Like others I embraced the Digital future - Something for those to consider that are on the fence

Should i fight the system? Should I continue to purchase Digitally? Should I consider renewing Gold

  • Take the £24.97 and don't look back

    Votes: 2 22.2%
  • CEO or GTFO

    Votes: 1 11.1%
  • 7 years a long time as a Gold member keep going!! Let it go

    Votes: 6 66.7%
  • one does not simply purchase game's , Rentals 4 life!

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    9

Mr Noble

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With the ease of access to cheap credit sites or other territory stores bringing down prices of digital content down now has never been a better time to go digital or so it seem's.

Sure it's convenient , it's cheaper than what it used to be sometimes you even get to play earlier depending on the Region you purchase from and they even throw in those preorder bonuses these days!... that's the plus points


Now let me explain a negative

A few days ago I mentioned contacting xbox support to get a refund for Battlefield 4 in the battlefield section on AVF which i purchased digitally due to the campaign reset issue, jammy git you are all thinking..don't i've just lost 3 hours of my life on chat support

So I logged into xbox.com and went to the e-commerce site to see if the refund had been issued, it had but it was for the premium pass not the actual game, ok but why is my account still showing as 0.00GBP but showing as settled.

So I get back onto support at lunch time explain what happened I wanted the refund for the game , instead an advisor refunded the premium pass.

No problemo we'll refund the cost for the Game as originally requested, just delete both from your console. it should be showing now if you want to log in and check.... so I do bam £94.98 you all guessed right? wrong! £24.97

So I query it , the advisor oh i see you used prepaid codes to purchase these. Yeah I did oh some of them expired after 12 months from purchase, and it hasn't been 12 months since purchasing them? well apparently unless you buy direct from the Microsoft you have no recourse for reimbursement should your product become defective so make sure if you go the digital route buy your credit from a reputable retailer or buy direct using a card on microsoft store.

Remember those cheapo codes floating around on ebay yup thems the fella's with the moody codes, they also advised me to remove my Various region addresses due to breaking Terms and conditions etc, wouldn't direct me to which one's I broke but there you go

Oh btw Battlefield 4 and the season pass will now cost me £54.99 and £39.99 again to re-purchase

TL : DR Make sure you buy your xbox live credit from reputable sources!


What's people's thoughts ? £24.97 to trade in battlefield 4 and season pass a decent trade off, or should I fight for my remaining £70 , bearing in mind I only wanted a refund on Battlefield main game too but a certain employee cocked it up

 
So the region change things people are doing for the cheaper games is in fact against the T+Cs ...

I cut my loses pal you can't get the time back it would take for you to argue the toss about it.
 
Yeah I think that for anyone that is buying cheapo codes from ebay(or other) and/or region switching you probably want to avoid contact with Xbox support.

I would just take what you can and let it go. After all this wouldn't be a problem if BF4 bloody worked properly! (saying that I have only booted BF4 once(from EA Access) and yeah I noticed a number of glitches but the game was playable without any headaches)

Let it go brother you'll live to fight another day. :)
 
I purchased Destiny from the Hong Kong store, but wasn't happy with it as there were constant server issues etc.
Contacted support and initially they couldn't even find that I'd purchased it!

Turns out that each store is a separate account?! But under the same gamer tag.
So if I log into my uk xbox account online, none of my HK purchases show there.

Anyway, eventually they found all my Hk purchases and refunded destiny no problem! The Xbox support guy was very helpful and had no issues with me getting the game from the HK store :)
 
I had BF4 since launch and was frustrated with the servers at the time. I had no idea it was possible to get a refund on a digital game.

For those of you who have had refunds, does Microsoft somehow remove the license and make the game unplayable?

Like Mr Noble, I too got ebay credit for launch purchases cheap, and even was notified to spend some money as it was due to expire. So not sure it's even worth me arguing for a refund. Good to know for future purchases at least.

Also, isn't EA Access about £20, better yet use the refunded money and you can then see the balls up as Microsoft paying for EA Access for 1yr, which includes BF4 and other games. So you get the broken game back, plus more.
 
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I had BF4 since launch and was frustrated with the servers at the time. I had no idea it was possible to get a refund on a digital game.

For those of you who have had refunds, does Microsoft somehow remove the license and make the game unplayable?

Yeah, got a refund for Titanfall too! Although I told a small white lie for that and said I purchased the full game by mistake and only meant to get the season pass and had already ordered the disc version lol

And yes, they just remove the license. So with destiny, the moment I hung up from support I tried launching the game and got the "Do you own this game, insert disc or purchase from store etc" message!
 
You could contact trading standards as a refund can be subjective to the retailer. You should only every get what you paid for it.

I would try Twitter and go the Xbox support route. I have recently arrange for one of my titanfall pads to be replaced. It took 10 mins to sort out online.

So how much did you get charged for the game ?

I have no issues with Battlefield 4.
 
It would never even occur to me to seek a refund on a digital purchase. That said, I was actually aware of the issue around digital points cards credit having an expiry date, though it's weird this applies to refunds.
 
I had BF4 since launch and was frustrated with the servers at the time. I had no idea it was possible to get a refund on a digital game.

