Prior to the release of the game they would refund you no questions asked because the game hadn’t been released.
This is something people need to appreciate when they pre order, your time to withdraw your right of purchase has time limits, it tends to be within 14 days for my country but digital software can be a very murky area in this regard, if you ever become hesitant about your purchase when you pre order you MUST refund it BEFORE release to guarantee you will get your money back. This is why companies (not blizzard though tbh) throw in the pre order predatory bonuses to get you to pre order and keep that pre order even if you start to lose interest.
I’d like to say this is one thing i can’t ever fault blizzard on, they don’t generally do pre order exclusive stuff, you can always upgrade your order well after release to get the extra stuff, so really there is no real need to keep the pre order running if you start to get hesitant… but at the same time they link all their orders with bonuses for other games that you can redeem right away so it kinda is the same predatory tactic just repackaged.
Now that it has been released they have that as a get out clause, you are now at the mercy of luck, getting a rep who won’t just instantly decline it. You should know that just making new tickets won’t change anything as they will refer back to your original ones that were declined.
Realistically if your ticket is declined your only option is to chase it up with your actual payment method, be it paypal or credit card etc.
I will tell you from my own anecdotal first hand experience that the whole scare tactics they give you and people tell you about how they will ban you and lock out your account etc are just complete BS. I have used paypal dispute with blizzard before with absolutely zero ramifications from blizzard other than them removing / locking out bonuses you received from the purchase (for example if you bought spoils of war here you would lose the wow mount normally, or a wow expansion the character you used a boost on would be locked out until you bought a boost etc)
I cannot guarantee you that the same will happen with you, making a paypal dispute will ultimately just lead you to the mercy of their customer service judges which may or may not allow you a refund.
Be civil, explain why you feel misled, provide evidence, list what your local consumer laws are that apply to YOU that they are breaching etc.
There’s a good chance that DIRECT coms with blizzard reps will refuse it though, during my attempt to get them to refund my BFA purchase, i mentioned that the game director had essentially acknowledged my class would be released on live in a broken state and i would have to wait for a content patch until they would be fixed (that spriest shaman saga), the rep was pretty damned rude, being pretty petulant with their demanding of evidence, i even gave him time stamps to ions direct quotes and on my life they just replied with “you’re just mad your class won’t be op”.
I provided all this info and the conversation with the blizzard rep in my paypal dispute and blizzard settled it and refunded me via paypal before it went to paypal making a final decision on it.
I don’t want to give you false hope with it, sometimes you just need to chalk it up to a loss and learn to never pre order things no matter what, i refuse to pre order anything now (except my favourite game of all time WC3) and even that turned out to be a mistake, i refunded back in november when i was not happy with development and started to see how things were being cut and how they didn’t seem to have actually did much of anything despite outsourcing what seemed to be the lion’s share of the work.
My personal example might have been refunded purely because of just how bad and unprofessional the rep i had dealt with was so don’t take it for granted the same will happen for you.
But i do want you to know that the scare tactics thing is BS, although i’ve dealt with it with steam as well who do take action against your account and i won my case vs them, i bought GTA V on steam years after release and something was wrong with their downloading of the game where certain files weren’t being downloaded, i spent well over the 2 hour grace period steam offer for refunds trying to fix it, (none of which was spent actually playing the game, only their launcher client open) naturally they declined because it was over 2 hours “played”. I forced the paypal dispute, they locked out my account entirely, i refused to back down and gave them the evidence that it was a fault on their end (it turned out to be a pretty well documented issue at the time that i didn’t know of until researching into my issue), eventually after about 10 days they offered to refund me and unfreeze the account if i dropped the paypal dispute.
Stick to your guns, stand your ground and don’t back down if you feel you’re in the right, companies can be terrified of paypal disputes as reaching a threshold can eventually block them from trading with paypal.
Good luck with your dispute and i hope you get your money back, this isn’t the game we paid for.
