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Warhammer Online Users Repeatedly Overbilled
TheSpoom writes "A screw-up in EA's Warhammer Online billing system has resulted in many players being charged upwards of 22 times for a one-month subscription, filling bank accounts with overdraft fees and the Warhammer forums with very angry players, who are discussing the issue quite vocally. EA has said that refunds are in progress and that '[they] anticipate that once the charges have been reversed, any fees that have been incurred should be refunded as well.' They haven't specifically promised to refund overdraft charges, only to ask customers' banks to refund them once the actual charges are refunded. They seem to be assuming banks will have no problem with this."
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to rampant stupidity and incompetence. This is EA afterall.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
ask customers' banks to refund them once the actual charges are refunded
Yes because banks are so courteous to their customers.
3 elements of the tort of negligence:
1) Did they owe the claimant a duty of care?
Yes. By getting direct access to their bank accounts, they had to take care not to overcharge.
2) Did they breach that duty?
Yes. They charged multiple times.
3) Did that breach cause damage?
Yes. Customers were put into overdraft (and who know how many cheques bounced because of it).
I probably left it in the glove compartment of my flying car.
I thought that, by now, we would have computerized bank accounts with asymmetric encryption, so that I can write a shell script and put it in a cron job to automatically send the $20 monthly payment to my MMORPG provider. The electronic pseudocheck would have a date, a recipient, an amount, and an RSA digital signature. It would prevent mistakes like this, as well as most credit card fraud.
Until we get this system (never), just don't tie your bank account to anything. Use your credit card for everything electronic, since you can always dispute the charge.
I am out of mod points. +5 Informative
Holy cow that is insane. Of all the ways they could screw up, this has to rank near the top for maximum carnage on people's real life.
Crazy the bug was made in the first place, even crazier that it passed QA. Billing code guy is going to be toast.
Were I on the receiving end of these charges, I'd just call my bank and have them process a charge back. Let EA handle the fees from that.
Also, teach you a lesson of never, ever putting things like this on a debit card that can pull money straight from your account.
It is usually a good idea to call up your bank and opt-out of their overdraft "service". Some people may prefer to pay a fee to save embarrassment of letting people know their account is empty, but usually you can just pull out a credit card if need be. Not to mention some banks intentionally re-order transactions to hit multiple overdraft fees, so if you're one of those unlucky people you never want to overdraft. A good alternate solution is to switch to a credit union, as they tend to have better customer service.
As far as this story goes, can EA actually refuse to pay the overdraft fees? It's their error so it makes no sense for people to pay overdraft fees despite doing nothing wrong. I wouldn't know if there is any legal basis to force EA to pay up, or if it is just up to their "good will".
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I've incurred overdraft fees based on merchant error a number of times, and every bank I have ever had has done everything they can to screw their customers out of as much money as possible. EA expecting banks to refund overdraft fees is like asking EA to ... I don't know ... behave like a company that cares about its customers.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Considering one subscriber in the linked discussion thread got charged 13 times for his ~$77.94 6-month subscription (which wasn't even up for renewal for another five months), for a total of $1,013.22 in charges—yeah, this sort of thing will fly under everybody's radar.
Many players probably use debit cards tied to their personal checking accounts; I'm sure they'd notice multiple charges. Even more so if they live paycheck to paycheck.
Even though EA/Mythic are allegedly working with their payment processing vendor(s) to reverse all the extraneous charges, they're still putting the onus on the customer to check with their respective financial institutions to ensure that any fees incurred are voided or reversed. I'm sure that is going to give said customers the warm fuzzies about continuing their patronage.
Total clusterfuck on the part of EA/Mythic. Heads should roll, and liberally.
Or what can be attributed to a crappy API. Even on a stable, well proven app, a shitty API (Like Paypal's payflow pro) will make your life misserable. I'm not defending EA here, those guys are worse than microsoft, just stating a technical fact, and a possible theory of how this happened.
