I purchased through the web, I installed a scenery, fired up the sim and clicked on Register Serial, which is the proper procedure to activate a newly web-purchased scenery, right?
That message comes out even in case of the first activation, I forgot this in my previous post.
In this customer's humble opinion, it should go directly to the second capture and not confuse me with that first one. "ERROR" with error code and a big exclamation mark looks like a real error to me, the average customer.
I agree the program is more verbose than necessary in this specific case, but not hiding any diagnostic messages, might be useful for us to understand what's wrong in case of problems.
I'm thinking, missing activation key? Didn't I just paste the activation key?!
Well, in fact you haven't, since you have pasted your Serial Number, not the activation key.
The activation key is what you will *receive* from the server when you send your Serial Number to be activated, and that's what's the error is referring to when it says it's missing.
And it's just what's really happening: you just pasted your Serial Number, but you haven't opted to activate it yet (this will be the next question) so the message says there's no activation key, then it asks if you want to activate it, and then (if the server says it's ok) it will say the product has been activated.
The thing is, the second message also says the product is not active yet. Why would I need to be shown that message twice?
On the first message, you don't have any choice to make, you can only press OK and go ahead so, even if the message meaning wasn't entirely clear, it's not that you could do any mistakes as a result of being confused by it, your only choice is to acknowledge the message and go ahead.
The 2nd message is giving you a choice, and is there because if you confirm, you are likely going to consume an activation, that why it's giving a choice in case you want to change your mind, and wait a better time to activate, or decide to activate on a different pc, etc.
When the activation is successful, the successful activation message that comes at the end, should probably clear up any doubts the scenery has been activated correctly.
Methinks the second one will do. It is correctly installed, but not active, do you want to activate, yes. What's the point of that first cryptic ("ERROR") message?
As I've said, not hiding diagnostics in any steps, will help us in some cases troubleshooting issues, without having to instruct the user to create a log file, send it, having issues with the logfile location, file permissions to create it, eventual problems/slowdowns when writing to a file, etc.
Normal to you, just doesn't make sense to me. And, well... let's not be conservative, to at least two thirds of those hundred.
Since only 3 people including you have reported it until now (nobody asked about it via email support either), apparently this is not seen as a problem by as many users: I guess that most will just be satisfied with the successful activation message that usually follows and the more obvious fact the scenery *acts* as Active, so they aren't bothered by the cryptic message.
Anyway, do with this info as you wish. This is no discussion, I'm just letting you know how I perceived it all and experienced certain customer dissatisfaction.
I've explained it with this post, in order to point out there was some reasoning behind showing that message, and the program always behaved correctly as it was supposed to do. I agree it might have been confusing, and it's best not to present something that looks like an error before any real problem happens.
So, even if only 3 people reported the message as being confusing, we have already updated the Addon Manager, and that message will not be displayed anymore before an activation, it will directly jump to the 2nd message.
The updated version is online already and, because its fetched automatically from the internet on each new install, everybody will get it the first time any scenery will be installed.
