Changes to rewards structure should trigger refund options

mjh

Impulse wrote:

While I don't think D3 is necessarily in the wrong here, they might as well have just refunded the guy some HP. The chances of getting any 2*s from fights are low enough that this situation can't be very common. They'd have been smarter to just let him spend the HP on something else.

this is my point, they already have his money. All this would have done is make him more likely to spend more in the future, now he definitely won't. Giving him back his 500 HP costs the devs $0

Unknown

Impulse wrote:

While I don't think D3 is necessarily in the wrong here, they might as well have just refunded the guy some HP. The chances of getting any 2*s from fights are low enough that this situation can't be very common. They'd have been smarter to just let him spend the HP on something else.

This seems like more of an argument for what they did, as opposed to against it. If the chances of that happening aren't very common, then him spending the money is more justified then if the chances of that happening were more common.

_RiO_

BearVenger wrote:

kermitk50 wrote:

Another analogy:
If you buy a car today form a dealership and tomorrow your grandmother dies and leaves you her brand new car, are you entitled to return that car to the dealership for a full refund? Hell no. You signed the paperwork, you paid the money. If you want to sell that car for a substantial loss you can (250 iso), but once the transaction is complete, you own it - plain and simple.

Actually, most US states have a 72-hour law for full refunds. I think most car dealerships would be chill with a next-day refund, too.

And for any purchase at a distance all EU member states must implement into their local law an EU directive that forces businessses to give consumers a no-questions-asked full refund on purchases of products if requested within 2 weeks. If this term is not explicitly mentioned at the time of purchase or disclosed through additional terms made available at the time of purchase, then that period is automatically extended to, iirc, 2 months.

Steam and other digital distributors had to resort to rather extreme measures of legalese to dodge the bullet on this one: explicitly stating in their ToS and EULA and reiterating at time of purchase that the products you purchase are infact not purchases of products, but one-time lumpsum payments that upgrade your free subscription to their distribution service with additional subscriptions of indeterminate time to a license (held by them, not you) that allows you to use the 'purchased' product, in effect turning the product into a service, which has no such policy for refunds mandated by law.

If you are an EU consumer you should have a reasonably strong case to demand your money back from D3P. I don't think they make any such effort to explicitly qualify the purchase of ISO or HP as anything but the purchase of a product, that product being a fixed amount of HP or ISO tokens. Ofcourse, you'll never actually see D3P cough that money back up because no-one in their right mind would bother spinning up an expensive law-suit for 4 bucks worth of micro-transaction...

Puritas

HawkeyeSucks wrote:

Not even 2 days later they started giving out 2* covers for Lightning rounds and other PvP events. He ended up getting the very cover he bought, 3 times over. He sent a letter to D3 to express his frustration at this point and it goes like this:

Thing is though, this isn't really like buying an item and then going back the next day to find out it's on sale.
It's more like buying an item and winning it from gambling the next day
When they have offered sales on specific things they've generally been good about refunding the difference within short periods of time.

user311

There are so many things that people on these forums complain about such as limited rewards, scaling, etc, etc. But man this thread really? It reeks IMO of a since of entitlement. Im sure there are hundreds of people that got their first 2* who ever due to this change. Probably hundreds that are still only getting 1* awards. 500 HP is like 4 dollars. Thats less than your lunch money. Skip your lunch and play some MPQ.

Unknown

_RiO_ wrote:

BearVenger wrote:

kermitk50 wrote:

Another analogy:
If you buy a car today form a dealership and tomorrow your grandmother dies and leaves you her brand new car, are you entitled to return that car to the dealership for a full refund? Hell no. You signed the paperwork, you paid the money. If you want to sell that car for a substantial loss you can (250 iso), but once the transaction is complete, you own it - plain and simple.

Actually, most US states have a 72-hour law for full refunds. I think most car dealerships would be chill with a next-day refund, too.

And for any purchase at a distance all EU member states must implement into their local law an EU directive that forces businessses to give consumers a no-questions-asked full refund on purchases of products if requested within 2 weeks. If this term is not explicitly mentioned at the time of purchase or disclosed through additional terms made available at the time of purchase, then that period is automatically extended to, iirc, 2 months.

Steam and other digital distributors had to resort to rather extreme measures of legalese to dodge the bullet on this one: explicitly stating in their ToS and EULA and reiterating at time of purchase that the products you purchase are infact not purchases of products, but one-time lumpsum payments that upgrade your free subscription to their distribution service with additional subscriptions of indeterminate time to a license (held by them, not you) that allows you to use the 'purchased' product, in effect turning the product into a service, which has no such policy for refunds mandated by law.

