Steelseries World of Warcraft MMO Gaming mouse

Right so I may have been outed as a bit of a WoWophile with my many characters and such. I usually play with the Belkin Nostromo N52, which is a great piece of hardware, nicely customisable and extremely functional.

So when the Steelseries WoW mouse with it's 15 mouse buttons was announced I have to admit I was straight in there with a pre-order. Which incidentally was pegged for a November 2008 release date (to coincide with the release of the latest expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King)



After over a few weeks of waiting on December 11th I get this in my email:

Array with kind regards, SteelSeries Order Support


Seriously that is all I got just the word "Array", so I reply:

Hi there, Not sure what 'Array' means, is the mouse now available?


They reply:

The demand for the World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse has been much higher than anticipated, even compared to our most optimistic forecasts. As a result, the mouse is still delayed, despite our best efforts working around the clock to ramp up production. We are writing this update to inform you that the order is still on-track to be delivered before Christmas. We are doing everything we can to get it to you as soon as possible, but cannot give you an exact date at this point in time.


Blah blah Merry Xmas, Steelseries brings the gift of Lies.

So I wait a while longer levelling my Death Knight with (shock-horror) a 3 button mouse. Finally on 31 December I get the mail saying that the mouse is now available so I do my thing, enter my credit card details, and part with my hard-earned £90 and play the waiting game for it to arrive. And it does so on 6th January, but since I was a bit pre-occupied with post New years festivities I didn't get to try it out till the following weekend. I messed about with the software a bit, and jumped right in, not overly impressed with the buttons or the lack of customisation, but it did have a cool flashy LCD that changed colour and that kept me entertained for a while. The next day however I noticed that the buttons were a bit sticky and squeaky, and as the WoW session proceeded I noticed that the buttons were actually sticking down and staying there pretty much rendering the mouse useless!

Raging that the mouse was actually impeding my gameplay I had to switch back to my laptop's mouse trackpad!

The next day, still bitter that my mouse had turned into a £90 paperweight, I wrote an email of complaint to Steelseries:

Hi There, I recently bought the WoW MMO Gaming mouse. Upon receiving my mouse I noticed that the main Left and Right buttons were squeaking when they were pressed, I figured that this may just be teething troubles but last night I found that the buttons are now sticking. I have used the mouse only a few times since receiving it last week. Could you please send me details on an exchange for the mouse.

I also decided to drop a mail to WoWinsider.com to get their view on the situation be warned the following article has content of a WoWish nature:

Hey, So I pre-ordered the WoW MMO Gaming mouse from Steelseries. And after 2 months of delays due to demand, it finally arrived last week. To begin with I was impressed, the buttons are accessible, despite being made out of metal It is very light, and the software that comes with it is very easy to use. However after a few WoW sessions using it I'm starting to get well more than a little disgruntled with it. Firstly the software is a little... annoying, it has given you many pre-programmed macros and basic commands, but rather than binding it to the actual functions it manually types commands in. For example you can set up a single button press for dismounting, which is essentially [Return]/dismount[Return]. I think I was actually hoping to set up the mouse to specific functions in the WoW keybinding interface as "Mousebutton 12" or just actually bind it to a keyboard function. Also when the software is active it seems to remap everything in WoW e.g. I pressed "M" to bring up my map screen and my character jumped. Secondly the hardware, I mentioned it was light, to be honest it is too light, It just seems odd that a mouse with so much metal feels so flimsy. It's corded, yeah I know that response times go up with direct connections but seriously, corded just seems a little archaic nowadays, though the cable is pretty funky it is covered in material and makes it seem like a USB rope. Finally, and this is my biggest gripe, the main left and right buttons are broken... After 1 week playing (2-3 times), the buttons started squeaking, I figured it was teething problems, but it eventually got so bad (after about an hour) that the buttons would click down and then take a few seconds to un-click like there had been chewing gum jammed under the buttons. Right now I am in the process of enquiring about their exchange policy, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't get a full refund. I was wondering if you or any of your readers had similar problems with this mouse? P.S. I didn't mention it does have a cool LCD light thing that you can change to any colour for any character, but to be honest it is rather here nor there, it's cool enough but since you hand is covering it up 99% of the time it is somewhat defunct. Regards, Richie. /dismount

3 days later and I still had not received any word back on this process, I had also googled to see if anyone else had the same problem and I found very similar complaints on a number of sites. Which was pretty much the straw that broke the camels back, I decided that i just wanted a refund.

So I checked the site out again, It seem that they had updated it and they now had a rather ugly On-line form for processing support requests. Since my previous email had fallen on deaf ears I submitted another request (13th January):

I recently bought the WoW MMO Gaming mouse . Upon receiving my mouse I noticed that the main Left and Right buttons were squeaking when they were pressed, I figured that this may just be teething troubles but last night I found that the buttons are now sticking. I have used the mouse only a few times since receiving it last week. I'm not overly happy with the product at all and upon googling my problem I have found other users with similar issues. As such I am unsure if a replacement would satisfy me especially after the delay and the money I paid. I would like to request details on obtaining a full refund.

Which I actually just (15th January) received a response to:

Thank you for your interest in SteelSeries Professional Gaming Gear. This is a known issue and SteelSeries has already taken the necessary action to correct this problem. This is not an official fix, though other customers have found it successful, however please try this: Lift the left & right click mouse button up with your finger nail after half an inch until you hear a snap, then let go. If that doesn't help you, please go back to your original point of purchase to get a replacement unit or credit. If you bought it directly from us, please provide your order # on this request and we will contact you back for the RMA replacement once we have the replacement units in our warehouse. Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for understanding. Thanks, SteelSeries Support

SNAP THE BUTTONS!?!??!?! Yeah... fuck that! Voiding Warranty much? Again... FUCK THAT!!!

Steel Series will shortly be receiving another request for a REFUND an I will capitalise since they seem to have misread it before...

So just to reiterate, Thatguys.co.uk does not reccommend the Steelseries WoW Mouse.

Love n Hugs,

Richie