Mythic Decides Billing People Is Fun, Can't Stop Doing It

Posted on April 9, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 41 Comments

[EDIT 4/9 8:30p: Mythic made an official statement today explicitly taking responsibility and pledging to make right their error. This is far better than their earlier comments that I rail about below but it does make much of the rest of this post look unjustifiably whiny. Frankly, I'd rather look whiny and people get good CS then the reverse.]

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This is pretty much the worst thing you can ever do as an MMO: abuse the trust your customers give you with their credit cards. Suffice to say that most people were only mildly amused.

Today, my bank notified me that Mythic entertainment had billed my credit card 44 times in a single day for $14.95, for a total of more than six hundred dollars. This was interesting since I don’t have 44 Warhammer accounts. Indeed, I cancelled my Warhammer subscription a few months ago.

Mythic’s official response has been: whoopsie.

We have confirmed with our vendor that players who have been charged multiple times for their subscriptions should start seeing a reversal of charges within 24-36 hours. We anticipate that once the charges have been reversed, any fees that have been incurred should be refunded as well. If after 36 hours, there are still incorrect charges or fees on your account, please follow these instructions:

  • Please begin by contacting your financial institution and explain to them that you were incorrectly charged multiple times and, as a result, over drafted. Most financial institutions will reverse these charges

  • If your financial institution is unable to remove these charges, you may contact our billing department by calling 650-628-1001 during our hours of operation, which are 10:00 AM EDT – 10:00 PM EDT, 7 days a week. Please have the phone and fax number of your financial institution ready when you call.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this issue may be causing our players. Please continue to watch the Herald in the coming days for further information regarding this issue.

Note what is missing from this:

* A clear-cut statement of responsibility and assurance this won’t happen again. As is standard operating procedure from the CYA manual, all that is offered here is an “apology for any *inconvenience* that *this issue* may be causing”. Because hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees (which, contrary to Mythic Rumor Control, banks do not reverse when you ask politely), you know, is a minor inconvenience – not “our mistake”, not “our issue”, just “this issue” – that can be addressed with a statement that refers to “an event” that, you know, just happened.

* Any sort of compensation to players for their financially damaging *inconvienience*. Because, I suppose, that would entail some statement of responsibility. For, you know, cleaning out your customer’s bank accounts. Instead of just, you know, assuming that just somehow *happened* by some unnamed *third party vendor*.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. And, you know, Flagship Studios isn’t around any more. There may be a connection. If you can’t even be trusted to collect just the money you’re supposed to… there may be some issues. Oh. Sorry. “this issue”.

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  • http://[email protected] Ashendarei

    now, I’m usually all in support for Mythic bashing. I’ve seen them take a game I loved and generally change it for the worse (arguably provable by virtue of population #s) over the course of years.

    That being said, it doesn’t surprise me that Mythic hasn’t done any sort of customer compensation (yet) for it.

    Since Mythic doesn’t really have their own forums (correct still? it was when I played DAoC) they don’t have a very direct method of recieving customer criticism, and on top of that they may not be in a position where they can AFFORD to reimburse their players.

    Not to let them off the hook or anything, because this is absolutely unacceptable, even as a temporary charge, but I’ve also had financial institutions reverse overdraft charges when it’s clear that I wasn’t abusing the system. USBank, and Bank of America both will reverse occasional fees / charges to keep you as a customer.

    Please let the regularly scheduled Mythic Bashing continue!

  • Athryn

    Yeah this would be pretty much a dealbreaker for me, no matter what game company it was.

  • Freakazoid

    I can afford to find this funny. My old cc I used for DAoC was cancelled years ago.

    My brother, however, might not be so lucky. He used his debit card to pay for WAR last year. I’ll have to let him know and cross my fingers that nothing happened/he does not shit a brick.

  • http://www.imaekgaemz.com Patrick Rogers

    I think it mostly de

    which, contrary to Mythic Rumor Control, banks do not reverse when you ask politely)

    I think it depends on your bank – I have had similar issues happen to me through various online shopping sites and in the two cases where it overdrafted me, the bank removed all charges from me once they were contacted by the company responsible.

    This happened with Frost and Chase Banks.

  • Soulflame

    Mythic does have their own forums, forced upon them by EA.

    I was somewhat considering another go at DAoC. Now I’m going to have to go over my CC statements, and make sure I’ve been charged for neither of my inactive accounts (DAoC and WAR.) Needless to say, I won’t be giving them my CC information.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com/ wowpanda

    Do you know what Clark Howard call those big bank debit cards? “Piece of Trash Fake Visa/Master card”

    They are crafted in the deepest infernos of Mordor for the sole purpose of drain over drafting fees. Your real credit cards will not over draft like that.