If you are an EU consumer you should have a reasonably strong case to demand your money back from D3P. I don't think they make any such effort to explicitly qualify the purchase of ISO or HP as anything but the purchase of a product, that product being a fixed amount of HP or ISO tokens. Ofcourse, you'll never actually see D3P cough that money back up because no-one in their right mind would bother spinning up an expensive law-suit for 4 bucks worth of micro-transaction...

? EU Right of Withdrawal only applies to digital goods up to the moment the download begins

Unknown

Doesn't it seem unreasonable to expect a HP refund just because a cover was obtained for an ability that had been previously purchased with HP? I would imagine D3 created some criteria to determine what situations warranted Customer Service action. It doesn't hurt to ask. It's possible others have had better luck. If it's a slow week, or if the request was written in just the right way, it's possible to see more favaorable response.

It is unlikely that there are any consumer protection laws that would help you recover your Hero Points or the money spent unless a crime of some sort was involved. In the US, consumers typically waive their rights in some form of agreement. Did you read the End-User License Agreement? Did you read ALL of them? There are also agreements with Google, Apple, your service provider (phone service) or Steam that might apply.

Unknown

LordWill wrote:

That seems unusual for them. One of the better aspects has been their customer support. They have impressed me.

Every time I have had an issue they have usually exceeded my expectations. The customer service side of their operations seems to truly care about the customer and I have never had an issue with them.

I am sure they aren't going to be 100% all the time, and you will get some cases here and there that slip through the cracks or isn't handled properly.

You could send a mail to D3PAdmin and see if he couldn't look into it.

I believe what you experienced is quite rare. I've had nothing but horrible experiences with their customer service and this forum is littered with people having a bad experience as well.

_RiO_

gamar wrote:

EU Right of Withdrawal only applies to digital goods up to the moment the download begins

Some notable member states (e.g. Italy) have required for some time the explicit mentioning of the fact that the 'performance' or 'service' will begin immediately at moment of purchase and the consumer will at that point lose right of withdrawal and the explicit consent of consumers to these facts. By now, almost all member states will probably have similar laws in place: EU directive 2011/83/EU demands that all member states codify this exact condition into national law that should at latest go into effect on June 14th 2014. (The member states were required to have everything necessary to comply with this directive ready and waiting as early as December 2013, iirc.)

For reference the new EU directive states the following:

Similarly to contracts for the supply of water, gas or electricity, where they are not put up for sale in a limited volume or set quantity, or of district heating, contracts for digital content which is not supplied on a tangible medium should be classified, for the purpose of this Directive, neither as sales contracts nor as service contracts. For such contracts, the consumer should have a right of withdrawal unless he has consented to the beginning of the performance of the contract during the withdrawal period and has acknowledged that he will consequently lose the right to withdraw from the contract.

Unknown

Before I came here I played a bunch of MTG, SolForge, and Hearthstone. MTG is a bit different than the other two in terms of how you can acquire cards, so let's use SolForge as an example (though I think Hearthstone may be a bit better known). In SolForge they will have cards that you can buy directly from them as a daily deal sort of thing. So perhaps I spend some money to buy the 3rd Thundersaur that my deck needs. I join a tournament queue and use it to win a few matches. After the tournament I get my rewards of a couple packs. I crack open the packs and find a Thundersaur in it! Well damn, since the game only lets you have 3 in a deck, this fourth one is now useless.

I see no reason that my money should be refunded in that case.
Or in this one.

Sure it would have been a good gesture of D3 to perhaps offer your friend a different specific 2* cover, but chances are he used that newly pimped out OBW to win some of the fights on the way to getting the excess cover as a reward.

As a F2P game it's supposed to be set up that money doesn't get you anything you couldn't get eventually. It just gets you there faster. Your friend chose to get the cover faster.

Unknown

Credit Card or PayPal chargeback. That's the reason to avoid having poor customer service like this. In this case though, if the funds were transferred through Steam or a mobile store the customer is usually out of luck.

Unknown

Firstly, whomever said 500 for any 2** was a good investment was dead wrong in the first place imo.

Second, and more importantly, getting MORE 2** for FREE is NOT the same as a character being purchased and then nerfed the next day ala Ragnarok. Your friend's 2** is not at all negatively affected by this change. Your cost analysis, which was poor imo anyway, changed...and that is not the devs fault at all.

There have been plenty of issues worth bringing up imo; the fact that the game was flooded with extra covers the next day after you buy something is not one of them.

Think of it like this...if I bought a 3*** cover for im yesterday, and then I see today that his cover is going to be a reward, should I be given a refund? It's basically the same thing (also, what puritas said). The nature of the commodity dictates that a refund after purchase isn't the best option for the company. They cannot exactly "price adjust" like a physical.store does and thier commodity is a non-physical body of code basically...something that they cannot resell ..as its created on its own each time. If anything, this shows why ppl shouldnt spend money on games like this, but its not exactly "unfair" as much as it is "par for the business."

