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."

Comments

Where's my computerized credit card?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Where's my computerized credit card?

[pcolaman]

Good stuff until the FUD at the end. If it's a debit card with a Visa or Mastercard logo, the dispute rights are exactly the same as they would be with a credit card.

Re:Where's my computerized credit card?

[A nonymous Coward]

Two weeks? You were without your own cash for two weeks and think that is perfectly acceptable?

The worst that happens with a credit card is it hits a credit limit and won't accept more charges. Maybe some automatic charges are denied because of this, but you can probably put them on a different card in the meantime and not really lose anything but some hassle. Meanwhile you dispute the bogus charges and the merchant loses and gets a black eye with real financial encouragement to do better: they pay more for credit card purchases due to their lousy track record, and if their lousy track record gets too lousy, they lose all ability to accept credit cards.

Contrast this with a debit account, where your own money is gone, you are guilty until proven innocent, and the merchant's only incentive to not do so again is losing your business.

Now maybe you are the kind of anal freak who checks your checking account balance and transactions every hour; you might catch malfeasance quick enough to undo most of the damage. But most of the rest of us only check it when we withdraw cash from the ATM or make a deposit. Once a week if we are lucky, once a month when the statement comes otherwise. That's a long time to not know about missing cash.

Re:Where's my computerized credit card?

[ultranova]

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.

I can just tell my bank to conduct a given electronic money transfer every month, no shell scripts needed. But then again, I live in Finland, not USA :p.

The electronic pseudocheck would have a date, a recipient, an amount, and an RSA digital signature.

No offence, but for such a large economy, you sure have a primitive money handling system. Who the heck uses checks anymore, just wire the money from yours to the target account.

Re:Great Business Plan

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

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.

Re:Tip for those wanting fee refunds

[Rasperin]

Interesting, can I get that bank employee's name? It's actually _illegal_ to accept any gift of any monetary value from a customer. This is not just a code of ethics thing, it's illegal on a federal level. Such as I work for a medium midwestern bank, I didn't know this policy so when my father (who banks there) decided to give me a gift for Christmas, I was forced to give it back. (My fault for saying how I got a nice gift card to Outback to my boss...). I then was forced to file a report to Feds which was an 11 page document explaining why I received it, it's approximate value, and a signature showing that the gift was returned. Anyways point is, not only can that employee get slapped with charges, you can get slapped with charges also for giving a gift to a bank employee.

Re:On a related note

[Achromatic1978]

My millionaire aunt got hit with a 50 dollar fee once and she was talking to the one of the VPs of the bank. Try asking for escalation when you have less than 100 bucks in your account.

Perhaps yes, perhaps no. My wife had an issue with a US Bank credit card that she almost never used, with only a $500 credit line on it. She was late, got a fee which overlimited her, and got a subsequent fee for that. They reversed both, told her to make a payment, $x. Turns out $x was a little small and three days later she was reassessed those fees, as the computer didn't view $x as the minimum payment.

US Bank's credit card department wouldn't entertain the error as being even worth investigating. In their mind, the fact that they had "courtesy waived" fees previously meant that they wouldn't again. They wouldn't accept that we weren't asking for a courtesy waiver, but that although we appreciated it, we were asking them to investigate their error (and had it been shown that my wife was in the wrong, would have accepted it).

No dice.

Even our local branch manager spent 90 minutes on the phone with them with us in her office, but she held no sway.

My wife said "fuck it, we'll pay, and close the account".

I told her I had one last trick... I wrote a letter explaining this, explaining our frustration, the goodwill it had destroyed, years of loyal, though small customer... I had my wife sign the letter, and I addressed and mailed it to US Bancorp's Executive Vice President and Chief Credit Officer. My wife? "What's the point? They won't care."

Two weeks later, she got a phone call from him, apologizing, offering to reimburse all fees and give her account a $200 credit as a gesture of regret... very little to them, but they could have done a lot less...

No offense, but that's one thing I hate

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Lawsuit

[iamhassi]

FTA:
"I have gotten this same error, I believe the system may have done this to everyone who is currently playing that is using credit cards to pay... 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, costing me any money that Icould possibly have to live off of..."

Wow... just wow. Having $1,000 suddenly deducted from your bank account would hurt almost any gamer

Warhammer Online requires a credit card on file:
"This game requires a monthly fee to play. The first 30 days of this fee are included in the purchase price of this package. You must provide a valid credit card to register and play."

So all those smart people saying "use automatic bill pay" are wrong, you can't with Warhammer Online. This is so much fail on so many levels I don't know what to say.

Re:Lawsuit

[Spazztastic]

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.

The real WTF is right here. Why on Earth did you give a third party the ability to withdraw funds from your bank account? What did you think would happen?

Frankly, if you are doing online purchasing or paying for a game subscription, you should only use a credit card. You can get one with a low limit ($200~) with even the worst credit rating, or buy a prepaid card and pay as you go. PayPal can kiss my ass if they expect me to give them my bank and routing details. If I ever did that, it would be tied to a savings account which I deposit money into on an as-needed basis. My brother had a bad experience with them overdrafting his account because someone disputed a charge 59 days before the 60 day period was up.

I have three total cards, and here is what I use them for.
- Debit Card: Kept in a safe in my house, I use an ATM card to get cash.
- Credit Card with a $800 limit: Used for online subscriptions (WoW account, VPS, etc.) I also use it for gas, morning coffee, and it has a points system so I benefit. I also can view it online to see any charges made to it at any time on either my Crackberry or my home computer. Usually charges show up within 8 hours or less, 24 hours depending on where you use it.
- Credit Card with a much larger limit: Kept in my wallet for emergencies only. If I make an online purchase with it, I call my bank and have them give me a one time use CC number.

Also, all my cards say "CHECK ID" in big bold lettering on the back.

Re:Lawsuit

[commodore64_love]

>>>why we have class-action lawsuits

I love class-action lawsuits. I got ~$30 from the CD companies after they were sued for price-fixing. I got ~$50 from paypal after they were sued for violations of banking laws. And ~$1000 from a Amway-type company called Equinox for making false claims (I had spent $2000, so I still lost money, but it was nice to get some back). Whenever I hear news of a class action suit, I immediately sign up. It's like Christmas. ;-)
.

>>>three months of free play

Sounds okay to me. If I am already a subscriber of Warhammer, and I get three months free play on that game, or some other EA game, then it's like getting ~$60 extra cash in my wallet. My Cellphone company did a similar deal when they forgot to charge my account and turned-off my phone. I got the months of April, May, and June free of charge. Sweet.