It's happened to me before. You have a working app, paypal or your bank or someone else decides to change something on their side without previous knowledge, and they only test it with their official SDK (most of the times java-only). All of the people that implemented their own codebase on another language, get screwed over. Hopefully, automated charging will just fail. In some cases, something like this will happened. Over the years, it's happened to me once with Paypal, once with Wachovia, and once with 2Checkout.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Find yourselves a good credit union people. Mine has no ATM fees, refunds ATM fees that *other* banks charge me, doesnt ever reorder checks to double hit me, has a max fee of $30, and has about the best customer service and relationship of any company I have ever dealt with. And probably about a dozen other good things I can't think of off the top of my head.
There is literally no reason whatsoever to give your money and soul to Citibank or Chase or BoA these days.
meep
I've been with a number of banks, including BofA, Washington Mutual, and lately Wells Fargo. I'm not that old, but I've been banking for around 10 years, so I've had my fair share of unfair fees and what-not, but all in all, there has been one thing that has helped me over the years, and that is establishing a personal relationship with your banker.
Many banks see you as just a number with some cash tied to it. The more cash you have, the more valuable your business, but unless you have tens of thousands of cash at a branch, most banks don't care. So, in lieu of having a bunch of cash, you'll have to cash in (bad pun intended) on the human element to get human treatment.
For me, I make sure I go into the branch every now and then to make deposits, and stop by my banker's desk, ask her how her day is going, and so on. These five minute conversations are important, because they re-enforce your presence to them, and they show that you care. Once a year, for Christmas/New Year's, I buy her a small gift and write her a card (expensive isn't important; under $20 is perfect). I make sure to thank her for everything, wish her a great year, and so on.
So, for a bit of attention and a
My point is, we can all complain that banks are evil machines not caring about people, but we're part of the problem because we treat them like machines. But if we make that effort to treat them as a company run by humans, we might make some headway towards being treated as humans in turn.
(Disclaimer: YMMV of course. I left BofA because no one there gave a shit. I'd had luck with both WF and WaMu)
Dark Age of Camelot (the game that put Mythic on the map) players were affected too. Unfortunately, DAoC players don't have the luxury of prepaid game cards, and MUST use a CC/Debit card to pay for their account.
I'm not sure why people are surprised, this isn't the first time there's been a billing issue: See here
Title should read "Former Warhammer Online Users Repeatedly Overbilled"
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Frost bank recently sent me an update of their overdraft policies:
"We will charge you a fee of up to $30 each time we pay an overdraft.
There is no limit on the total fees we can charge you for overdrawing your account."
the bold $30 was as they printed it and the phrase "no limit" was underlined by them.
luckily i don't play Warhammer, but i wonder if this notice was related...
This is EA afterall.
Oh, so you're saying it was malice?
(j/k standard disclaimers apply)
Qxe4
Shitty API still falls under incompetence, does it not?
Sent from my PDP-11
Anyone know how these multiple charges occur within the system? I would think it hard to write a billing system so it could accidentally charge people dozens of times. Even if it had some glitch to try to repeatedly make charges, there should be some check to see if the account it up to be billed again. This isn't the first (or will it be the last) time I've heard of this kind of problem, so this must be a bigger problem than I would be inclined to think.
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This is EA afterall.
Oh, so you're saying it was malice? (j/k standard disclaimers apply)
It's both. Malicious incompentence, two words that describe much of the industry.
Of course you should check your bank statements. Anything to do with electronic transactions can and will screw up. I've had a restaurant bill me twice, because the first time their terminal said not completed, but the money was taken out already. If it involves money, always check your statements.
What may happen is that most of the people who used credit (not debit) cards demand a chargeback from their bank, EA gets hit with thousands of chargeback fees, and EA's merchant bank kicks them into a higher cost credit card category for excessive chargebacks.
There are Visa procedures for this. This is a chargeback code 82 - "Duplicate Processing". Likely cause: "Electronically submitted the same batch of transactions to the merchant bank more than once". See "The Chargeback Life Cycle", page 71, for an overview.
