'cracked' copies of P3D, FSX etc.

An extraordinarily high percentage of support requests involved users who were running cracked copies of FSX or P3D, or indeed other "loaders" which interfere with various integral bits of the sim and/or Windows to enable various bits of cracked software (for example GSX) to be run. The result being that the software they had purchased, perhaps unsurprisingly to you and I, didn't work properly.

Understandably this results in huge amounts of support time being spent only to discover that the cause of the problem was pirated software (and thus no amount of support was going to fix the problem). Thus I can understand why, on occasion, any particular developer might want to seek some form of proof that any interacting software was genuine in order to prevent large amounts of time being wasted which could instead be used supporting customers with genuine problems.

I would imagine that any developer requesting such proof would only require the very minimum of information necessary to prove the software was genuine.

I agree Simon. It is quite probable that developer X knows that his product A will generate an error when run in conjunction with a pirated copy of product B produced by developer y. To eliminate that situation a simple POP request should suffice with just the minimum to show it was purchased.

Vic

I've done support for years and would never, ever, ask for proof of purchase for another dev's product. Feel free to tell the asker to stick it, and complain via the other vendor's contact venue.

DJ