FB users buying Oculus VR headsets to get customer service prioritization
There&#x27;s a bit of a story behind this. Oculus is owned by Facebook, but the Facebook website and the Oculus headsets&#x2F;software are by different teams working in different states. When Facebook bought Oculus, they decided to get rid of the Oculus-specific account system and use only Facebook accounts. The Facebook account requirement took effect with the launch of the Oculus Quest 2, which launched in October 2020.<p>October 2020 was the month before the US election, and the peak of both disinformation&#x2F;influence campaigns, and of Facebook-the-website&#x27;s efforts to combat those campaigns. So the spambot detector sensitivity was turned up to max that month, and if you tried to create a new account, there was a large chance you&#x27;d be mistaken for a bot and banned immediately. So a bunch of people who weren&#x27;t Facebook users got fancy new VR headsets, tried to create Facebook accounts in order to be able to use them, and got immediately banned. The support department for Facebook-the-website was not at all up to the task of dealing with this. This kind of wrecked their product launch; instead of the press coverage and public reaction being about how great their hardware was, it was about all the people who couldn&#x27;t use their hardware because of account issues.<p>So now Oculus has a completely separate support department for Facebook account issues, which acts less like it&#x27;s supporting a free website and more like it&#x27;s supporting a $300 piece of hardware. And if you have an account issue with the website, and you want to use that support department instead of the bad one, then buying a Quest 2 is not such a bad idea.