Well, sorta.
Today, my bank notified me that Mythic entertainment had billed my credit card 44 times in a single day for $14.95, for a total of more than six hundred dollars. This was interesting since I don't have 44 Warhammer accounts. Indeed, I cancelled my Warhammer subscription a few months ago.
I did a little more digging and found this over at the Warhammer forums. Link.
The thread is 8 pages so far and filled with people with similar stories. Due to how some folks had been paying for their subscription and the size of the mistaken overcharges, some customers are looking at overdraft fees, checks that bounce while this is getting sorted out, and returned check fees.
Fun times. I'd like to think it will eventually get sorted out, but Mythic is so far keeping mum on how something like this could happen or how they are going to prevent it again in the future. I also sympathize with the folks that get zapped with some undeserved banking penalties because of returned checks or whatnot.
Mythic has a tough time getting anything to go right it seems lately. It's tough to imagine a better way to antagonize customers than something like this. Mythic has yet to contact me by email to apologize for their error. My email address hasn't changed in ten years.
Last edited by Hiredgoons; 04-09-2010 at 03:10 AM.
as I wrote somewhere else, its pretty strange, since the same thing happened on the europe servers as well a few months ago, something that is being handled by GOA in europe. One would think they would learn from that debacle?
but..44 times? holy moses... I need to check my bank records as well, since I'm actually subscribed
That's why you don't have your mmo accounts attached to your bank account.
On Slashdot now. :)
Ouch.
Hope that gets straightened out quick. Not much worse than going to purchase something and not having the cash available.
Didn't something like this happen with a previous MMO? It sounds very familiar.
Going on the thread on the official forums, it happened with this MMO. December 2008 is the general date they're throwing around.Originally Posted by Not One Of Us
This is really something that would make me call a lawyer and get a comp from Mythic for damages suffered (Reject fees etc this stuff can ramp up quickly). I mean 44 or even more Times? If rent or other essentials would be declined because of something like this... unimaginable. It puzzles me how something like this could happpen again, considering it has happened before in Europe.
As someone who works on systems that handle ACH transfers, it's really not that difficult for something like this to occur. This is, however, one of those things that it should be the highest priority to prevent from happening. They should have had safeguards on their safeguards so that no single bug or blunder would have allowed this to happen.
It happened with Hellgate: London as well.
I also happened with... Hellgate! That's right, Flagship's creme de la creme also had an early bout of overcharging a bunch of subscribers.
Edit: Beaten!
Guild Wars.
j/k
No overcharges for me! Phew!
Reading that thread is awful, though. Like the person who may have to cancel their little kid's birthday party because Mythic took all their money...
I used to work on this type of stuff previously, and we had our processor (a very large mutli-national bank) accicdently run a few of the transaction files multiple times and end up charging our customers 2-7 times. We took the blame, covered all the NSF charges, and they gave us a discount on their processing cut for the next few years.
It's not *necessarily* Mythic's fault.
According to responses in that post it was caused by a maintenance on their billing system so in this case it looks like Mythic rather than their payment vendor. It also happened to DAoC customers apparently.
So far all we have is a forum post. If I was overcharged and don't read the forums (say, for example, I quit WAR months ago like the original poster) and I didn't happen to check my bank statement, I would be out hundreds of dollars.
It doesn't matter who's at fault for the charges. The difference between EA and their merchant bank is immaterial. The blundering way they're mishandling customer communication about these charges, however, is. They need to contact every overcharged single customer to notify them about the error and promise to address any and all overdraft fees.
Yeah, I can tell you that despite the mass of rules and accreditation you go through with banks, and the anti-fraud systems that seem to interfere with plenty of legit transactions, stuff like this can just go wooshing straight through. I worked on a system where the aquirer (bank) let through 30 charges against the same card on one day with the same goddamn authorisation code. And this was within the last 18 months.
My post was mostly in relation "how can this happen again" - you're absolutely correct that they need to get their response sorted out, quickly.
From a post on the Slashdot thread, it sounds like they did send out an official email.
Oh. Not such a big deal then, if they notify everybody and promise to make it right. Still blundering, but not criminal.
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