$499.00 for the preorder?

I purchased the pre-order and the GOTY upgrade today. There were no problems during my checkout, and the bill seemed to go off without a hitch. I'll Keep an eye on my monthly statement, but I don't forsee any issues.

FFS if you are old enough to have a credit card you are old enough to know how to deal with an obvious transaction mistake. You visa card can send you the transaction records and you can send them to NCSoft and once it has been cleared up then your card will be reinstated. If you have a good visa company, their fraud division will work directly with NCSoft by providing them the evidence, which NCSoft won't be able to refute, and clear it all up quickly. If they don't then you have a crappy card provider and better off switching anyway.

I preordered this as well and had the similar fraud issue. I'd like to see a response from ANet or NCsoft about this.

omg


ty for mentioning

am going to check mine too

I will pass this along and see if I can obtain some information from our billing team. One thing you may want to know is that the rate of fraud has risen greatly, and we are seeing people acquiring accounts through various means, like stolen credit cards and so forth. (This isn't CC's stolen through NCsoft -- this is CC's stolen through criminal networks.) The double-bad thing about this is that a lot of those committing fraud are also those that sell in-game gold, or bot. So it's bad, and bad again.

This may have raised the alert rate on credit cards, to avoid potential issues. Please give us a bit of time to sort it out.

And if you were overcharged, submit a support ticket immediately and the billing team will fix it!

Doing a "charge back" definitely can result in impact upon your game account. Why? Because "charge backs" are a way that scammers and those involved in fraud commit their scams and fraud. We have to lock the account to make sure there isn't someone scamming us and scamming others with secondary sales. The better way is a support ticket and a credit to your account, I believe. Again, I am asking about this.

Thank you.

the only fraud going on here is the overcharging (by a mere hundredfold) by Anet. So bringing up this diatribe about stolen credit cards and criminal networks has NOTHING to do with this.....


Charge backs are consumer protections.......against hundredfold overcharges and the like. Yes, it would be better to submit a support ticket......for you and your business history. BBB doesn't look kindly upon businesses with a lot of charge backs. I say if some random company overcharges me one hundred fold, a call to the CC company asking for a charge back is about the first thing that comes to mind. That's my money and I don't want to sift through the fraudulent company's bureaucracy to get it back. And if they close my account forever because I exercised my just and legal rights, that company has no reason to keep my business.

No good CR can come out of these arguments.

It runs both ways. If they overcharge you, then sure you can chargeback. But then that leaves your account with a product you haven't paid for. I highly suspect that gives them just and legal rights to freeze your account until you sort things out with them.

Damn it i've just done the exact same thing for the last half hour any news on this yet cos i think i just charged myself and my friends card about 40 times also...

"EDIT" Attached the error message...

Call the numbers on the back of your card and your friend's card right now and tell the customer service person what just happened. They can look at the attempts and see just what happened. I'll bet it's your security code on the back of your card. I strongly suspect the encryption software being used in the in-game store was done on a non-US keyboard. Regardless, I believe they haven't done the necessary keymapping to accommodate all the different keyboards used out there.

EDIT... I'm calling off the bet about the CVV. ;D I just read your edit, and you're getting a different error message than I got. I still think it's encryption/keymapping errors though. i just saw another thread around here about that same error code.

worked fine for me, althought i think i got charged 4.99 euro instead of dollars, o_O gonna go check my email again to make sure.

/agree

surely you understand that I am not going to sit on a $500 bill because YOUR site overcharged me because of errors on YOUR website that YOU keep pushing on us. So I am to come up with $500 and try to work it out later? How about the service provider step up and cater to the customer, not the other way around!!! And if this had happen to me when I got some new slots I would have charged it back and then if my account had been closed I would just be sure everyone I know and could tell via the WWW and BBB what happened and how it was handled so they might not purchase anything from the company in the future. It is SOP for any ordeer online to go to a "confirmation" page immediately after charging your card, and an error msg is not a confirmation, this should be fixed or the store closed until it can be fixed. (and Gaile, by YOU I mean a-net/plaync, I know you personally don't care about how we purchase)

So what would you expect them to do? Leave your account alone and email your perhaps-invalid email address which you may not respond to? Remove the character slot, perhaps deleting a random character if they are all full? If you haven't paid for something you have no right to it, and if you're unwilling to contact ArenaNet at all, in parallel to using a chargeback or otherwise, then you deserve to have your account frozen.

This is the internet, it is impossible to entirely remove the possibility of an error being returned (you might lose your connection, for instance).

Here is what I expect them to do, immort:

As Keith discussed, and you missed, have seperate order and confirm pages. That way you aren't submitting multiple orders when pages crash or time out. However, in this case, I doubt the person hit that order button exactly 100 times. This just sounds like either fraud or a horribly bugged order system on Anet's behalf. I order a lot of wine online, and all the retailers have seperate order pages, where you place your order, and seperate confirm page, where the shipping, tax, and the factored orders are all added up. Virtually every online transactor has this. Just go online shopping. Why Anet doesn't do this, well their online store has been a total debacle in about 10 different ways since they tried the bonus mission stunt. Go look at all the seperate threads on the seperate problems.

