Tonight, my WoW account became inaccessible due to my recurring 6-month subscription not processing like it has for the last 3 years. I check and all my payment information is correct and my CC is up to date and not expired. When poking through, it is asking me to make a setup a new subscription plan. When I clicked through the link, the new plan is now a little over 25% higher than what it was the last time I was billed ($77.94 CAD to $97.99 CAD ~ a 25.7% increase).
I could not find any information readily available (through forums, support services, reddit, and google results) that the subscription fees would be increasing this year, let alone by how much. Also, is it normal to stop automatic renewals so that we need to sign up again at a higher rate? Is anyone else having the same issue?
Most likely explanation is a variation in the exchange rate and/or possible changes to sales tax based on your location. 6 months is a long time in the financial industry.
I thought the same, but when I dug through 3 years of transaction history, my 6-month renewal was always $77.94. If it fluctuated with the exchange rate, then it would follow that the renewals would show some variation over that time span, which it does not. Thus this price hike seems suspicious to me right now.
77,94 is the USD rate, idk if it might be a leftover from when they did the currency conversion and started to accept CAD. I will say blizzards currency support system is annoying though because I also pay for most things from Canada but blizzard forces me to pay the 77.94USD rather than the Canadian rate, and once you factor in bank fees + exchange it costs easily an extra 5-10% more than what it would cost me if they just accepted CAD. And its all because they had to change my account country so I could redeem my BFA collectors edition as blizzard balance…
An alternative I found is just buying time cards directly as I was generally able to find them for 25%ish cheaper than what blizzard sells 6 month subs for.
It’s because support forced me to change my Bnet country so I could get the balance from pre-purchasing BFA credited back to my account when I redeemed the collectors edition, and when you switch countries they lock you out of your local shop. for the US region it annoyingly defaults to USD unless your bnet is set to Australia/New Zealand/Mexico/Chile/Argentina/Brazil, (not sure what region Japan falls into, because officially Japanese accounts are registered in the Asia region) and it doesn’t take into account what your using to pay with. Obviously that affects what you pay for your monthly sub.
I personally have just resorted to buying time cards on eBay where I can usually Get a year for approx 100-110 USD which is still cheaper.
Its funny because now anything I buy from the shop gets more expensive and goes through a currency conversion, because Blizzard doesn’t support the currency of my current country of residence at all now. (it defaults to Euros instead which is almost worse)
not really, but i lived on both side of the pond throughout my life, financially most of my ties are still linked to Canada however, I certainly dont have any EUR account despite blizzard wanting to charge in Euros.
Its more where i order a Collectors edition, even in canada if you order the french collectors edition (and they do exist at some retailers), its a EU licence and to redeem it blizzard will force you to switch your account to an EU country, if you want the credit back.
I realize this isnt the situation for most people, i do have wow accounts on both EU/US but US was always my origional wow account.