Generally, if chargebacks exceed 100 chargebacks and 1% of transactions, the chargeback penalty provisions kick in. Thereafter, the merchant is charged $100 per chargeback by the merchant's bank. The merchant is forced into Visa's "High Risk Chargeback Monitoring Program", a $5000 "review fee" is charged to the merchant for the first month, and even higher fees are charged if the problem continues.
Even big merchants have to pay. The banks have to deal individually with each customer to straighten out the mess. They charge the merchant for that.
Incidentally, "No Chargeback" sales receipts are prohibited by Visa rules and will not be enforced by banks.
EA is telling their customers to contact their financial institution before calling EA. It would probably be cheaper for EA if EA dealt with the problems themselves, but their call center may be too small.
Some users are complaining that EA charged them partway through the billing cycle, when they didn't owe EA a payment.
Anyway, EA will be getting a big bill from their bank.
Dear Valued Customer,
We are sending you this email to bring this matter to your immediate attention.
It appears that some of our customers may have been inadvertently charged multiple times for their subscriptions. If you are affected, you should start seeing a reversal of charges within 24-36 hours. We anticipate that once the charges have been reversed, any resulting fees that have been incurred on the affected account should be reversed as well. If after 36 hours, there are still incorrect charges or fees on the affected account, please follow these instructions:
* Please begin by contacting your financial institution and explain to them that you were charged multiple times and, as a result, over drafted. Most financial institutions will reverse these charges.
* If your financial institution is unable to remove these charges, you may contact our billing department for help with charge reversal by calling 650-628-1001 during our hours of operation, which are 10:00 AM EDT - 10:00 PM EDT, 7 days a week. Please have the phone and fax number of your financial institution ready when you call.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this issue may be causing you. Please continue to watch the Herald for your respective game (http://warherald.com/ or http://camelotherald.com/) in the coming days for further information regarding this issue.
At the bank that I use, I can generate "temporary" credit cards in which I can specify a credit limit and a expiration date. If I want to use it for reoccurring charges, like my gym membership, I can specify what the max that can be charged each month, in my case $45. Therefore if my gym screws up and tries to double charge me one month, the credit card company won't let them due to insufficient balance.
I can't believe people provide debt card/checking account numbers to anybody as there's very little protection (ie: disputing/reversing charges) compared to a credit card.
Whenever I play an mmo I'll buy a time card if I can, IRL if possible, through a reputable online site if it's not, and I also make it a point to remove my cc info from sites I buy stuff from as soon as a transaction I requested is finished. I don't use any online store or site that doesn't give me the option to remove my info...
you'd think they would have some kind of safeguard on the system before the transactions are sent to the cc companies, like if they just had someone verify a total each day before they send the billing through, they might have noticed that 15-25 times the expected amount for that day would have been a little fishy and they could have taken care of the issue internally, but that's not how anyone operates these days =(
I feel for all the people who had their bank accounts turned upside down on them, when many are doing well enough to keep the lights on and their fridges stocked... after all, many people I personally know play these sorts of games to escape the reality that we are leaving each day.. (I don't care what others say, but that little bit of sanity is worth $15 a month to many people).
Way too many people and gamers alike live day to day, with account balances well below what some were charged in this case..
People still play Warhammer Online?
And to all dutch people reading, this is why the disappearance of the Postbank is a really bad thing. We forget just how good we got it as consumers when the government used to run the cheapest bank around.
Pin charges, used to be free but still an insignificant amount compared to Credit Card charges.
None of the penalty payments like the above. If you can go in the the red, then you just pay the reasonable loan rate over the amount borrowed. There are no penalties. If you are not allowed to go in the red (you can turn this feature off), then you pay nothing. Any charges against your account simply don't get handled. No penalty fees again.
There is no allowance for repeating incasso to many times. The initial agreements specifies the repeat interval. Any company that abuses it faces the full fury of the bank, because the costs are fully for the bank, and banks don't like companies that upset their customers.
