Let South Americans purchase Booster Packs

Many years ago, NCSoft sold the rights to CoH to Levelup Games, a BRAZILIAN company. This means that the NCsoft store locks out South Americans because we're supposed to be purchasing booster packs from Levelupgames. Unfortunately, Levelupgames is does NOT sell booster packs.

South Americans have never been able to purchase booster packs. Please remove the region lock on booster packs in the NCsoft store, please. Levelupgames is obviously not interested in carrying them.

Thank you.

I'm signing this just because I like Leandro and KayJMM's presence on the boards.

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Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Just out of curiosity if they sold the rights to these people, that means they have the rights. They would no longer be able to sell the packs legally without buying back the rights from these people if what you say is correct...no? So NCsoft can't do anything about it.

I know of a fair few people who have been completely unable to buy Booster packs for themselves, and have had to come up with... Creative solutions to obtaining them. This is not a good situation.

Let me ask the following question: If you make a deal with a specific distributor to distribute your product and they simply don't, isn't that a breach of contract?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

So is there anything about living in South America that prevents you from having access to an account directly from NCsoft the way NA or EU players interact with it? I guess in this Internet age I don't fully understand why you'd have to deal with a third party (in this case Levelup Games) to do anything with a company directly even if that company is based in another country.

I'm a NA player and when I went to Japan on a business trip I had no problem playing the game or even accessing my account to buy a Super Booster pack while I was there. I didn't have to deal with any third party at all.

I understand that Levelup Games might make it easier for Brazilians to pay for this game locally. But it seems like it might be worth their hassle to find other ways to pay for this game (via international payments) if it means they can bypass the Levelup Games' interference. *shrugs*

So I assume PlayNC is blocking these IPs because presumably Levelup Games is supposed to be handling the situation even though they aren't? That is pretty crappy. Is South America the only area having to deal with that kind of thing or are there other areas/countries dealing with this scenario as well?

I guess as a SA player you'd have to resort to IP rehosting to "trick" this out and yes, I agree that's not a "good" thing to have to do.

Right now, for us to buy the boosters we have a few ways to bypass the stupid regional ip block.

1) The Risky Way: Use a proxy server to try bypassing. Its risky because you actually trust your credit card data into unknow hands to use it.

2) The Ugly Way: If you have a friend you really trust that lives outside the blocked area, you can give that person all your data. Credit Card. Account. Billing details. Its ugly because you actually have to pester someone to do all things for you. Thats what I do to get what I want to all my accounts (yes, evil me).

3) The Expensive Way: If money isnt a problem, you can hire a net service of cloud-computing, and by using it you can, with fully native IP, buy all you want from everywhere you want. The costs arent prohibitive (but arent also trivial), but you must know what you would be doing, you must hire a trusted provider of those services, and you better get all you want as soon as possible, as youll be paying to even access the nc store. I could have used this method... but its easier to pester my friends than having to learn how to use cloud-computing.

I am 500% in favor of enabling the boosters on the online game store (much like its done on Guild Wars). That way everyone would be able to get those shinnies, and safety can be handled by the limits set on the card with the Master Account.

Couldn't you purchase a gift card with limited funds and give that information to someone who's outside the restrictions and whom you "trust" to purchase the codes for you? Less risky then giving your personal credit card information since your liability is restricted to the gift card amount. I have no idea if this is feasible or not in your country, but hopefully it is. (similar idea to what MunkiLord mentioned.)

No, but it's about as likely. Or less. Getting that guy to post would be the equivalent to getting whoever was a few levels above War Witch to post. And likely a few levels above whatever typical marketing rep we'd be more likely to get, such as Black Pebble.

Anyway, my point is, if players in Aion can get someone what high up who's not directly involved in development to post, it'd be possible to get someone not directly involved in development to post here (or again really, we did have Black Pebble for a bit). Though, it may be harder for us since CoX players aren't nearly as disgruntled as Aion players were at the time of my linked post.

Didn't Paragon Studios/NCsoft, during one of the recent promotions add a 'Buy Now' button to the Login Screen that basically bypassed the stores IP restrictions?

I think it was the GR Pre-Purchase... maybe...

Hadn't noticed this thread before, but you can guess where I stand in this. I've only managed to buy the booster packs by giving my account details to a global friend in the US and have them buy them with their credit card, then paying them back via PayPal.

Attempting to buy using a proxy triggers PayPal's anti fraud measures (understandable, since it would recognize the address as a proxy server) so faking the IP is not even an option.