You don't want my money today, don't you?

Today I tried several times (over a period of several hours) to buy some gems via Paypal and always get an error.

Now I even have load some money on my Mastercard and tried it with this... only to get the same freaking error.

Something wrong with payments from Europe?

Best to create a ticket for this. All kinds of things can go wrong with payment systems and it's not too easy (or safe) to diagnose them on the forums.

Just thought I ask here first, if others might have the same problems. More often than not it's a general thing and all one could do would be to wait anyway :)

Depends on personal habits, I suppose. I've had numerous problems with failed payments in GW2, and it seems some were due to fraud detection. Support didn't specify what had gone wrong, they just fixed it.

The last one, however, was because I was using a new card and had forgotten to actually activate it before trying to pay for things with it. No surprise the bank declined that one.

I've been having the same problem myself, trying to buy the Path of Fire expansion. I've tried two different browsers and numerous different payment options, and everything's failed. Support ticket, here I come!

I found logging out and then logging back into the game tends to correct this problem . . . given there's no issue with your funds or card. Sometimes, there's a disconnect between ANet and your bank of choice. And sometimes, there's a communication error with the bank, and it may take an hour or so for the connection to auto correct.

I'm not using bank transfer for a reason. In the past when there was any problem, even one wasn't responsible for, the account was banned. In the old forums there were dozens of entries about this.

So I'm usually only using Paypal. Credit Card only as a last straw.

Still not working today.

Edit: At least I get another error message now. "Payment Authorization Failed" there definitely is money on my Mastercard account.

Edit2: At least paying via Paypal was now possible. Now having money on the credit card I do not want there. Have to wait for the next thing I want to buy in GW2 it seems.

At this point, I recommend you click support. No idea what could be happening. Just be aware it may take a minute, given recent events, before Support can get to you.

https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us

Good luck.

Had a weird few days using my debit card for gems purchases a few weeks back and it also began happening on 2 other sites.Every transaction failed even though there was more than enough funds available... bank saw the transactions were failing but it wasn't until the highest level of security in the banking team took a look the issue became known.It turned out it was not a failure of funds or bad comms handshakes between buyer/seller. It boiled down to the fact my current debit card was in its last few weeks of its life and a new card had been issued, logged into the system but not arrived, just seemed to not like having both cards active after some bright spark entered new card details into the banking system... after that was resolved my old card worked fine again, bought gems.. but when the new card arrived with nice new expiry date etc.. it never worked - for the same problem but all the bank then did was kill the old card a week early and it's all good again.

As noted, it was "resolved" on May 1st for me, because with Paypal I could pay again then. Of course something else than the message "An error occured" would be more helpful to know, what exactly happened.

@Bloodstealer.5978:My card is still valid for three years. Eventually it was some kind of communications failure back then between Mastercard and ANet, I can't tell now :-/

And again, neither by Paypal nor by Credit Card can I buy any gems. Only "Payment Authorization failed" appears.

Yes, my bank account still has enough money on it, yes it has, yes.Yes, my credit card is still valid, yes it is, yes.No, nothing is wrong on my side, no.

You REALLY should fix your transaction ways! Surely quite some people have missed Gemstore items which were available only a few days because of this!

ok, what kind of SICK JOKE IS THIS? Suddenly I see a mail in my mailbox for "Thank you for your gem purchase!". I check Paypal again and you took my money DESPITE SHOWING ME AN ERROR MESSAGE? AND LET ME TRY IT AGAIN AND AGAIN?

I hope for YOU that you don't now suddenly book off MULTIPLE times money via Paypal!

Great. You really did it.

YOU OWE ME 100 EUROS NOW!

Then create a support ticket to ask for the extra charges to be undone and the extra gems taken away.

Ticket #6983464. Do something.

For anyone else wondering:after I clicked through my Paypal login, you usually see the last page telling you something like "Thank you for your purchase. Your gems will be transfered. If they are not there within 15 minutes, please contact support" or something.

But for me a message appeared stating something like "There was an error in the communication with the payment partner" (I didn't make a screenshot unfortunately).

It took over 15 minutes before I got the mail from ANet telling me "Thanks for your purchace". And another 10 minutes, before the second mail came (I tried it twice on Paypal site).

Something like this MUSTN'T happen! It completely destroys the faith in giving you any money at all anymore!

There's no system so perfect that errors can't happen. Open a support ticket, politely request a refund, and give ANet a chance to make things right.Keep in mind that ANet doesn't handle the transactions: that's between your 'bank' (PayPal, in your case) and DigitalRiver (ANet's retail management contractor); the game just provides the interface for the transaction.

ANet, of course, bears the ultimate responsibility to make sure that things work. Presuming that they've done their due diligence in selecting a firm, they won't be aware that there's a problem until someone tells them. Without a support ticket, they can't investigate & figure out why this happened. It might turn out to be a problem on PayPal's side rather than DigitalRiver's. It could out to be an internet issue that affected traffic in one direction (the confirmation). Or it could turn out, as you allege, to be a widespread, systemic failure.

Which ever it is, your next step is the same: file a ticket, and wait for ANet to get back to you.

Additional bad news: their customer support is backlogged currently. Replies for some issues are taking 2+ weeks to resolve. Money issues ... they usually prioritize, so make sure to use the appropriate pull downs during ticket creation.

Just as an information:The ticket was already solved from the support, I got a refund.

As many bad things we hear about the support here in the forums, on important tickets, they are working very fast.

@Nokomis.5076 said:Just as an information:The ticket was already solved from the support, I got a refund.As many bad things we hear about the support here in the forums, on important tickets, they are working very fast.

They are working on improving that, too, bringing new CS people on to help with the load. It is good to know they got to that fast, though.