Market forces are NOT a good thing when it comes to handling your meager savings. Let the Americans have their silly banks and let us keep our cheap ones. Where you don't have to pay a bank for the privilege of holding your money.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have yet to see a bank not take every possible advantage to screw a customer as hard as possible. I wonder if this applies to businesses as well...
No offense, but I _hate_ people who stop to make conversation with a clerk while 20 people queue behind them with other problems. I remember spending an hour in line when I had an actual problem, because half the people in front of me were trying to chat up the clerk about the weather or about their kids. And half of those didn't even have any reason to clog a clerk's time instead of using the ATM in the hall.
And then there are those who'll try to chat up the cashier at a checkout line at the supermarket. Usually even I can tell that that cashier isn't interested, and is just spewing more mono-syllabic responses than the stereotypical husband, but some old lady just won't shut the fuck up with trying to start a chat anyway.
I always figured out that those must be just some lonely people, but if it's just trying to treat a corporation like real people... here's a thought for them: see those people behind you? Those are real people too. Just a thought.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeah, how's that working out for you now? Is Honest Imran's Billing Emporium (New York, Paris, Mumbai) going to refund you the lost goodwill as well as all those chargeback bills?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
nm
Whenever I play an mmo I'll buy a time card if I can,
I always did something similar, i.e. pay them myself each month instead of giving them permission to take money from my account.
Living in Germany - where direct transfers from one bank account to another are the standard - I always chose to directly wire the money to the company each month. Worked fine for years of Dark Age of Camelot and later Everquest 2. The latter didn't even care if I was a week late because I forgot about it ... again *cough*
I could have given them the permission to charge my account, if I was lazy. But the peace of mind was worth the minute spent transferring the money to them each month.
Anyone know how these multiple charges occur within the system? I would think it hard to write a billing system so it could accidentally charge people dozens of times.
Ask Dreamhost - the company that billed a few years in advance.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
If you're paying for Warhammer Online, aren't you being overcharged by definition?
... and then they built the supercollider.
been reading the forum post ...." My fees were 13 charges of 6 month subscriptions, 77.94 X 13 = 1013.12 I didn't have this much money in my account....."
omgwtfbbq!!!
i'd be asking for money back, bank charges paid and compensation...then canceling the account
There's a Stupidity attribute in WOL?
Wait! Whats a sig?
I remember that Blizzard had this very same issue with WoW, back in either Vanilla or early The Burning Crusade times.
I believe it was a mistake by the company they had outsourced the billing to.
Its sounds as if this is not the first time this billing issue has happened, and since these companies (in some cases) will only allow Credit Cards to be used, then I would believe that those players over billed excessively have the ability to protect your good name. I hate our litigous society, but to be recharge up to 22 times in a month and no one at the company realized the extra $$$ coming in? BULLSHIT! The accountants know what to expect.
Banks may forgive one or two overdrafts if you haven't had problems on your account in the last 6 months, but 22? They won't likely refund more than two. And it is your account and you the owner of that account are expected to monitor it. So a bank will say you are also at fault for not stopping this issue sooner. The only way the account owner might be really free and clear from bank fees is if the charges all happened with in a day or two of each other.
I would see it as part of the responsibility of the billing company to ensure this crap doesn't happen, and I would have to believe that they should be responsible for most of the overdraft fees for bad billing practices. If I were a lawyer, and I'm not. I'd be all over this one in a heart beat.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I have an account with at a bank, and I still have my credit union account from my college days (don't ask why, it's complicated). I've been billed once accidentally with each account where it caused me to have a negative balance. After the charges were reversed, the credit union gladly refunded the fee, but the bank told me flatly "Unless a fee is a result of our error, we won't refund it".
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Finish This!
Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the unclean.
There are still people that play that pile of crap?
Anyone know how these multiple charges occur within the system? I would think it hard to write a billing system so it could accidentally charge people dozens of times. Even if it had some glitch to try to repeatedly make charges, there should be some check to see if the account it up to be billed again. This isn't the first (or will it be the last) time I've heard of this kind of problem, so this must be a bigger problem than I would be inclined to think.