That said, they really COULD have reimbursed the 500 hp...its more likely its company policy to not refund in such circumstances as to not set a precedent. Otherwise ppl could use the same stance when opening a pack and not getting what they wanted. I feel for your friend, that sucks, but its just a "well shucks" situation and that's it.

Unknown

It would have been nice for them to refund it but to say someone is entitled to a refund in this type of situation is silly.

Even the comparison to buying something that goes on sale doesn't work. If I buy something that I need and/or want that is my decision to make. By buying it I've shown I need/want it at that time. If it goes on sale the next day I'll definitely ask if there is anything that can be done but I never expect the answer to be yes in those situations. If it is that's awesome and I'm appreciative and my loyalty rating with that business goes up. If the answer is no I don't think twice about it.

It's one of those things that a company has to have a policy about. If they have no leeway then fine. If it's a 4 day policy that's fine too. But then it will be the player that gets the cover 5 days later that will be posting this.

Unknown

Jkells wrote:

Impulse wrote:

While I don't think D3 is necessarily in the wrong here, they might as well have just refunded the guy some HP. The chances of getting any 2*s from fights are low enough that this situation can't be very common. They'd have been smarter to just let him spend the HP on something else.

This seems like more of an argument for what they did, as opposed to against it. If the chances of that happening aren't very common, then him spending the money is more justified then if the chances of that happening were more common.

It's an argument for "they might as well have erred on the side of making the player happy". If it was he got two widows from standard tokens, then he shouldn't get a refund. The change to getting random covers from pvp is recent enough it's reasonable to think the player was unaware when he spend the HP (or perhaps it was before the change). It doesn't cost them anything to refund some HP, indeed it would probably make the player more like to purchase in the future than I imagine he's now inclined to do. This is a recent enough change and a rare enough case that D3 would have been smart to refund, though I wouldn't go so far as to say they're obligated too.

mjh

Impulse wrote:

It doesn't cost them anything to refund some HP, indeed it would probably make the player more like to purchase in the future than I imagine he's now inclined to do

This is the whole point.

All of this other talk about entitlements is overreaching. He simply asked since the pvp reward change was so soon after. It would have only helped D3 to oblige, instead another stain on their customer service

Unknown

I honestly would have been shocked if they gave him teh HP yet, he made a purchase taht he intended to make, then he got lucky and pulled a blue OBW cover, even with the change, getting a specific cover is pretty rare, I desperately want 2 more green ares so i can max him out. And have very small odds of pulling it from a pvp battle, dude just got lucky at the wrong time. I really wouldnt consider this bad customer service, just normal business.

yogi_

While I can see the point of the original post and maybe it would have been nice for them to return the HP, the purchaser made the purchase, the end. The good was delivered as promised.

Is it annoying that then the covers arrived? Sure.

Can you ask for a refund? Sure.

Would it have been nice to get a refund? Sure.

Should they have given a refund? Toss a coin.

Does their business practice / model give refunds in these circumstances? Obviously not. It's their business, they can run it how they want.

While I totally have sympathy for the person in the situation (I am desperate for 2 OBW blues), such is life and there are certain calculated risks you take when interacting in environments like this.

reckless442

Copps wrote:

Try buying 4 rags red covers and having him nerfed the next day. While spending 500hp on a cover and getting it over and over the next day is annoying it was still a good investment in a character that is still incredibly good. She is the best 2 star head and shoulders above ares who is likely second. And in the long term scheme of things 500hp is a small price to pay for the lesson he just learned about rng and cover rewards.

Try buying virtually all Rags covers, and then leveling him up to 50 -- only to have him nerfed the following day. I got so sick of getting my **** handed to me by teams with Rags that I gave in and spent HP. I think I calculated that I spent about 12,000 HP and countless ISO, only to get a fairly useless character. After the nerf, I submitted a ticket, but never got a response.

Deimos12

This and so many other problems could be avoided if they just communicated changes ahead of time. I mean honestly how long have we all been YELLING OUT for the devs to give us some heads up as to major game changes. Good or bad. Yes the cover rewards is a good change but why couldn't they have communicated it before hand? It's not like they make these decisions half an hour before they push the update to us. Although maybe they do with some of the asinine decisions they've made lately

Unknown

HawkeyeSucks wrote:

Impulse wrote:

It doesn't cost them anything to refund some HP, indeed it would probably make the player more like to purchase in the future than I imagine he's now inclined to do

This is the whole point.

All of this other talk about entitlements is overreaching. He simply asked since the pvp reward change was so soon after. It would have only helped D3 to oblige, instead another stain on their customer service

You called them "low class". IMO that reeks of self entitlement. And frankly insulting.