Good Refund Experience

I've done a fair amount of complaining about Cryptic on this blog, so I think it's only fair to also give them credit for doing things right when it happens.

Last week I meant to buy a bundle of Zen, but after the transaction had seemingly gone through, I received an error message saying that it couldn't be processed and when I checked my balance, no new Zen had been added. This led to me trying two more times, just to run into the same error again and again. Ten minutes later I suddenly received three email notifications at once, showing that all three purchase attempts had in fact been successful after all and I'd just spent more than £100 on Zen. Aieee!

I wasn't sure whether this sort of virtual currency was refundable at all, but still decided to open a ticket to explain my problem. Working in e-commerce myself, I'm actually quite understanding of this kind of glitch; the question is how the company deals with customer contacts about it afterwards.

And what do you know, I had a response within a few hours and they happily refunded the duplicate transactions without any fuss. So thanks, Cryptic!

Charge Rewards Resolved

I got an e-mail from Cryptic last night that they resolved the Black Friday charge rewards issue. They did what I suspected would be the easiest way of dealing with the matter, which was to give everyone affected free extra "reward points" so that they'd be able to actually buy all the rewards they had been promised (shock, horror).

In fact, I suddenly had enough points to hit "claim" on the owlbear a second time! Not that this actually resulted in a second owlbear in game, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. I can't really complain about not getting a second owlbear as that certainly wasn't what had been promised.

I am mollified for now, but I'll certainly approach any future promotions like this with a lot more scepticism.

The One Time I Decide to Give Cryptic Money...

... they have to go and fuck things up.

Lured in by their Black Friday sale for Neverwinter, I decided to buy their biggest Zen bundle for $200/£160. I hadn't given them any money in nearly half a year while having a fair bit of fun with the game, so it seemed only fair that I should buy some Zen again - I had just been holding out for some good charge rewards. Then I saw this page, which included the all-important line: "If you charge in any tier, you’ll receive all items in the tiers below, so charging $20, will grant you both the Zhentarim Warlock and the Neverwintan Noble Title." So I would get $200 worth of Zen, a bunch of bonus Zen, three mounts, a companion and a title? Sweet!

Except, once they had my money I was redirected to a page where I was prompted to spend my "reward points" and lo and behold, there were nowhere near enough of them to buy all the rewards I had supposedly earned. I was relieved to find on the forums that I wasn't the only one who had noticed this.

However, Cryptic's response so far has been less than impressive, as it basically comes down to "oops, we'll look into it after the weekend" while also quickly removing the "you'll receive all the items in the tier below" line from the promotion page. Apparently the promotion was never meant to work as advertised. Can you say "bait and switch"? I really would have expected more professionalism from a company that is happy to take these amounts of money from their customers.