Disk space filled to capacity? Poorly written algorithm that doesn't take it into account because programmers don't think about hardware issues most of the time?
while true, do the following:
Read records 0 to End; for every record do the following:
is something owed and has a bill not been sent/money been siphoned from an account? then send a bill/transaction request for $X
mark account record to state that a bill has been sent or money has been siphoned. !!!ERROR, Could not write to disk!!!
if money was siphoned, mark the owe value as $0 !!!ERROR, Could not write to disk!!!
end foreach loop
end while loop
If it takes a minute to go through all of the records, it might have been 22 minutes of full disk space before someone in accounting noticed that there was an unexpected 2000% increase in income that hour.
I'd assume this problem would affect literally dozens of people.
My advice is to stop paying the subscription fees and switch over to the free-to-play Runes of Magic.
"POS Withdrawal" and "EFT" say this is using automatic debits directly to the customer's account, most likely over the ATM network. The ATM network is basically a bunch of switches and routers. Think about it like an HTTP request, where you ask for something and the server returns a code. There are 'OK' codes, 'Not ok' codes, and 'retry, I think something happened but not really sure so just let me know kthx.'
Yeah I'm dumbing it down a bit, but it's like that. All it takes is missing a 'good' return code in a list of switch/case tests, or a bad one, or misunderstanding the documentation and misinterpreting a code, and you get the rare response code 'Successful, and by the way you have lovely eyes' which you misinterpret as 'Retry' instead of 'Successful'.
Having worked in the bank support business dealing with these return codes, we see these kinds of mistakes all the time. It happened about once a month, to different institutions. They called us, we told them what to look for, they fixed it, most customers never even saw the mistake. It's likely that the payment processor screwed up and update/upgrade. First the vendor will sort it out and get money back where it belongs, and in the process most banks will either waive the fees or punch the vendor in the throat and then waive the fees, because they don't want each individual to call them separately and tie up the phones.
To repeat that - for most banks, there will be enough affected users that it's cheaper to refund the overdraft fees than to deal with each customer. For the few that don't, the customer's call will be enough to refund. At that point if you can't get a resolution, EA will probably call with the customer on the phone, and now you have business vs. business and the customer sits back and watches. At least one bank will say 'tough cookies' and end up on The Consumerist.
As always, if you have a credit union instead of a bank, you're going to feel safer when these things happen. Funny thing is, they usually purchase outsourced service to keep costs down, so depending on the vendor chosen you might see this kind of thing more with a credit union - but they are more proactive in resolving it without the customer having to pester them.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to rampant stupidity and incompetence. This is EA afterall.
Heh. This is the same week they released a beta Tiger Woods Online golf game that has a payment screen that rejects valid credit cards.
Way to go EA! You guys are really on a roll ...
It's not just Warhammer. Dark Age of Camelot has also been affected. We are talking millions of dollars and EA is telling ALL of their customers to take it upon themselves to fix it.
Well, there's one thing to be said for the geek crack that is Wow: I canceled my Warhammer account a looonnnnnng time ago cuz it was cutting into my WoW playing time too much!
Not even close to the worst.
http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=p2psupport&view=by_date_ascending&message.id=16152#M16152
Another subscriber got hit 52 times, for a $40.35 three month sub. That's a total of $2124.12.
If they're that good, then mention the company's NAME! Seriously, we're quick to jump on and tell about BAD companies, I would love to hear which ones are considered good in case they're available in my area.
Which is why any decent sql language/database interface will throw an exception if a query fails.
Oh and is MySQL the only database that just let the query hang until there is free diskspace again?
, they're still putting the onus on the customer to check with their respective financial institutions to ensure that any fees incurred are voided or reversed..
I wonder - I know NCSoft has a policy of banning any account involved in a chargeback... Does EA (while telling their customers to basically get their banks to chargeback, seems like) have the same?
This is why major financial systems are not written in VB.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
The fanatical, pants-on-head retarded idiots that comprise the core forum using user-base actually having something legitimate to complain about, that is.