So if that universal feature to online ordering would be implemented, we wouldn't even be talking about charge backs for these situations or having your e-store account locked for doing so.

This isn't 2001. Current technology and solutions have corrected the problems of the past...........well, except the gw e-store. Then the numerous puzzling decisions, leading to the other threads about the problems, leaves many of us unwilling to give our money to Anet because of concerns like these, or strange rules where they won't take our money, results in a very bad business model. Gaile then following that up with her brand of 'CR' as above leaves us where we are now.

Now that I have read a PM from the OP, I understand this situation better.

First of all, before I understood that a charge was not placed, I have passed along these concerns to the head of the NCsoft billing department. After considerable research and a review of all purchases since the store opened, there are no purchases on record in the exact amount of $499.00. None.

Second, the OP did submit a support ticket, which is excellent. It's interesting to note that the only purchases in the PlayNC Store that exceeded $400 in recent times all seem to have involved customer fraud. You cannot blame the company for being careful, any more than you can blame the bank for trying to protect your credit by assuring that potentially fraudulent charges don't go through. It's inconvenient to have the card locked down. It's far worse to deal with a stolen card, identity theft, or that sort of thing.

So again: No one was charged $499.00, anywhere, at any time. Not the OP, not anyone. So whatever happened, it may be safe to say it was a single incident and nothing more. Until I see a support ticket (please send me your incident number) and can read the incident and track the facts with the financial records, I want to ask that everyone else hold off on assuming that NCsoft has committed an error. Certainly any error -- an erroneous attempted charge on NCsoft's part, a misread by the processor on the credit card end -- would not have been intentional.

The billing team will be absolutely fair to the anyone who has legitimate issues with the system. That is all they ask in return.

Completely irrelevant if the issue is happening after submit is pressed, regardless of how many pages you have to click through to confirm your order. Even with an extra confirmation page, if you get an error after hitting submit (perhaps because the store server is overloaded) then anything could have happened.

Further irrelevant because I was talking about what happens after something goes wrong - discussing how to prevent things going wrong has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

you probably should stop immort......you dont understand them

a confirmation page does not place orders, it just confirms.......the order. If you reconfirm a single order a thousand times, that's still just one order

they were cleverly programmed and implemented worldwide more than 5 years ago to avoid the problem of mistakenly resubmitting orders because of high server loads

it's really this simple.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, you are completely correct, that would work for that issue. Teach me to post late at night. Of course, the store should be checking you aren't buying something you already own anyway, which works for everything except character slots. :P

I stand by my comments regarding chargebacks - and they still might come up regardless of a confirmation page if there is some other bug in the store.

Of course it's great that they are being cautious. And a merchant can be cautious and decrease fraud and chargebacks dramatically by implementing AVS and CVV requirements in their transactions, which they clearly have done, and in which case it's very important they make sure there are no bugs in their AVS and CVV encryptions and make sure all the keys (public and private) match.

True, the decimal point error seems at this point in time to be an isolated incident, but there are so many other errors that seem, based on many of the posts in this forum, to relate directly to the AVS and CVV encryptions that NCSoft is using to decrease fraud.

Of course NCSoft wouldn't intentionally make errors with credit card transactions and to accuse them of fraud is ludicrous, but they are still capable of making unintentional errors. I'm disappointed that they would blame "misreads" on the financial institutions' end for the many errors their customers are experiencing. That's irresponsible. To veil their vision to the probability that many are generated on their end certainly does nothing to help solve the problem. Some encryption software is indeed buggy, and it's up to NCSoft to make sure theirs is not and to have encryption keys that match all the financial institutions' keys. Based on my own experience and the experiences I've been reading here, I don't believe NCSoft has done that.

That is not to say, however, I believe all the errors are generated by NCSoft. No doubt some of the customers are not entering their CC billing address in the address fields (used for AVS), but I imagine a good number are and at least 99% are entering their CVV correctly... it's a bit unusual for a person to mistype 3-4 digits over and over again... don't you think?

EDIT:

I am being very simplistic about the encryption and decryption process because my knowledge of the process is very limited. I did only enough research to find what I feel confident is the source of the errors, not enough to learn how to do encryption myself... of course. I just hope, instead of trying to sweep it all under the carpet and/or "explain it all away", the person administering the in-game store is looking or will look for the source of the errors as well.

So is it save to order on line?

Will be charged $4.99 0r $499.00 ??

i would guess it is safe to say that you will only be charged 4.99, and that if there happens to be a 499.0 charge, then as long as you have legitimate information to back yourself up, then any errors will be straightened out...and decimal places relocated