Feldon In an alarmist posting on the EQ2 Forums, Moonflake of Splitpaw has brought to our attention the disappearance of the Bank Transfer and Direct Debit payment option for purchasing StationCash, monthly Subscriptions, and the upcoming Velious expansion. Bank Transfer may seem unusual in the US for a small amount such as StationCash, subscription, or an expansion, but Bank Transfers and Debit cards are both common means of making even small purchases in Europe.
Payment Options page in Germany (before the changes) showing Bank Transfer (upper right) and Direct Debit (center left).
Payment Options page in US (after the changes)
Conclusion?
We are not certain if this marks a policy shift in the payment options available from SOE, or if this is a simple oversight in the revamp of SOE.com (formerly Station.com) which seems to have received a substantial facelift in the past few days.
Customers who have pre-ordered the Destiny of Velious: Collector’s Edition are now reporting a payment status of “Payment Source Unavailable”. It is unclear if these customers will have to choose another payment option or miss out on the Collector’s Edition special pricing ($59.95 until Feb 22nd).
More as we have it…
The only reason I could see for this change would be some way to try to reduce the credit card fraud they get by the boatload from China (basically the common way of starting an account up for gold farming purposes which ends with a chargeback to SOE).
However, I’m sure this was done before by credit card and not debit card. So the alternative guess I have is due to cluelessness by SOE sales as to how Europe works.
Continental Europe especially seems to shun credit cards (at least my experience a few years ago) and instead go for bank transfers a lot more.
One day SOE might actually invest in someone who has an idea how the European market works, that day they’ll make 20%+ more cash, but until then it looks like a lot of floundering around…
SOE has a record of treating their International customers like poop. This isn’t really helping that image.
I wonder how many people think they pre-ordered the expansion to find out that on release day their payment isn’t accepted :/
Ooh, ouch. I didn’t even think of that. That’s gonna suck.
If I was John Smedley I’d be asking my head of sales “why are we doing so poorly in Europe compared to our competitors”, but since SOE have been underperforming for years I’m guessing that question isn’t getting asked.
Its not that their products are not to European tastes, and its not for lack of technical work since EQ2’s localisation and local servers shows they have everything technically in place and working well.
EQ2X is an excellent example of the recent years lack of thought to international sales, cancelling all the free trials on non-English langauge servers to replace them with a US based only service is only a negative for non-US servers, and that’s a negative to the profit line.
I’m counting on one day someone in SOE will look at the world outside of the US as a potential opportunity for increased sales, the law of averages says it has to happen somepoint.
And its sort of amusing that there is now a thread on the forums full of people trying to find ways to pay SOE money 😉
As the original poster i would say that if i was “John Smedley”i would have start the monday meeting with all heads of the departments in a meeting room. Lights out then on a huge monitor show the thread and ask the question to all present “So why don’t we want money from our Customers” then sip his coffee and await some form of responce… any responce….
I checked this out cause this made me paranoid, logging in I see the same “payment source unavailable” message. But if I look at the actual order (should be able to click on the order number for more details and ways to cancel etc.) Then look down at “Billing Details” it shows my correct MOP.
So hopefully that means it’s still all set. I am in the US by the way.
Amnerys has raised this issue with SOE. If we get an answer before Feb 22 (or after), we’ll update about it.
I see two differant issue’s wrapping around it. Make sure we seperate it.
1) My point of the removal of direct debit. So not only the expansion but also station credits and subscribtions and other can’t be bought anymore with direct debt.
2) Ordering the expansion and the fact that SONY hasn’t billed yet.
Those are two completly seperate issue’s.
Just fyi