For those of you who have had refunds, does Microsoft somehow remove the license and make the game unplayable?

Like Mr Noble, I too got ebay credit for launch purchases cheap, and even was notified to spend some money as it was due to expire. So not sure it's even worth me arguing for a refund. Good to know for future purchases at least.

Also, isn't EA Access about £20, better yet use the refunded money and you can then see the balls up as Microsoft paying for EA Access for 1yr, which includes BF4 and other games. So you get the broken game back, plus more.

I like the EA access idea but i've given up my season pass too that's £94.98 worth of content for £24.97, plus i own all the games :D

Advocacy team has took up my issue now i'm expecting a call /email tomorrow once they've delved into my account to see if they can do anything to rectify the issue
 
Woke up to an email from a xbox account analyst and they confirm the full refund should have came through but the credit I used expired on the 20th September 2014 £80 worth , so the guy has manually added another £80 to my account so have £104.97 in there now.

He referred to it as my main billing account so is aware of the others so must be fine to keep them.

I still have access to battlefield 4 and premium, guess if you persist they will sort it in the end.

That's took the sting out of the November releases for me a bit
 
You did well there @Mr Noble.

I am still confused over the whole change region thing, as much as i would love to save a few quid i am still worried it is against the TC's and end up with a ban
 
You did well there @Mr Noble.

I am still confused over the whole change region thing, as much as i would love to save a few quid i am still worried it is against the TC's and end up with a ban

Was there any TC's when creating the additional accounts, i don't recall.

MS could easily put a stop to it in a software update, they have not and probably will not. I doubt anyone will get a ban, too many people around the world using the loophole, just enjoy it i say
 
I think any issues would be the addresses you have to make up.

I don't know I'm just over cautious I suppose

LB
 
Woke up to an email from a xbox account analyst and they confirm the full refund should have came through but the credit I used expired on the 20th September 2014 £80 worth , so the guy has manually added another £80 to my account so have £104.97 in there now.

Like I said before, you jammy scrote!!!
 
I think any issues would be the addresses you have to make up.

I don't know I'm just over cautious I suppose

LB
Yeah, they do have a pretty strict response to fraud - Permanent ban on your live account, console and loss of any digital games you have. Pretty sure giving a false billing address could be considered an act of fraud, Microsoft may not take action but the opportunity for them to do so is there. It has happened when people did the same thing to get freebies from different regions on the 360, getting cheaper digital games is just a different level of the same thing.
 
Yeah, they do have a pretty strict response to fraud - Permanent ban on your live account, console and loss of any digital games you have. Pretty sure giving a false billing address could be considered an act of fraud, Microsoft may not take action but the opportunity for them to do so is there. It has happened when people did the same thing to get freebies from different regions on the 360, getting cheaper digital games is just a different level of the same thing.
On a practical level, how do you think they could go about enforcing it? It's nigh on impossible without address verification.

On a strategic, PR level, I'm sceptical they would see taking away hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds worth of legally bought games for such an infraction as proportionate for a ToS breach.

And on a legal level, how could they take away any legally bought games anyway? Surely they could only remove the titles that breached the ToS, and even then surely you could just pay the missing tax and you're done? I'm not aware of any law that would allow MS to take such action.

I've read the accounts that were banned were doing far dodgier things than downloading free US stuff, that whiffs of Chinese whispers.
 
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The other aspect here is MS said that games are multi region and people are allowed to buy a console and games, even if their country was not in the supported list of release countries. While I agree there is a small risk, it does not seem logical that MS would ban thousands of accounts for legally bought games. Equally, this would be a very simple loophole to close Or limit if they wished to, for example, they could limit the times a console can change its region to once a year. They choose not to.
 
We're they not meaning discs when mentioning multi region?

Unless the have specially said use another countries online store to download your games?
 
Unless the have specially said use another countries online store to download your games?

Albert Penello, the MS lead planner for the X1, expressly said that you could use any marketplace of your choice for which you had a valid means of payment.

It may be said that implicit in that is that you shouldn't use a false address and post code to do so, but the clear impression pre-release was that you could shop wherever you could pay.
 
I've read the accounts that were banned were doing far dodgier things than downloading free US stuff, that whiffs of Chinese whispers.

From what I understood, the wave of bans around this time last year as, as you say, not for marketplace manipulation but was principally against people who had been manipulating the dual licence system (i.e. one for the tag that downloaded it, one for the console on which it was downloaded) to play games across multiple consoles and effectively get more than one licence for the cost of one download.
 
From what I understood, the wave of bans around this time last year as, as you say, not for marketplace manipulation but was principally against people who had been manipulating the dual licence system (i.e. one for the tag that downloaded it, one for the console on which it was downloaded) to play games across multiple consoles and effectively get more than one licence for the cost of one download.
But that's not even against the ToS is it?
 
There was more to it than that, MB - I just can't recall the detail of it! I think the gist of it was that multiple people across multi-consoles had been playing on the one licence.

Either way, the bans weren't for downloading hookey copies of Angry Birds from the Russian marketplace or the likes of Injustice from the Omani marketplace.
 

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