Tag: Refund

Warhammer Online Details Refunds


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In case you’ve forgotten, Warhammer Online shuts down tomorrow. In a post on the Warhammer website, Mythic has detailed exactly how players will be compensated for their purchases. If you have made a purchase after November 1st, or had any game time remaining on your account on the same day, you will be refunded in full. If you purchased with a credit card, you’re all set as it will be refunded automatically. Anyone who paid with a game card will have to contact Mythic’s billing support. The same goes for unused game time codes.

According to the news post, refunds will start going out December 18th with the entire process possibly taking up to 90 days to complete due to the amount of work required. Check out the entire notice at the link below.

(Source: Warhammer Online)

En Mass Entertainment Offering Refunds For Subscribers


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Yea, this is directly following my article on TERA becoming free, but I felt this topic was important enough to warrant its own commentary. Generally when an MMO goes free to play, you don’t see the developer lining up to hand out refunds for existing subscriptions. More often than not, any additional paid time is simply converted into whatever premium service that is rolling out with the transition. In the case of TERA, however, En Masse Entertainment will be refunding any additional game time on an account should the user request it.

From the FAQ:

On the day TERA’s drops its subscription fee, if you would like a refund you may submit a ticket and request a refund for your remaining game time. We will then refund your remaining subscription after the current month ends. For example, if you purchased a 90-day subscription and have 65 days remaining you will receive a refund for 60 days of game time. The remaining 5 days will stay as elite game time.

It appears that this is only for the North American version of TERA, through En Masse Entertainment. The FAQ for the European transition does not make any reference to refunds.

(Source: FAQ)

Bought Craft of Gods After It Shut Down? Read Me


Yesterday I mentioned that Craft of Gods mysteriously shut down with no notice from the outside world, apparently including Gamestop’s Impulse Driven download service. Complaints on the Craft of Gods Facebook page showed players who had purchased the game on Impulse only to find that the servers are down, the website does not work, and the keys have no use. Additionally, Kalicanthus Entertainment’s website shows a shut down notice that has been up since March.

 If anyone purchased too late email downloadsupport@gamestop.com

If you do need a refund for Craft of Gods, send an email to the above address. It may be a while before Craft of Gods is actually removed from sale, so I am posting this in case anyone is searching for a solution.

Blizzard Being Investigated In Korea Over Diablo III Refund Refusals


Gaming return policies are a double edged sword. You can’t return games because, on one hand the policy stops people from burning the games to a disk and simply returning them. On the other hand, and this goes equally for digital downloads, if the game is broken or unplayable at a fundamental (the game on the disc, not the disc itself) level, the customer has no recourse other than to hope one day that the company patches out the problems. In other words, once the company has your money, they have your money. Unless, of course, you’re willing to go the chargeback route.

South Korea has taken issue with Blizzard’s policy of “no refunds,” raiding the Blizzard offices this afternoon to gather evidence in an investigation as to whether or not the company violated South Korean law by refusing refunds. Dissatisfied Diablo III players, unable to log in to the game, were denied refunds under Blizzard’s terms of service. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission, who conducted the raid, did not comment on the matter further than admitting that there have been numerous complaints filed.

Blizzard apparently believes they are in the right, as the company has not changed its mind on refunds.

(Source: Korea Times)

No, You Are Not Owed A Refund


Whether you pay a monthly fee, buy cash shop items, or simply just play without paying, you are making some kind of investment in your MMO of choice, a combination of time and usually money. As I have pointed out before on many occasions, the major difference between MMOs and many other games is that MMOs are consistently changing. In fact, if you were to quit an MMO and come back two years later, what you might find may be drastically different than what you saw when you last played. Features are balanced, new updates are released, storyline progresses, and more.

An important factor I make note to remind people of is that your subscription fee pays for now. The subscription you pay for June 2010 has no bearing on July 2010, or even December 2010 and beyond. It is because of this that I stress that players should get into the mindset of “I’ve paid $150+ since I’ve subscribed for over a year.” Blizzard could care less if you subscribed to World of Warcraft in July 2008; if you are not subscribed now you will not play on their servers.

I point this out today because whenever I see a notice of a huge update to a game, or a game is shutting down, certain players feel that they are entitled to get their subscription back. Not the pre-paid subscription, as developers are always good about reimbursing players who paid for time past the shutoff date. What I refer to are players who believe they are entitled to their past subscriptions back as some form of compensation for their time.

First of all, your money is spent. Developers don’t shut a game down because they feel they’ve bilked enough money out of it and it’s time to close shop and live in the Bahamas for the rest of their lives. Your past subscription money has already been paid out, likely to some developer so he can feed his family. To put it short: If the developers had the kind of money to refund everyone their past subscriptions, then they wouldn’t be shutting the game down.

Secondly, and this is a crucial one: Please don’t act like you assumed the game would exist forever. Every MMO is going to shut down one day. It may be ten months later, ala FURY, or it may be over thirteen years later, ala Ultima Online. No matter how long it takes, it will happen eventually. Our characters may be a multi-year project, but like any good pet we know that one day that character will be lost, and instead of thinking about how we will be post-burial, we choose the present to have as good of a time as possible.

Third: In certain cases you do get compensation. When Star Wars Galaxies launched the notorious NGE updates, they refunded players who had purchased the latest expansion pack under the assumption that the game would be as it was. Many times when cash shop Korean games change services, they also offer players compensation in terms of in-game currency that they had spent.

In a sense, this article is primarily dedicated to those players of Lord of the Rings Online who expect a full refund of their past subscriptions because the game is going free to play, as well as World of Warcraft players who expect a full refund because Cataclysm is going to make The Barrens slightly less suitable for Chuck Norris jokes. The same goes for all games, however.

I tell people to vote with their wallets, because when the developers see their subscriber/cash-shop purchases plummet, if they are decent they will start listening to the community. Otherwise they will fall, or in the case of FURY, send emails to their ex-customers calling them losers.