How do I scare off my paying customers?

Dear ArenaNet team,

after the experiences of the last two days with your ingameshop and your support I am surprised that you still exist.

Here a short outline:

My wife discovered the sky-shed removal tools in the shop on Thursday. Yes, here in the household my wife and I play with one account each, I even have a second account myself, but logically with only one public IP.Since Guild Wars has been with us for about 15 years, you can get some gems with PayPal, at least in theory."An error has occurred. Please try again." A really very meaningless error message, if I may note that.

Since the mining tools are limited, we thought that I should quickly get some gems and give her the tools as a present. But I got the same error message.

Then let the support solve it:She opened the ticket on Thursday, I mine only on Friday. Reaction to my ticket within 8 minutes and the solution according to the employee 90 minutes later. The ticket of my wife needed longer. When she got the information that she could shop, she did it immediately. I also wanted to buy some gemstones, but see, still the same error message, about three hours after the alleged solution.On my feedback in the ticket I have not received any further reaction until now, 21 hours later.

What really upsets me now is the "buying restriction" on my account. It's like when the Media Markt in Germany tells me: No, I have to see if I let you shop again, you have already left some money with me, but in the last few years not much, so I don't want that for now.

I also wonder what "security checks" the payment providers, in this case Digital River, do. The same payment provider is used more often for my payments and there are no "security checks" in front of it.

What makes the whole thing even more absurd: Even an attempt via paysavecard leads to the same error.

By the way, it was not only ten euros that were to be spent, I mean three mining tools a 1000 gems etc.

For me, with a commercial and IT background, this way of dealing with paying customers is an unparalleled disaster.

Unfortunately you can't buy GemCards anymore, at least I don't know any dealer who still carries them.

Maybe you consider to sell the gemstones through your shop (https://buy.guildwars2.com), there seems to be less problems.

In my opinion it's no wonder that your team shrinks when the sales decrease if you exclude your paying customers.

With kind regards

You may find this informational: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/b62066/any_fixes_to_not_being_able_to_buy_gems/

Dornsinger is the Lead GM.

Also, as indicated by the Sticky, due to high volume and the on-going worldwide crisis, ticket responses are slower than the usual 'within 72 hours'.

So without getting too close to you, but a post on reddit, even a year old is really no reference.

But I'd be happy to go over the points Dornsinger made:

• Your card is declined.I tried to pay with PayPal or Giropay, so I tried, because I did not get the possibility to pay.

• Your bank rejects the purchase as suspiciousIt didn't go through any bank or credit card

• Our bank rejects the purchase as suspiciousI guess Digital River would be the bank here?

• Your firewall doesn't load the shop.So if the shop follows the standards, then my firewall should not block anything here. Request goes out over port X so the answer may also go back to the source over this port.

• You have reached a spending limit which has to be solved with DR via supportSpending limit? Well, I think it's good that ArenaNet cares about its customers, but given my age, they should think carefully about what should be considered my "spending limit.

• Your PayPal system does not have a linked credit card, and PP does not consider your account secure for the transaction.Well, I certainly make enough sales via PayPal in a year and through my deposited and verified bank account I have no limit and PP certainly does not consider me to be insecure.

• PayPal refuses the purchase due to their algorithmFirst of all I would have to be able to pay at all, but that's not going to happen.

• Rarely is there an actual problem with the server connections (although we would then have about 100 people contacting us within an hour for the problem, these spikes are detected and resolved very quickly)No comment

According to the German forum and allegedly also the chat in Götterfels, far more people have the problem.

The statements in my ticket are also contradictory, which really makes the whole thing a farce:

First, I did not pass the "general security checks of the payment provider" then "checked my account and removed the purchase restrictions".

As I said, if you don't want my money, and apparently that of many others, you shouldn't be surprised about the drop in sales.

Again: Here is the official forum and the official website, a post on Twitter, Facebook, reddit or anywhere else have no relevance for me, because I expect a company to find the information exactly on their pages.