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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.
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.
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.
Banks in the UK notoriously operate a catch-22 procedure:
If your account is allowed to go overdrawn:
1. You are charged for processing of the debit that takes you overdrawn.
2. You are then charged for being overdrawn.
This amounts to around £65 of charges for going overdrawn.
If you instruct the bank not to let your account go overdrawn:
1. You are charged for the rejection of a debit that would have taken you overdrawn.
2. You are charged again every time the debit request is repeated, which may be each day.
3. Some banks also charge you for notifying you of each request being rejected, and don't allow you to opt out of these notifications.
Our banks have recently been under a lot of pressure to make their overdraft charges fairer. Here's the solution that some of them came up with:
1. If you use an authorised overdraft, you are charged £1 per day.
2. If you go over the authorised limit, you are charged £5 per day.
Work it out and you'll soon see that this is more damaging to customers and the banks are only getting richer.
Not everyone has hundreds of dollars to spare for a fuckup like this - some people were charged upwards of a thousand dollars! Not everyone can afford the tens or hundreds of dollars of fees they'll be facing, not just in overdraft fees, but also fees for bounced checks, etc. There are lots of people who live paycheck to paycheck - they feed themselves, maybe their kids, they pay rent... but there's not too much left over to save up after that. Even just a few days in which someone can't pay bills can cause a great deal of carnage in someone's life.
A programmer is a machine for turning pizza into code.
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)
Title should read "Former Warhammer Online Users Repeatedly Overbilled"
My webcomic
Shitty API still falls under incompetence, does it not?
Sent from my PDP-11
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.
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.
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 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.
If you're paying for Warhammer Online, aren't you being overcharged by definition?
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.