#0 - Nov. 11, 2008, 4:12 p.m.
As suggested by the Subject line, I recently went through quite a big hassle with the automated renewal service.
Subscription Renewal rolled around on Saturday. Got an automated email from Blizz (see the subsequent post for this) that my payment had not been processed but the specifics thereof were lacking).
Went through hell trying to get into and stay in the account manager (Please don’t ask how many times I had to flush my web-browser history). I know the story was problem not on Blizz's end, but come on... I was working from 2 different comps and tried both IE and FF on both of those... and the same apache server error kept happening... at the same time now issue with any of the other websites.
Ok, I digress, at the same time I'm trying to get into my WoW account manager, I'm also logging into my banks web server. I've got plenty of available credit, etc... and bearing in mind I've already used the card for groceries earlier that day so what the heck is the issue I'm thinking.
So, finally in the account manager and I went in to re-enter my card info, and I keep getting the error invalid card # feedback (leading me to believe I've mistyped the card #... rinse repeat same results. Tried another card.. same results... wtf? Ok, well maybe just server issues.. I can come back and try in a few hours. (I did peek here on the CS forum and saw a # of posts with people with some of the same issues between getting logged on and credit card issues).
Come back about 4 hours later. I was scheduled to go raiding in about 45 minutes, so I thought lets give this another go. Got logged in the account manager after flushing again (man this is getting old fast), but still getting the same error message on my Visa.
Crap, missed my raid (no biggie it was just Kara but I did want the pet bat for my collection).
Anyway, a little qq via Vent (or would venting over Vent be better?) just figured I'd give my trusty old debit card a go (I really didn’t want to use that since I remember reading lots of stories of billing issues, and at least with a credit card I've got a month to get any issues resolved before I gotta pay), and it finally goes... woot, too late, but woot.
So, I'm thinking everything’s hunky dory, til I went shopping last night and had my card denied at the register (Aha!) calls credit card customer service (Chase) and their fraud dept says they had a ton of problems with bad transactions from Blizzard and had put a stop on these as a precaution. Anyway, I got that cleared up, but my big cue was getting a "denied" message rather than invalid card #, so as a way to improve support:
a) I would really like to see better guidance from Blizzard both inside the account manager and with the automated notification. Of course, I could have called, but “Billing representatives are on hand to take your call Monday through Friday, 8am-8pm” and obviously I was not inside that window.
b) Change the timing the renewal is pulled to a few days before the subscription runs out so as to avoid interrupted game time (at least give us a day or 2 to try and resolve any issues that may be coming from our end).
TLDR: better feedback from Blizzard regarding payment issues woulda been nice and bad renewal timing really gave me a huge headache.
