For about 4-5 months now, I have not been able to use my Visa cards to set up a subscription either directly via the Credit Card itself, or by adding it as a primary payment method in my Paypal account. This seems to be a region wide(local, so Asia) issue and I’ve also recently seen this issue mentioned by European players as well.
What actually happens is - once you’ve entered the details of the card and hit Pay, it loads for a bit and says ‘failed’ or ‘some payment modes cannot be used for subscriptions’, which is weird given I’ve been using the very same card and Paypal accounts to pay for my sub for multiple years without a hitch.
So after a few unhelpful responses from Blizzard CS through tickets, I reached out to have a lengthy discussion with my bank instead.
My bank Customer Support, after some investigation, say the reason the transactions for my VISA credit card keeps getting declined on merchant end is because the Merchant’s software version for VISA transactions is not up to date, so the failure is automatic. As soon as the payment request hits the merchant end, it fails due to a minimum software version requirement check failure.
Please get in touch with the Merchants you as Blizzard use for Credit Card VISA transactions from Asia/Europe, and please have them update all the software on their end. It’s kind of embarassing to have transaction losses for blizzard because the marchant is lazy with their maintenance.
Having to buy 60 days gametime from the store as the only option to pay for this and not having the option to pay month by month is a big loss to freedom of choice with when and how i spend money to play wow.
Hopefully this issue is taken seriously and escalated to the proper levels, as I’m certain I’m not the only one facing this, given just how many forum posts and reddit threads I’ve seen regarding this issue.
Unfortunately this isnt gona reach the ones your hoping for those that handle these things dont frequent here. Your best bet would be to use the ingame suggestion feature if you want the dev to see it.
5 Likes
I’m putting this on the CS forums only because the last GM to respond to my ticket asked me to.
There is no guarantee the in-game suggestion feature is ever something they pay attention to, it just feels like you’re screaming into the void with that. Gonna do that too anyway.
THey didnt mean here specificly any feed back get devoured by the maw to never be seen by the developer.
2 Likes
All GM responses that direct people to the forums only say to post on the community forums. They don’t direct anyone to X specific forum, trusting people to find the most appropriate forum, whether it be some sort of loot discrepancy that should head towards the Dungeons and Raids forum or most things that should go towards General Discussion as the catch-all.
This forum is honestly the only place where feedback should never be left, as it is the only forum that no staff comes to beyond our SFAs - and it is not within their purview to collect feedback and suggestions and push it to the proper department. This particular forum is singular due to it being one for players to assist other players. Every other forum though, the Devs and their staff do collect that data from.
I am sorry you and others are having this issue, and hopefully it will be resolved sooner rather than later.
6 Likes
Looking at your transaction history, it doesn’t look like your 2 recent failed orders in April were credit card related. They are both attempts through PayPal.Your last successful order in March was with a credit card.
Your last successful PayPal order was in May 2022. If PayPal isn’t used for a while, the authorization to complete a payment can timeout/expire. So in those situations we’d suggest removing the PayPal from your Battle.net account and setting it back up so you can re-authenticate.
We process a LOT of payments every day. If there were an issue with our payment processor, we should be seeing a lot of reports around the same time.
I’d give that a try first.
7 Likes
Already given all of that a try. I’ve removed and re-added ALL my payment methods to my account. And yes I’ve also removed and re-added my credit card to my paypal account, and I have used it for other purchases on Xbox store and amazon just fine. The problem is only with your bnet payment gateways/merchants. It’s only being declined on your end, and specifically ONLY when trying to setup a recurring payment, aka sub.
The credit card transactions you’re talking about this calendar year, have either been for store mounts, or 60 days game time.
The issue I’m (and others are) facing is specifically ONLY with subscription.
You’re likely not seeing many reports about this failure in transaction because your asian servers/playerbase got nuked. There aren’t many people left from this region to actually give a large sample of reports.
That being said, I did do my own due diligence and spent hours on reddit, the wow forums and other such spaces and came across many similar reports from players living in Asia / Europe (far western europe).
This is not an issue on my end, I have already verified it with my Bank many times in the last 5-6 months. They have repeatedly pointed out the issue is with your Merchant gateways/servers which are auto-declining any attempts to set up a “Recurring Payment”, aka a subscription.
Buying a 1 time purchase item like a gametime card or a store mount =/= the same as setting up a recurring payment, which requires a few additional hoops, depending on the geo location and the laws there, the banks, and the Merchants you use and how they operate.
Anyways, its disheartening to see this response, which basically is just trying to turn it back around and say ‘you can try X troubleshoot’ even though checking my account history should’ve made it clear I’ve already done so.
As it stands, I just cannot subscribe to this game by any means, and am forced to buy 60 days gametime chunks if I want to play. That’s something I’m not going to do, I like being able to choose If i want to continue more than a month’s gameplay or not, and this situation takes away that choice.
You can go ahead and lock this post, think I’ve got my response and I don’t see any further good coming of this.