Arche Age (Trion the new Ocean Marketing?)

SirT

I had forgotten about this game for a long time but quickly grew re-interested after hearing of its release and as a sand-box MMO focused on farming and crafting it had a lot of appeal to me. It quickly became apparent that it was not even worth trying to play for the first two weeks of launch. The queues were hours long, and even the people that paid some serious money for upgraded memberships to bypass the queues were still stuck waiting in line like everyone else. If this was the end of the story though, it would just be another botched MMO launch, noting to make me come on here and post. But my friends, we are just at the tip of the ice burg....I decided things had died down enough to start playing (its a free download) and I liked it, it seemed like a fun game I could get into, they had added enough servers to support the player base and things ran fairly smooth. THEN I tried to actually give my money to Trion (who runs the American version of the game) and discovered that I could not. Somehow me trying to pay for a full game membership with the same CC I use for all online purchases without issue flagged my as a potential hacker/fraudster. Now I can not upgrade my account, I opened a ticket and got no reply. Then I went onto the forums and the reality of what is going on sunk in: The average turn-around time of responding to tickets is between two weeks and never. They have live support but only if you have an upgraded account. The forum has a 71 page post about people who have been trying to give their money to this company for weeks not to no avail. And it gets worse. Apparently Trion uses bots to ban account in an effort to fight the rampant use of....bots. Thousands, and I am not exaggerating here, thousands, of innocent people have been caught up in this and had their account banned. Oh, and when your account gets banned, your upgraded status is removed so you can no longer access live support to discuss the account...Some people had their accounts wrongly banned, lost access to live support, went to create a NEW account just to get access to live support, only to be caught in the CC no longer being accepted issue. The whole situation is so bad is has become comical. I rally really hope PA does a comic on this as it is fertile ground indeed! Oh, an a last update: In order to combat gold farmers Trion updated the ban bots to ban anyone who types in a link in ANY chat. So if you link your guild to something you are banned - guilty until proven innocent, which will take weeks.

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Mike and Jerry don't read the forums, you should email them directly if you want to get in touch