The Diablo III refund thread!
 

OK, I'll start.

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Subject: Refund request

Chruser | 22 minutes ago


Hello,

Due to a number of disagreeable design decisions, mostly related to the mechanics of the Auction House taking the fun out of the perquisition for items (and the game in general), I am requesting a refund for Diablo III.


Your Order From Blizzard - #57139931

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Purchase Receipt
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[...]


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Fhlarny | 11 minutes ago
Customer Service Representative


Hello there,

After an extensive review of the circumstance you have described, we have determined that the account zelaron@gmail.com does not qualify for a refund.

You have had the game for a long time and been active in game during this period. Refunds have to be requested very early on after buying it to qualify for one and sadly that is not the case here.

If you feel that we may have reached this conclusion in error, please reply to this ticket.


Regards,

English Game Master Team
Blizzard Europe

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Chruser | 0 minutes ago


Hello,

Thank you for your extensive review of my circumstances. What are the minimum requirements for "active in game during this period"?

I have deliberately waited for 30 days from the date of purchase to file a refund, which is considerably longer than the amount of time I was "active in game during this period".


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I don't have any high hopes for my request being accepted, but I'm curious as to whether I'll receive any specific information about the requirements for a refund.

Supposedly a lot of people are calling their credit card companies and having the companies do a chargeback. According to most of them, if you tell them you were victim of a "bait and switch" they will return your money.

Ah, that sounds like a useful strategy. Anyway, I received more detailed information in a response to my support ticket:


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Yubalkkor | 7 minutes ago
Customer Service Representative


Hey there,

I apologise for the long wait but we've got a lot of questions about D3 at the moment.

In order to be able to offer a refund, the request needs to be made within 72 hours after the game was bought. Unfortunately in this case the time has passed now and this is why we can't refund the game anymore. :(

Regards,
Yubalkkor

English Game Master Team
Blizzard Europe

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Chruser | 0 minutes ago

Hello,

Okay, I'll be sure to make my refund request for the next Blizzard game within 72 hours and ensure that I'm not "active in game" during this period of time, if I want a refund for it.

Thanks for your assistance!

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I'm sure it should be easy enough to find a rational reason to dislike a game without playing it. I'd hate to risk being considered active in the "long time" of 72 hours and having my refund rights revoked!

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/top...9449545?page=7

A lot of people are calling their banks trying to get a refund on the IAS items they bought off the RMAH.

I really wish Diablo III was a good game. The only good thing that resulted out of all this is that the idea of a RMAH has failed, thus preventing it (hopefully) from ever weaseling its way into any other high profile video games.

I don't think the RMAH is the problem. Blizzard has designed the game in such a way that promotes using it, almost to the point of requiring it, and they will continue to make changes that make your purchases worthless therefore trying to get you to use it again. If they weren't using such tactics, it would be a useful tool IMO.

This is probably true. You'd think that the 12 years of development time since D2, and the experience with making the world's most popular MMORPG, would make Blizzard think through their item and gold sinks better.

Seriously, how could anyone in their right mind think that essentially one gold sink (crafting), and the band-aid you mentioned, would be good enough?

(I've intentionally omitted a few sinks like the cost of repairing items, because it's not really an issue unless you play terribly, IMAO. Getting killed isn't an investment.)

What should be done is to add incentives for players to get rid of gold and items when there's too much of it in the economy (duh). Keeping RMAH prices high is of course an incentive for sellers, but it wouldn't be in the interest of the individual player to get rid of his own gold and items solely to this end. Instead, letting players reduce the supply of others would be one possible solution (think hardcore PvP), but I guess this isn't EVE...

https://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5150109977#9


http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company...rmsofsale.html




Abundantly clear refund policy...

You should respond to the e-mail with that information.

Blizzard decided that my support ticket should be closed, unfortunately.

Are you going to take that from them?

Fine, I yield. For some reason, my new ticket ended up being marked as US rather than EU, despite the fact that I explicitly chose EU. Weird. I'll return shortly with the results, hopefully!

I just am not gonna try. I have the game, I do Azmodan runs on Hell so I can get decent items. I would only run act 1 inferno. So I'm really upset but not gonna rage and request money back. They'll fix it.

Unfortunately, the latest patch is about as good as an indication that things will start going in the right direction as the previous patches were. That is, not at all.

It's not about rage. It's about using that insipid Capitalism 101 trick that a company will actually be likely to listen to: Reducing their profits when they're doing something bad.

(John Zerzan's precursory writings on anarcho-primitivism has some pretty interesting extensions of that idea, but property damage is beyond the scope of this post.)

Patch 1.0.4 has been leaked!

Patch 1.0.4:

-You can now repair with 'Blizzbucks' or money earned or bought on the Real Money Auction House.

-Repair costs have gone up another 700%

-All items are now ethereal except those bought on the Real Money Auction House.

-We felt that the 'Indestructible' affix on items was too boring. This has been removed.

-We feel that 'Increases Gold and Health Globe pickup radius' has been underused. All items now carry this affix at the expense of one stat.

-The repair vendors have revolted and now demand real money in order to provide their services. Gold may no longer be used to repair your items.

-Haedrig has starved due to lack of players crafting items. He has been removed and replaced with his son, Smaedrig. Smaedrig will use your blizzbucks and leftover RMAH items in order to craft weapons and armor that might be an upgrade!

-Increased attack speed has been removed from the game, dual wielding no longer provides an attack speed bonus.

-Removed the chance for weapon and armor racks to drop anything

-Removed the chance that gold will drop off terrain objects

-All elite / champion packs are now Reflects Damage, Fast, Shielding, Teleporter Soul Rippers while playing a ranged hero and will now deal 20% durability damage to a player's items in addition to the 10% when the player is killed.

-All elite / champion packs are now Molten, Arcane Enchanted, Vortex, Waller Pre-Nerf Wasps with invisible projectiles when playing melee heroes. They will also taunt players when they land a killing blow.

-We found that too many players stacked critical strike chance and damage. These have been reduced by 75%

-Treasure Goblin health increased by 500% and not longer stutter when struck. They no longer drop gold when hit.

-All bosses have had the time required to enrage cut by 75%

-Invulnerable minions now grants automatic shielding to the main monster. If the monster also has the Shielding affix, it too will be invulnerable.

We feel these changes should add to the dynamics and fun of the game, and we hope to see you in Sanctuary for years and years to come!

Found this on the Blizz forums, lol!

That made my day just a bit better.

Magiaris | 1 hour ago
Customer Service Representative


Greetings!


Thanks for contacting us. I am Game Master Magiaris and I will be assisting you today. Hope everything is going well.

The refund policy that your battle.net account will adhere too is that of the Americas. 30 days to refund the product. Since your ticket was placed on the very last day of the refund period I'm going to refund your purchase. Please allow 7-10 business days for the changes to reflect in your statements. This is dependant entirely on how fast your financial institution can process these types of requests.

Should a survey proc for you, please remember it is soley based on this response/ticket/my work with you.

Thanks for letting me help!

If you have any further problems or questions arise, feel free to hit us up again anytime! Take care.

Game Master Magiaris
Customer Services
Blizzard Entertainment
www.blizzard.com/support

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I guess there is a free lunch after all.

Grats. It's kind of stupid that you had to point out their own policies to them to get the refund, but cool that you got the refund at least.

So if you get a refund does that mean all your characters would be deleted and you would never be able to access them again?

For 64.79 USD, I can provide you an answer to your question. :p

If I am not satisfied with your answer, will I get a refund?

I'm really hoping they fixed their mistake.

It looks like Diabo III may be the biggest letdown of the decade, but the new Elder Scrolls Online may topple it. Of course it is early in the decade, there is plenty of time for contenders.

Even more so than Duke Nukem Forever?

D3 is a much bigger letdown.

Agreed. Especially since it came out and had such potential. Then blizz destroyed it.

Well sheeeeeeee-it.

http://zelaron.com/apax/ifitaintthecapnhimself.jpg

How about commander?

I really want ESO to succeed, but I'm pretty sure it will suck.

