i cant promise this wont turn into a RANT

following on from Cry-Tom's thread > http://secure.gamesas.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=43696

after spending almost 30 minutes premium rate on the phone with EA support and going through all the options of what i had done and tried and where to put the dlc zip files which i had already told the tech that i had done he goes off to talk to his superior.
5 minutes later he comes back and apologizes that he had just been told the dlc's purchased in the past will now no longer work if downloaded now. even if you have the zip files posted by members on external hosts they will not connect to to the game.

just in case, i have now downloaded from 2 different members external links and put the zipped files in the dlc folder in my saved games, and ziltch, nada, nout works.

the only advice i was given was there was nothing they could do and i had to contact crytek direct.
ive now got their full address details and phone number so i will be contacting the uk office tomorrow.

its not the matter of how much they cost me even though i paid full price of ￡29.99 for the game and ￡7.99 each for the map packs its the kick in the teeth seeing the special edition on steam over the weekend for ￡7 for all three.
i bought these dlc's in good faith that they would work and now they dont. i couldnt give a toss about a refund all i want to see is i can use what i paid for or at least do the decent thing of offering its customers the steam download for free.

if youve already got them loaded then i guess they wont stop working now but as ive just bought a new gaming lappy with a 680 graphics card somehow loading them now just does not work.

rant over

Yes downloading them from site no-longer works, however a couple of days ago i got the 2nd one from WS's link and it installed.
As you know i have another account (this one actually) with both dlcs but i can't connect to MP with it.
So yeah i only got the second dlc and damn it there are lots of folks playing the dlc maps these days and i want the first one too.
I'll probably get my third copy of game off steam sometime as i'm really enjoying SP /MP again.
Hey C2 would be a great game to test your new uber lappy with, it has 2gb vram?
hehe i'm really digging the capaign with my Kepler for sure, 2gb vram is what's needed.(dx11 ultra /HD textures)
can your lappy do the textures plus dx11?

now that didnt take me long. ive sorted it.

how you ask.
i tried my old clevo lappy which i had made a backup of all the files.
i opened the dlc folder which had the 2 zip files in and it also had the 2 extracted folders which i then copied across to my new clevo. loaded game and all the dlc maps are there.
it looks like these sneaky bastages have done a code of somesorts to stop all new zip files from extracting the folders even though you own them.

the extracted folder has in it:
a folder with the maps
sxml file
data.pak
levelsixtra.pak
they are all dated 18/5/11 which was when i bought them.

my spec is a 3720QM quad. 16gb ram, nvidia 680 and a 512 crucial M4 SSD
wicked spec but it did cost me over ￡2000
ive got all settings on ultra,dx11 pack and tesilation pack loaded but to be honest i cant see much difference.

i havnt got time now but i will have a play tomorrow to see how to extract the folders and let you all know.
if i click on the zip it fails with errors so the folder has to be extracted some other way.