    Anyway, back to Billing. There will always be bugs in software. I am pretty sure they wrote their test cases, just forgot to run them.

  • WoeBegotten

    My wife and I play WAR and last night, when we saw the news, we thought we dodged a bullet when we checked our accounts and everything seemed to be hunky dory. This morning we woke up to $600 in charges from Mythic and lots of bills rounding the bend.

    Fun times.

  • JeremyT

    Um, I hope I unsubscribed hard enough to avoid this.

    On the plus side, I guess they could technically count each individual billing transaction as a subscription, which would make WAR’s subscriber numbers competitive with, I don’t know, LOTRO.

    New slogan: WAR is everywhere (on your bank statement).

  • http://tagn.wordpress.com/ Wilhelm2451

    And people scoffed when I balked at giving Mythic my credit card number in order to play the free trial.

  • Ajediday

    I only had one of my two accounts hit with the crapstorm of charges. My daoc account that is on a 3 month billing was untouched only the monthy was hit. My dead warthammer account was also untouched. Amex cleared things up this morning after I talked to them yesterday. That still doesn’t mean I won’t get hit again, I am hearing about people still getting smacked.

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    As far as the “sucks to be them” dial goes, I’d say this one is somewhere past 11.

    Referring not just to the customers but to Mythic’s CSR and lawyers who now have to sort this out.

    On the upshot, perhaps EA will be held responsible and have to pay out a massive cash settlement to fix this issue.

    You know, karma for absorbing Mythic, pressuring them to make a WoW clone, and kicking out the guy who founded it when they didn’t like how that turned out. ;)

  • Vetarnias

    Because, naturally, the most appealing thing to do, after being overcharged, is to make a long distance call to Mythic’s billing department. If that ever happens to me, why do I feel like making it a collect call?

  • hitnrun

    This happens more than most people might think, in every industry. As I’ve discovered recently by working on the other side of the curtain, almost everyone you give your credit card to keeps it on file, even when they expressly tell you they don’t. They have to just in case you want a refund or whatnot, and most CSRs don’t have the authority or the tools to erase it even if they wanted to.

    And of course, once you have all that stuff on file, well, shit happens. Though rarely quite like this, and it’s usually a collaborative disaster: the seller for having a shitty site, Microsoft for having a shitty browser, and the customer for being a shithead who uses his “back” button during a credit card transaction and/or clicks Submit Order multiple times.

  • Bleaktea

    And this is why I put recurring subscriptions and internet purchases on a credit card with a $500 limit. Thank you, Mythic, for vindicating my paranoia.

  • Mike

    Bleaktea,

    Your bank would have charged you an over the limit fee on each transaction in excess of $500.

  • Bleaktea

    Apparently you’re right and I have had a credit card for years without actually understanding how it works. Now I feel like an idiot. And there’s public record of it on the internet.

    I’ll just go over here and sit with this dunce cap on.

  • Octopaganini

    I would be karmically delicious if this ends up as a class action suit against EA.

  • faefrost

    OK so they have tapped thousands of accounts for upwards of 1000% extra charges and transactions? They have entered thousands of transactions against customer who legitimately and clearlt cancelled their services over 60+ days ago? And these multiple extra transactions are continuing to appear or go out for almost 2 days after the problem was discovered and announced. So they are still doing it?

    At what point does this surpass the allowable level of “oops! we have suffered a computer error” to reach “OMG! We have comitted actual FRAUD!”?

    One would assume at this level of multiple day screw up and the volume and nature of chargebacks demanded by customers, that most of these banks and providers will disallow any transactions to Mythic or EA for the foreseeable future.

  • http://trollshaman.blogspot.com Klepsacovic

    That sounds like a convenient way to fill a temporary budget problem. No interest, pay it back whenever you like… it’s like theft with an IOU but less likely to result in imprisonment.

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    While it’s easy to jump on the Mythic bashing train here I’m MORE interested to know what vendor they use for their processing. They’re the ones who actually screwed up and should be held liable for every single dollar that this costs EA/Mythic.

    I’ve never been a fan of game cards, but shit like this makes them look really, REALLY attractive.

  • http://www.whysohostile.com Cymbaline

    While it’s easy to jump on the Mythic bashing train here I’m MORE interested to know what vendor they use for their processing. They’re the ones who actually screwed up and should be held liable for every single dollar that this costs EA/Mythic.

    Actually, word is that Mythic made an update to their end of the billing code, had a for loop that went a few too many times, and the fault is entirely on their side, not the vendors. Granted, that’s the word on the street via the forums and news posts on this, but Mythic hasn’t really denied it, either.