Why do you think it will suck? I've barely heard anything about it and it isn't supposed to be released until next year. What are you basing your opinion on?

They've been going downhill since Morrowind as far as gameplay is concerned so it should come as no surprise that faith in Bethesda would be wavering. I want it to succeed more than anyone else, but it's going to be like Diablo. People will have such high expectations and then Bethesda will only deliver a mediocre product that only barely reaches the stated design features.

If you think Oblivion or Skyrim are mediocre, you're smoking crack. Skyrim is probably the best game I've played in the past few years, easily.

Most people who seem to be making the claim that TES Online will suck are making the argument based on the presumption that "all MMORPGs suck." I don't really think that's a valid argument, unless you are assuming that they will make an MMORPG exactly like the rest, and even then the argument is based on an assumption.

Of course, I'm not making the argument that it WON'T suck. It very well might. And if you didn't like Oblivion or Skyrim, it probably will suck.

I'm putting more hope on Fallout 4 than TES. At least the former will be console worthy.

The combat system doesn't seem very Elder Scrolls-like. Zenimax Studios has little experience. The game won't look as pretty as Skyrim. Plus, the whole Elder Scrolls series revolves around mods IMO.

Skyrim is awesome mainly because of mods. I still play the game today. And Morrowind. Oblivion I haven't touched in a year.

Mods make or break a game for me. Some of my favorite games (Diablo II, EVN, Minecraft) Have their story line, then after that you move onto mods. Tons and tons of playthroughs with completely different styles.

Less mods,

I would make the argument that Oblivion was mediocre. The game play was incredibly stale, the environments recycled, and the combat system was also fairly lame. The removal of tons of spells and weapon types, blah blah blah you get the picture. Skyrim was a step up in terms of graphics, epicness, and... dragons? In terms of openness of gameplay, which is something I treasure in an RPG, the Elder Scrolls has been backpedaling since Morrowind. After playing Morrowind, I accepted the limitations of games at that time as far as real openness (I mean here options given to the player in given situations), but instead of moving forward with new hardware at their disposal, they are moving backwards by simplifying things to the point of dullsville. Don't get me wrong, I played Skyrim quite a bit too, but after you get the only handful of spells in the game, or max the only three weapon skills, it can get pretty boring, and unbelievably constricting to the player. Actually what got me to stop playing Skyrim, on top of an ever increasing pile of shenanigans, is the existence of invincible NPCs (including children). Sure you'll throw the argument of story breaking at me by killing essential characters, but let's not pretend like we don't all save the game every 5 minutes. And the PC decision to make kids invulnerable just makes me feel like I'm being coddled as a gamer, which I don't need and I'm guessing you don't need either. Any argument about kids playing the game is a moot point since not only is the game rated M, but it could have an option for realism at the beginning of a game which would just set a token to "Children_Death=true" ad "Story_Characters_Death=True" and simply when you kill those characters if those tokens are set then they die and maybe it pops up a message for you (again this could be set by a token if you didn't want spoilers by knowing which characters are essential to the story). And speaking of saving every 5 minutes, that makes the game seem highly inconsequential. So what if I make a bad decision, I'll just reload it. I'm not blaming this on Bethesda as this just seems to be a trend in games lately, where you can just save and recover whenever and wherever. I guess the only reason I like this myself is when you're not sure if a game will behave realistically in a given scenario (the splinter cell series is notorious for this)

/endrant

I think they made certain NPCs invulnerable because of the n00bs who would QQ if they couldn't complete the quest and didn't realize the NPC had died. Plus the whole children dying could be considered offensive yadda yadda. Thankfully there's mods that make no NPCs essential.

I'm ok with the children and essential npc's being invulnerable. What I am not ok with it that I can not go and kill an entire town because the invul guys will come and kill me. It's a pain in the ass. If you're going to make invincible characters, don't make it so they can attack the player.

More importantly, make invulnerable NPCs incapable of qualifying as a "witness" to a crime. There's nothing more annoying than having such an NPC witness your crime, which makes it impossible to eliminate the witnesses.