An open complaint letter to NCSoft Billing and Marketing

Hello. I've been a City of Heroes subscriber for a long time now, and I've been constantly bugging a friend of mine in Germany to get an account for most of that time. He got one as soon as it became free-to-play, and he quickly found he liked the game and sought to purchase some paragon points.

However, that's when things went wrong, it would not accept his paypal, which is currently his only means of payment. So from my location he gave me his username (***********) and password (not repeating it) so I could use my own personal credit card to buy him paragon points. It turned up a "Suspected Fraud" alert.

This is a problem, it's not letting you take either my money or his money in order to gain him paragon points. If you'd like to continue to recieve my money, I suggest you rectify this somehow. I'm willing to pay $15 american or the 14.40 euros to get him the points legally.

Companies that make it difficult to give them money don't tend to be very successful companies I find. I eagerly await a response either here or by email.

You do realize that NC Soft does not read these forums? Especially on weekends.

You'd be much better off submitting a trouble-ticket from the Master Account screen.

Be Well!
Fireheart

You should file a ticket with billing support rather than posting to the forums. You should also edit out your friend's account name as there's no good reason to post that.

Finally, the reason for NCSoft's rather draconian policies is because they're a major target for credit card fraud, which costs them significant amounts of money. Considering their track record of success in online gaming, they probably have a better idea of how to succeed in this space than you do.

You should contact NCSoft's support (not ask other players for help, which is what this forum is for), on the NCSoft website. It turned up as "Suspected Fraud" because, likely, the account was suddenly accessed from the other side of the world and had a credit card (that was likely already on file on your account?) attempt to be used on it.

If you (well, him, not you, since it's his account) give them all the information and explain the whole situation, they'll more than likely help you resolve it.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Account, Billing, Technical and Warranty Support

In addition to the contact options listed under the General Support heading, you can get account, billing, technical, or warranty help by phone.




Call by Phone: Phone customer service for billing and technical issues from Monday through Friday, 12 noon to 5 p.m. CT, by calling (512) 225-6359. Phone support for in-game issues is not available.



CT stands for Central Time Zone in the US.

does you friend sprechen the german? I realize the german forums aren't very busy but you could post a message in the german forums for him asking how they manage dealing with NCsoft billing. Good luck with this I admire how far you're going to help out a friend.

This would make a wonderful Ustream subject, too bad it's more likely we'll get a rant about Mario Lopez instead.

NCsoft is known for having draconian security measures for their store which prevent many legitimate attempts to buy. NCsoft support may not be able to fix the problem but can remove the measures temporarily for a specific account the account (in my experience they gave it for 24 hours), and so allow him to buy the points.

You should definitely edit your post to remove your friend's user name. And, as others have said, a response in this thread from the company is very unlikely.

Worse, it's actually a violation of the new forum rules to post other people's globals. I realize it's not likely being done in a malicious way, but as others have said, it's not a good idea anyway, so risking running afoul of the forum rules just makes an already ... suboptimal thing worse.

It seems odd to me that they would reject someone's PayPal payment. But I don't use PP for much of anything, so I have little experience with it.

Actually, posting account names of other people is against forum rules. So, congrats, instead of receiving help from the official support you put your own account at risk.
(and they do take billing issues seriously, and they did eventually fixed even such major messes as epidemic of double-charges affter the release of superbooster #2.)


Grandstanding and writing open letters should be the last resort, not the first. And putting private item in open letters is stupid, even is it wasn't against the rules.

Ah, good point.

Well, the OP could buy his friend a subscription with a game card. That would get the friend one reward token, 400 points, one character transfer, and VIP access for one month.

Might not want to do that indefinitely, but it's one way to kick-start an account so it has a bit more.

Addendum: I just went to my NC Soft account page. There's a link there to buy points now. It also has a link for PayPal, right on the buy points page.

I'm not sure why this wouldn't work. Too many "my friend can't use any of the several methods already provided" here for me to guess what's really going on. I've sent money to folks with just an email address using paypal. They'll send money to anyone.

So I dunno why it won't work, but yeah, I don't think this is a huge problem. NC Soft and Paragon Studios seem to have done a pretty decent job of offering multiple ways to pay. Tell your friend to try harder to get the internet to believe he isn't some sort of massive credit risk.

I could see not having a credit card, but debit cards are a fantastic convenience. I can withdraw money any time and I don't have to wait for a teller, plus there's far more ATMs than bank locations. Not to mention cash back, which turns almost any store into a bank.

"A quarter" sounds high but perhaps you are right.

As mentioned, they can see if some form of pre-loaded "Gift card" style credit card is available.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Forbin_Project Because of the astronomical amount of credit card fraud that goes on in South America.

And to combat that, they go through an intermediary (Brazil uses Level-up games, IIRC, and not sure what others have to use) to help combat that. But Level-Up was big on not supporting boosters and such.