Guild Wars 2

I’m wondering if I should just not buy gems anymore. I see (from reading other peoples problems on the forum) that you can lose what you already purchased in the past and paid for due to paypal or your credit card messing up. I expect that it is even possible for game cards to glitch, after all nothing is completely perfect. As best I can tell, once there is some sort of problem, your account is permanently closed. You are not given recourse to pay in a different way than the one that messed you up.

I would hate to buy $20 worth of gems and have something go wrong and lose all the investment of time and money in my account.

Saying it is unlikely to happen isn’t a solution. The chance that it could happen and that an optional purchase of gems for fluff could cause me to lose my account makes it not worth it for me.

My question: is there any way to separate the purchase of new things from the gem store from your actual game account. For example, I would be willing to sign up for an option that does not deliver what you have bought UNTIL your money is in ANET’s hands. This would protect my game account and allow me to purchase the fluff items without fear. I can wait a few days or even a week or two to receive an item just to be sure that something doesn’t go wrong with my account.

Katz.5143:

My question: is there any way to separate the purchase of new things from the gem store from your actual game account. For example, I would be willing to sign up for an option that does not deliver what you have bought UNTIL your money is in ANET’s hands. This would protect my game account and allow me to purchase the fluff items without fear. I can wait a few days or even a week or two to receive an item just to be sure that something doesn’t go wrong with my account.

You can avoid most if not all payment issues by purchasing GEM cards where available also.

Paypal problems plague a few other games I know. The other games also ban your account, however they offer a way to resolve the billing issue, and don’t punish you after the issue is resolved by treating you like a villain.

The only issue that I’m aware of that will likely result in an absolute account shutdown with potentially no recourse to reopen is if you reverse or deny payment of a legit CC charge….that requires an ACTIVE action on part of the CC holder. Any other “mistakes” would certainly be actionable and have other recourse to be reinstated.

I think a lot of this paranoia is due to ANet’s poor choice of wording and harsh stances presented in the automated emails being send out from ticket submissions on such issues. I think there has been enough of a stink raised over some recent account banning for other reasons that hopefully this policy will be altered (at least, the wording of some of the email response should be changed to something that is just a tad less rude and absolute).

I have no idea how a legitimately purchased legal Gem Card could result in an account issue and if there are claims out there that they have, I suspect there are other “shady” aspects of the purchase that the claimant is not revealing and that ANet would NEVER make public.

Right now I’m using paypal and haven’t had a problem. However, suppose I bought some gems and then paypal did something – would that be considered a charge back?

I may just try and find some Gem cards somewhere.

I’m not entirely sure what this is about. What is a charge back? I sometimes get gifted gems when my Aunty is over and she uses her credit card to buy them…Am I at risk of anything?
By closed account do you mean the Guild Wars 2 account? Because if that was closed…all the time I’ve put into that game and the community…I’d be really upset

What prompted my question was that some guy gave his friend cash so he could use his friends credit card to buy gems then his “friend” disputed it on his card which caused the original guy to lose his gw2 account permanently. I would have felt much better about the situation if they had let him make good on the money owed using game cards or paypal or something to recover his account.

Although I will never use anyone else s credit card, I was playing a Sony game back when they got hacked and they gave us all a free year of enrollment in some organization that watched for misuse of the info. Unfortunately they were over zealous and when I tried to purchase secret world when it first came out, they blocked it as “suspicious” which resulted in the account being banned. Problem was, I had earned all the stuff from their facebook build up to the game so that annoyed me enough I didn’t even try to make another account and play the game. They could not or would not let me switch from the credit card to paypal on the same account.

The point of that story is that was when I realized how easily an account can get permanently lost. If paypal or your credit card company messes up, you can’t switch to another payment method and fix it. You are just out of luck. I’d rather be able to buy things at a store and then apply a code. That seems less risk to me.

I wish they would handle it in a way that doesn’t put your account at risk. Like I mentioned before, don’t let you have the item until the payment goes through or let you pay it some other way.