Response from NCsoft Support (About Refunds)

I bought extra Paragon Points to get into higher levels of the Tiered VIP Rewards.

I want to chime in on this sentiment. I didn't like how Wizards of the Coast handled the switch from 3.5 to 4 of their Dungeons and Dragons franchise. I've never bought a 4th edition product because of it.

What NCsoft is doing now is much much worse and would make me boycott the company for as long as they exist.

People have long memories. I know my mother still sticks with certain brands and avoids others because of things they did 20-30 years ago.

I also did this on my second account with the intention of going FTP with access to what I needed on that account while still paying for my main one. I never actually stopped paying and have about 5K points still on it.

My main account was paid 6 monthly (I lose about a month's paid time) and the second one monthly so no huge loss to me, but I'm still angry with the way NCSoft is handling this. If CoH dies, I want nothing to do with NCSoft, certainly not a sub to one of their games where I can invest time and energy to then have it closed down on a corporate whim when it's not doing badly.

Except there's a giant difference and the two don't compare at all.

The PS proc is covered under the EULA. It's an item that is SUBJECT TO CHANGE. As anything in the game itself always is. If they couldn't change items in-game, they'd risk having a potentially broken item permanently part of the game and unbalancing game-play forever. When they changed the way the proc worked, they didn't take the actual proc itself away. You still have what you paid for. If they had deleted the proc from the game, then you could claim fraud.

Now, when you talk about taking away the game itself, when you allowed people to buy time to play it ahead of time, you are actually TAKING AWAY THE PRODUCT. A transaction was made in good faith and is now being dishonored.

Big difference.

I know you were posting this in response to WHF, but I did want to mention on this specific that those of us who did this (I did it too on my second account) did get something out of it. We gained extra Paragon Rewards benefits on our accounts.

Even if I never get to spend the points I bought doing that, I did get at least partial value out of that expenditure, and still am getting benefit out of it now.

Overall, I'm pretty unconcerned about points never spent. I mean, I'm not crazy bout it, but I wouldn't consider going after NCSoft relating to points even if it were easy to drag them into some sort of process for such claims.

Lost subscription time is a different beast all together for me, and I would consider going after them for that even knowing what a pain in the *** it could be.

Hear, Hear.

Way to go Sam, glad you....er, wait? What?

What happened to this guy:

Oh wait, I get it. Now that it's YOUR money not getting refunded to YOU that it's ok to go "
antagonising NCsoft". Before that it was a bad thing. Got it.

Funny thing is in that thread when they were discussing SW: TOR you never mentioned that you were boycotting EA.

Well, in either case, welcome to the Revolution.

I think there's a difference in saying you can't force NCSoft to continue the game and saying that ending service mid-payment arrangement requires a refund.

An attempt that will be utterly wasted on those of use who play on Macintosh computers. CoH is/was the only Mac-compatible game in NCSoft's stable. I'm not going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a gaming PC just to "take advantage" of such an offer. I do have a $400 Windows 7 laptop, and I tried Aion (and games from other companies) on it. I discovered three things:

1) I didn't like Aion at all

2) That laptop is really too underpowered for gaming

3) Trying to game on a laptop when you're accustomed to gaming on a desktop is extremely aggravating

No , that was about boycotting Ncsoft. Before Sam's money got involved he was against it. Now he is for it . Bully for him but I have to point out the hypocrisy.

...is what I think you meant. That is, he's not rallying everyone for massive boycotts just stating what he's going to do with his money.

Even me, the person who's been going on and on about how boycotting and blisting NCsoft won't do you any good, the person that hasn't bought GW2 yet but is going to buy it today...still is of the opinion that your money is your money and you're not evil for spending it on a product you want to support owned by a company you don't like nor are you anything bad for choosing to withhold your money specifically because you choose not to deal with the company.

To paraphrase, don't call me some traitor for buying GW2. Don't say people refusing to deal with NCsoft are 'punishing' ANet. It's your money and you should be allowed to express your stance as a consumer with it. Period.

Again, two different things being discussed in what you've quoted.

Trying to sway others into boycotting a company in hopes of getting a game saved or in hopes of ruining their finances is one thing. Saying you no longer want to do business with a company on a personal level because you find their lack of business ethics a turn off is another.

....september...october...november 30th...

By my calculations (with my fingers), that's about 3 months.

So you paid for three months and as Leo pointed out the servers will be up for three months so unless you drop down to Premium between now and then you're not entitled to a refund.

I thought it was a tongue-in-cheek kind of comment. *shrug*

Right, my reply was sort of tongue-in-cheek too. The smilie was more like a 'Yay! You didn't get bum****ed that bad!'

We've had people make far more outrageous complaints who were quite serious about them so it can be hard to tell without an emoticon or other indication.

Like the guy that thought the Science Booster would entice children into cross dressing

or the guy that argued that the Freebie Friday items were comparable to giving spoiled rotting food to a starving person.

It's been a crapshoot for it so far. Mine ran out right before the announcement and I was unable to re-VIP, but some people who were VIP after the announcement have been able to stay VIP.

Granted they made beta available for everyone...but dammit! I want my character slots open! I need huggles from my toons!

The letter of the law says I can make that game. I own the copyright of anything I create, and that automatic copyright protection by virtue of authorrship cannot be transferred to NCSoft by EULA, for the simple reason that black letter law says ownership of creations cannot be transferred except specifically, and in writing. "Everything you make in the game" is not "specifically" and copyright law was explicitly written to protect against such transfers.

On the other hand, they could also make that game. I did extend to NCSoft a non-exclusive right to use my creations for any purpose they wish. That's *not* prohibited by copyright law. So NCSoft could use my forum handle, my character names, and my characters themselves to market some new game if they wished.

Also, I'm not sure why people think deleting their characters terminates those rights. Once that right to use was granted, deleting the bits on their servers does nothing to amend that right. They could restore your characters from backup if they wished, and still use them. Its only an interesting action to delete your characters if you think NCSoft doesn't back up anything and deleting the characters made them permanently unreachable or unusable by NCSoft. Which I think is unlikely, given they permanently log everything that happens on the servers.


The EULA demands that we not use content for which we cannot follow the EULA. So if we use something we previously created outside the game, we as authors do have the right to extend to NCSoft the rights mentioned above: non-exclusive perpetual right to use. If you had the copyright to your characters *before* using them in the game, you've just extended to NCSoft the right to use them. If you *didn't* own those rights, NCSoft would, in using them, be violating someone else's rights. But I believe they would have a safe harbor there; if the violation wasn't obvious, they could claim they acted in good faith by using something a player was supposed to have the rights to. They could then sue *you*.

I agree its unlikely this would happen, but legally it can happen.


This is the relevant part of the EULA: