Sync issues for Android Device Plants vs. Zombies Heroes
I'm just putting this here in case someone else runs into the same issue or if someone from EA might know what the issue is and how to fix it. It's long but relevant.
Played Plants vs Zombies Heroes on android device. Made progress, etc. Yes, I was connected/signed in via Google Play Games (android device) the entire time. It has an email address and username associated with it, etc. Broke my device, got a new one. Made sure everything was signed in and synced per the EA how-to's on the topic for the old device. Got rid of old device. Installed game on new android device. Game does not sync. Connected to my Google Play Games profile in-game on new device. It recognizes me, but game still does not. Uninstalled/Reinstalled game four times. Still doesn't sync game progress. Hmm...
Contacted EA technical support. It was extremely painful. (If anyone at EA cares, I'm a business consultant and can improve your Customer Service processes and how they are handled). In short, no previous game progress was showing on my account with the email address that was used. The CS rep insisted that I must have been using a guest account or was not logged in. I, of course, explained several times that I was. They asked for the player ID on my old device. I had already explained several times as well that I did not have the old device. They suggested that I contact google so that they could recover my account - to which I explained that there was nothing wrong with my google account and that it did not need to be recovered.
After an extended conversation with the CS rep where I began asking questions that were a little more technical than what they were trained for and they just answered by repeating themselves, I ended the conversation. I'm sure they thought I was a stupid user who didn't know what I was talking about. I uninstalled the game again. Just for fun, I physically logged into my EA account (which I've never actually logged into) to see if it showed any game data. I also opened Google Play Games on my device and installed the game directly from there instead of the play store.
This time when the game launched, it recognized that there was previous game data and I was able to access my previous game play. I don't know if it was logging into my EA that synced it, installing the game from another app or I just got lucky.
