Many months ago, I dusted off my copy of Sins of a Solar Empire. At that time, there were a lot of good mods coming out, the company had promised to fix their 2 gig memory foolishness, and they even had a post on their page saying that they had optimizations in the works for a patch. As it was a outfit with a US address, and not a Russian or Czech company, I was willing to give it another chance. I played a little, then decided to order both the expansions. They seemed like solid improvements, so I played a little more. Then out came the beta version of the patch, and I decided to test it to see if they had really solved the memory issue. I went on to Impulse to DL the beta, and the site informed me that I couldn't, because my expansions weren't registered. Strange, since they should have been on activation of the downloads. Then Impulse told me that the game keys were no good, and that I bought a DL version of the original game. This was curious, since I've got the dusty CD case and the documentation with the correct key on it sitting right here. I decided that it might simply be that something wasn't installed correctly, so the next logical step was to reinstall the expansions. So I uninstalled them and then went online to DL them again and reinstall, but at that point, my purchased DLs didn't show up at all. Nothing except my receipts and the deductions from my bank account indicate that they were ever purchased. Impulse cannot find any record of the purchase, and one of the receipts (not moved out of its folder and locked in time) indicates that the serial number is safely stored on Impulse. I cannot download the game again, as records of my purchase cannot be found. The information I request regarding my purchase refers me to Impulse, instead of doing anything useful. Really? The next logical step was to look around the web for similar incidents; I found legions of similar issues. I also visited the forum, and read numerous complaints by people who have had similar experiences (I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that even more have been deleted, because they really, really reflect badly on Stardock, as well as others). Still, I filed a technical support request and received a ticket, and will wait and see. I suspect I will be waiting a long time, judging by the dates of the incidents and the "unresolved" status of many of the individuals posting in various places around the web. So let me say this for the official record: there is a problem with the exchange of information between Stardock's record keeping and Impulse. Using a service like Impulse was unnecessary and as manifestly foolish as limiting the game memory to 2 gigs. There is ample evidence that this continues to be a problem of which you are aware, and of which you are not addressing in a timely fashion. Please correct this situation before other customers are affected.