  • Arthur_Parker

    Cymbaline, you have any links to where you read that? It seems real unlikely to me.

  • Jeff

    Wow. Thank God I always use pre-paid time cards for these types of games whenever available, just because of my fear of crap like this. My heart goes out to the people that fell victim to this, I hope they are able to get restitution. I mean for Mythic’s sake they’d better, even if only on an individual basis, be paying these over drafting fees. Otherwise they’d better be ready for their own War, in court.

    I wonder if this happened on the EA end or the Mythic end. The smart money is on Mythic in my opinion. It certainly doesn’t help Mythic’s image. First it was the burning of the heretics, followed by one of the most draconian beta’s I’ve ever seen, where listening to the customer seemed to be as high on their priority list as listening to the heretics. Then the spectacular launch of Failhammer. I’m sad to say I actually stuck around for that and a few months after just hoping they would turn it around.

    At what point do they just fire the rest of the Mythic employees and let Bioware handle everything?

  • http://www.whysohostile.com Cymbaline

    Cymbaline, you have any links to where you read that?It seems real unlikely to me.  

    Yarr. Toward the bottom of the page. Fourth-last and last posts, mostly the last post.

    “I was told by a CSR that a new billing system had been put into place and that was the reason for the current situation. Apparently the new system was “stuck in a loop” or something, because of which customers were billed repeatedly.”

    Those are the words of some guy on the internet, so I don’t consider them reliable truth by any means. That said, neither do I flat-out buy that it was the vendor’s fault.

  • Arthur_Parker

    Fair enough, thanks for the link.

  • OrderedChaos

    I feel for Mythic, but this is their second offense on this particular issue. This, coupled with the how the rest of the game has been handled over this last year or so is going to help their situation at all. I am not saying “DOOoooOOOoooMMMM!!!!”, more like “Daayamn”. I don’t think they can take more stupis hits like this. EA, I am sure, isn’t really thrilled about this either.

  • Jeff

    I feel for Mythic, but this is their second offense on this particular issue.This, coupled with the how the rest of the game has been handled over this last year or sois going to help their situation at all.I am not saying “DOOoooOOOoooMMMM!!!!”, more like “Daayamn”.I don’t think they can take more stupis hits like this.EA, I am sure, isn’t really thrilled about this either.  

    Yeah you have to feel think EA is regretting ever bringing Mythic into the fold.

  • Iconic

    Square-Enix had a serious double billing issue that flared up over and over for years, and an even more pathetic CS response (such as having no response at all, or permanently banning your account if you disputed the additional charges, etc).

    If your game is good enough, the addicts will keep playing it, while wishing for you to rot in hell. If it’s not good enough, they’ll cancel and possibly join a class action lawsuit.

  • Iconic

    Also LOL@Mythic for claiming that any overdraft fees “should” be refunded. No, banks are notoriously stupid when it comes to overdraft fees. I know people who have had their debit card stolen, had their account plundered, had the bank refund the stolen money to them when the fraud was revealed, but STILL WOULD NOT REFUND THE OVERDRAFT FEES.

    Not to mention businesses charging “bounced check” fees, land lords charging late rent fees, and so on and so forth. God help you if you paid a court fee with a check that bounced because of Mythic’s blunder. Have fun explaining that when they come to arrest you.

  • Votan

    I can see double billing, I can see billing the entire data base, I can even understand a mess up in charging canceled accounts but 15-20x separate charges, then having it happen again today? I have never seen anything like this happen in any industry before in the volume of times customers are being charged. Let alone from a company that relies on me storing my credit card information with them on a on-going basis.

    How they could not have a 800 number and extended hours, hourly communication to its customers on what is going on, what happened, and what they are doing about it for something that is affecting so many of its customers just shows what a clown shoe organization Mythic is.

    Oh they also had a decent amount of accounts hacked as well while this is going on, customer “service” on those are far worse than with the billing.

  • Angelworks

    I’ve had banks reverse charges – especially when its their fault, but I guess time will tell.

    I’m really curious on how this will pan out in terms of subscriber numbers. I’m pretty sure Warhammer Online is on the razor’s edge as far as profitability goes, so this could be interesting.

  • Aethena

    Eleven times. I was charged *11* times. Which is not as much as some, but still. Despite all the problems in the game, despite the fact that wait times for T3 scenarios to pop at times seem infinite, despite the fact that I can log on and not find any Open RvR going on at all, I really wanted to hang in there and get to T4.

    Now, not so much. Once they straighten out my account, I’m gone.

