WoW Character Transfer Error Empties Bank Accounts : World of Warcraft General Discussions

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/world-of-w ... 207124.php


For the last 8 days, I have been valiantly struggling to help a friend transfer his World of Warcraft character from Shadowfist to Kor'gall on the European servers.

You see, he doesn't have a credit card. So I was more than happy to step up to the plate and put it on mine. I am a millionaire video games blogger, after all.

When the first step was completed, I was told there was approximately a 12 hour queue to transfer his character. Okay, no problem. 12 hours later the estimated wait time was the same. 36 hours later? It shot up to two days. By the time Monday came around, we started figuring out that there was something much more substantially wrong than a long queue.

We checked the forums. Hundred of people were complaining, yet Blizzard didn't deign to answer a single question. When a blue Blizzard rep did show up, he merely cut and pasted a static response that the system was working as intended, and that these were flukes that should be resolved by calling the billing department. Not a single person who called could resolve the issue with a CSR: they suggest canceling the transfer and starting over again. Those who did had no more luck getting their characters transferred. We decided to wait it out.

Finally, yesterday, my friend was told that his character was ready to be transfered. All he needed to do was log in, confirm his credit card details and click transfer. I did this on his behalf: I got an incomprehensible error message. For the next twelve hours, I logged in once per hour, repeating this step. At no time was the character transfer finalized.

But here's the kicker: this morning I check the forums again, and see a message from a user who got a more or less firm statement from Blizzard over the phone that they know there's a serious issue with their character transfer and not to keep on trying to finalize the transfer, as it would always fail but would charge your account 20 euros for each failed attempt.

My heart stopped. I checked my online credit card statement: no charges. I went back to the forums and it turns out that it doesn't appear to happen to those doing the transfer with credit cards, but only guys with debit cards. Dozens of people complain that their entire accounts have been drained by this. They are completely broke; their banks have frozen their accounts.

So what we have here is an error on Blizzard's part that has completely drained the bank accounts of some of their customers. Paid character transfer hasn't worked for the last 8 days, but it was only today Blizzard pulled the page. At no point has Blizzard issued a statement, an ETA or even admitted on their forums that there is an issue. Hearsay is the only word that comforts those people who have been bankrupt trying to transfer their fruity little gnomes.

How can a company be so close-lipped with their customers? What level of callous contempt for the ignorant monkeys who greedily lap up Blizzard's wares can possibly explain such rank incompetence and lack of consideration? What a disgrace.







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That's just horrible lol. I wonder how many times they must have tried in order to drain their bank accounts. Blizzard better refund them. Lol I bet Blizzard got hella rich off their little scamming escapade.

I smell a massive lawsuit if they even consider not refunding money. Then again, that could be contested and knowing blizzard, they'll come up with a BS statement that people paid to transfer characters multiple times, and it wasn't their fault. Good luck to those people that got cork screwed sideways.