Just like that, we suddenly understand some peoples' stern distaste for subscription-based MMOs. A recent bug in the Warhammer Online billing system charged some players its $14.99 monthly fee dozens of times on their monthly due dates. The amount of the overcharge differs from user to user -- reports on this forum thread average between $200 and $500. One player, who claimed to be repeatedly charged for a $77.94 six-month subscription, was hit with fees totaling $1013.12.
The cause of the error is currently unclear, as is the scope of its impact on the game's subscriber base. EA's billing support department is now in full-on crisis recovery mode, working with each affected player's financial institution to refund the fees within "24-36 hours." Considering that this debacle could have likely led to any number of overdraft fees and bounced rent checks for the over-charged, it could prove quite a costly recovery for EA.
Definitely not good publicity for Warhammer Online, particularly since EA has apparently done a half-assed job in trying to fix it, basically amounting to "We'll return the extra money. If our error racked up a bunch of overcharge fees for you, ask your bank nicely if they would take the charges back and pray that they care."
This problem may have also affected people with inactive accounts, so keep an eye on your bank accounts if you've played.
Mayabird is my girlfriend
Justice League:BotM:MM:SDnet City Watch:Cybertron's Finest "Well then, science is bullshit. "
-revprez, with yet another brilliant rebuttal.
This sounds exactly like playing real physical warhammer now. You spend all your money without even realizing it.
"Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring the earth." M.A.A.A
On the VN boards one guy said that his 4 accounts (2 DAoC 2 Warhammer accounts, both closed long ago) were charged a massive number of times each giving him ~$2000 in charges plus $3000 in service and overdraft fees. By closed long ago I mean his DAoC accounts were closed 2 years ago and his warhammer accounts closed 6 months ago.
This isn't the first time this happened either. Last time it was people getting charged 3 times on the renewal, which hit me because I was still playing.
While errors like this can happen, they of course shouldn't. Especially not several times.
However, this makes me glad that I a) never subscribed to WAR after the free month and b) always pay stuff like that with either credit card or Paypal, where you usually get a lot more protection against crap like that.
Let him land on any Lyran world to taste firsthand the wrath of peace loving people thwarted by the myopic greed of a few miserly old farts- Katrina Steiner
DPDarkPrimus wrote:This could be the nail in the coffin for WAR.
I think the lack of PvE, the massive number of servers at launch, and several classes being so broken that they weren't in the game at launch were the nails in the coffin.
So apparently this came just after a large number of people had their accounts accessed and stripped at the same time, likely because of some particular account security breach since nobody had mentioned an increase in phishing attempts around when this happened.
EA's CSRs refuse to return any money removed from characters and players have to buy back any gear that was sold/disenchanted/destroyed when the account was held by the thieves.