  • Cedia

    This happened to me. Yes, the charges were reversed. Really, WTF Mythic??? I’ve been playing MMOs since 1995 and this is the first time anything like this has ever happened.

  • Boanerges

    Having to deal with payment systems at work, Mythic (or EA but probably Mythic) has a gateway they send data to to charge their cards. So this isn’t likely an error on behalf of some bank.

    I’ll buy the “wild loop” explanation (coupled with an apparent rogue query that pulled inactive customers just for fun!) but the larger question is why it wasn’t tested first. Every payment gateway I’ve dealt with (and I’ve dealt with more than a few) has a sandbox so you can send test transactions to. So unemployment +1.

    Banks vary *wildly* in how they deal with overdraft AND refunds. If you’re with a larger bank like BofA, you’re probably going to be fine soon, if not already. If you’re with First Bank of Nowhere, it depends greatly on their rules. The screwy thing is that, while debit cards run as credit will hit your account instantly to withdraw, you might have to wait up to 3 business days for a refund. Add in that this is a weekend and you have customers out hundreds of dollars for almost a week.

    Credit card users, you may point and laugh now, as your money is all funny anyways and you’re protected by your user agreement against unauthorized charges. If I were you guys, the best way to go is definitely credit card with a decent limit (you’d be amazed how easy it is to file and win a chargeback).

  • Blake

    A friend of mine took a break from WoW to check out WAR a few weeks ago. He actually was enjoying himself with the changes in WAR. He got hit 39 times.

    As you can guess his enjoyment just tanked. He’s closing his account once the billing issues are fixed. He can’t be the only one who is reacting this way. I wouldn’t be shocked if thousands of subscribers left for good. And honestly? Given that this is the second time they’ve done something like this they deserve it.

    Also I’m very glad that I ignored the email in my inbox, sent from him, with ten days reactivation on my account.

  • http://grimnir.mmofansites.com Grimnir

    Despite everything that’s happened and all the people that have been affected by this (myself included), this is the first time I’ve heard the word “Crackhammer”. It made me smile.

    Anyway, this isn’t really a big deal to me. I have enough spare cash in my bank account to eat up nine charges, and my bank refused everything beyond that without me having to lift a finger. I do not find it hard to believe that people can’t simply have some buffer room in their bank account. This day and age we live in just doesn’t give us that luxury anymore with all the crap we could possibly buy instead.

    Therefore, silver lining is that some people will actually start using common sense banking practices. The rest will go back to their living paycheck to paycheck and getting screwed every time something out of the ordinary happens. We can only hope that people learn,

  • http://suicidalzebra.blogspot.com Suicidal Zebra

    Some dudes on MMO-Champ just said that a new round of multiple charges have gone out. I hope to hell that this isn’t the case.

    Given the difficultly of dealing with overdraft charges specifically, and associated impacts on credit rating which are even harder to scrub, this could get really bad for a whole lot of people. Smells like class action lawsuit territory.

  • Jeff

    Some dudes on MMO-Champ just said that a new round of multiple charges have gone out. I hope to hell that this isn’t the case.Given the difficultly of dealing with overdraft charges specifically, and associated impacts on credit rating which are even harder to scrub, this could get really bad for a whole lot of people. Smells like class action lawsuit territory.  

    Ya think?

    It blows my mind that they haven’t set up some kind of 24 hotline to make sure they are keeping their customers up to date and processing refunds as fast as they can. Instead, its simply “an issue” that “your bank” will fix. I think a lawsuit is a matter of when not if.

    New company slogan: Mythic Entertainment: We make shitty grindfest games and bill you 10+ times a month for them.

  • nametopost

    Those are the words of some guy on the internet, so I don’t consider them reliable truth by any means. That said, neither do I flat-out buy that it was the vendor’s fault.

    And the official statement is just some smuck on the internet with a fancy name tag… it’s amazing how much credence we give to random community-coordinator types and then will flat out deny something said by a “stranger” no matter how true it may or may not be.

  • Rob W.

    I checked today and saw EA refunded 21 of the 22 charges and that the overdraft fees of $240 were not refunded by EA or Wachovia bank. Even though the bank recieved a notice from EA about the mistake. This has turned into a major headache that makes us jump through hoops. Not to mention the aggravation. I even searched for a legal suit for this.

  • Fredrik

    To me, being forced to spend my time contacting my bank because of someone elses mistake is enough of a dealbreaker. So is having no available money on my card because Mythic stole it.

    There is only one way to make this right. Send me the head of whoever is responsible for this (And his boss and that bosses boss) in a box. That will cure all illwill.

    “Apologising for any inconvenience this may have caused” like this was a minor bug or an extended maintenance… Thats just weak.