Guild Wars 2

Yup. A week after opening my ticket(9/04, early AM last Tuesday) about being unable to purchase gems for the week-plus prior to opening said ticket, I just checked my support account again(not exactly sure what I was hoping to see, anyway) and it says my ticket is now simply “closed”. Only time I EVER heard from support was when they sent out a mass commerce emailer on the 6th, which didn’t address the issue I explicitly noted in the support ticket, and instead asked me to reply to the email if I had any further questions…which I did, five days ago. Now, closed without any response whatsoever, to say nothing of some attempt at resolution. Not that I was expecting much, as this thread made it abundantly clear that the best I could come to expect would be some 24-48 hour free reign to spend my ill-gotten gains on their services…which seems odd, given that they should take pride in being able to singularly detect and then block my nefarious monetary intent, rather than further enabling my supposedly fraudulent activities on a time-limited basis.(???)

Bit of free advice: for now, drop your risk assessment system. Completely. It’s obviously not ready for primetime, your staff doesn’t seem to have any confidence in it if you’re handing out waivers for anyone willing to jump through enough hoops(while still not engaging in some process that actually changes your internal risk assessment of these individual end users), and has only added problems to the inevitable chaos of a new release. Just let the credit card companies do what they do, or at LEAST until you are truly certain you can do better. Even with your mistakes causing slight problems for my credit card account’s use, to say nothing of the minor hassle and embarrassment of my previously posted encounter with my card’s service department in the aftermath of a declined purchase attempt with your service, the most you’ll receive from me over this is slight frustration and a bit of snark…as you may notice in this thread, other gamers are going to get angry. Angry is bad. As it is, this has become much less of an issue for me since I started funneling all of my in-game money into buying gems from other players who haven’t been affected by this headache, so I’m not all that mad about my ticket being summarily closed without ever even hearing back from support. Now that all my characters are habitually broke, I just hope other players don’t somehow find out what a high-risk transaction I represent in-game, or I might get cut off from the auction house too. Now that would suck.

Good/bad. The Good: While making a purchase [at the mall] on my card yesterday, the merchant had to contact(15 minute process, fun!) my credit card company and put me on, to verify that my card wasn’t stolen…while on, they referenced two other recent purchases, ending with the failed NCSoft one, which they noted was declined on NCSoft’s end as some sort of anti-fraud measure. I also verified that nothing on the card issuer’s end was blocking the purchase, with her stating that I would simply have to re-submit.(which still doesn’t work, by the way) So that’s good to know directly from my card company that the problem is definitely on NCSoft’s end…and they only referenced one attempted transaction, making it pretty likely that the dozens of other attempts aren’t even being processed at all, rather than just somehow overlooked in the conversation. The Bad: I’m apparently getting blowback on my card now, due to NCSoft flatly declining my card as part of some sort of anti-fraud measure on their end, given that this is only the second time in almost two decades that this card’s issuers have been worried about a purchase I made enough to block it until verification.(the other time being the first, if I recall, of my Dell computer purchases, which was an admittedly unusual and substantial remote purchase over either the phone or internet) Oh, and I guess it’s technically also “bad” that I still can’t purchase gems two weeks after release.

Anyway, with an unblemished credit rating, a card of approximately two decades with no account problems ever, and [thankfully] not even any problems with any of this hackapalooza stuff going on around here for some, it boggles my mind as to how I’m somehow supposed to represent a high-risk transaction on a system supposedly designed to mass-process purchases of up to 50 bucks. I think it’s safe to add my name to the list of those who have pronounced NCSoft’s new in-house anti-fraud measures as fundamentally flawed and outright detrimental to our enjoyment of all this game has to offer.

Incident: 120904-005020, submitted 9/04: no response yet.
Same issue with “card approval failed” message when trying to purchase gems. Made dozens of attempts evenly spread over the last week and a half, since the headstart, but none of them have gone through.(including times when the trade post has been up and working in general) Tried using my Mastercard as well as a Visa pre-paid debit card, at different amounts, with the same results. It doesn’t even seem as if it’s trying to process the details of the card, just a flat denial on processing the transaction, based on the speed at which it comes back with a failure message.

In lengthy searches of the internet for resolution on this problem, it sure sounds like it may be related to the aforementioned purchase restriction inexplicably put on some accounts…but there should be no legitimate reason for me to be affected by such, not for any issue related to anything I can control, anyway. No administrative action taken on my account, no issues with accessing it thus far, haven’t linked my old GW1 account to it, no purchases(successful or otherwise) on the account thus far, long-standing credit card account in use for ~two decades and with zero issues or ever even any outstanding balances. If I’m a high-risk transaction, it’s not for anything I’ve ever managed to do.