I have no idea what Blizzard is doing, but they’ve got some serious issues they need to sort out if they’re accidentally emptying out people’s bank accounts. In World of Warcraft, you get to choose a specific server you want to play on. The server is essentially your character’s world. If you ever want to switch to play with a friend who is on another server, you have to pay a little fee and have your character transferred. One of Kotaku’s writers recently used his credit card to have a character transferred and faced some serious problems.
First, he was asked to wait 12 hours for the transfer. Well, 2 days passed and nothing happened. This caused MMORPG panic, but it turns out he wasn’t alone – the World of Warcraft forums were filled with hundreds of pissed off players facing the same problem. A Blizzard rep managed to show up and copy and paste a general error message. Anyway, the players were asked the log in their characters again later to finalize the transfer, but the process still did not work. Players tried to finalize the transfers all day with no luck. They later found on that Blizzard was charging them 20 euros each time the finalization failed.
I went back to the forums and it turns out that it doesn’t appear to happen to those doing the transfer with credit cards, but only guys with debit cards. Dozens of people complain that their entire accounts have been drained by this. They are completely broke; their banks have frozen their accounts.
This doesn’t end happy either. The server transfer hasn’t been working for 8 days and Blizzard has not issued any more information. Blizzard did, however, manage to pull the transfer page today, but there is still no official statement about anything posted up. Hopefully Blizzard will clear up this issue soon, before the losers come out of their basements and get their moms on the phone. Just kidding. Best of luck with anyone who actually had their bank accounts depleted.