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Making a purchase via an ArenaNet Partner


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As a community, it's a really nice option to be able to support favourite Partners / Streamers, by using one of their links when making a purchase. 

Beginning November 26 until December 31, you can get 50% off when you purchase Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire™ from one of these participating retailers.

Unfortunately, some of us live in regions not represented in that list. 

I know that many Partners have links to buying the game, so I'm wondering if a possible workaround might be, to make that 50% off purchase using an ArenaNet Partner link?

If so, then are we given a code that can be applied to an existing free to play account? 

Edited by Stelawrat.6589
grammer... and spelling... grammar
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1 minute ago, Randulf.7614 said:

I’d expect partners would also be restricted or have to abide by the same regional laws that Anet are obeying when doing these promotions. 

Yeah I understand & can appreciate that, but in the case of Amazon as a retailer, I imagine most regions are unrestricted, including Canada for example. 

I'm not daring enough to give it a shot tomorrow, but if someone else does try, would be neat to know the result. 

Or if a Partner can advise what, if any, information they have re: the regions that they are allowed to honour, then that would be great. 

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Re: my workaround suggestion. Please note that I don't recommend that anyone try this.

I tried just now to purchase the game from Amazon.com & as usual, there was the following disclaimer: 

"This product is non-returnable and non-refundable. 

Note: Currently, this item is available only to customers located in the United States." 

I'm guessing that these codes are flagged in some way to confirm the region where they're eventually used. So even if you could obtain a code though a favourite ArenaNet Partner / Streamer, you wouldn't be able to use it, unless you lived in the States. 

I didn't try any EU Amazon sites, but I imagine that they use the same type of disclaimer. So codes obtained from EU Partners would also be flagged for use in their respective regions only. 

So for regions like Canada, Australia, India etc. - unfortunately, no day in the sun. 

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This sale is not legally accessible by anyone in Australia or Asia, whether you use an affiliate link or not, this is very disappointing.  None of the resellers are accessible.  Pretty sure the codes would work for you though, if you could purchase it somehow, or someone else purchased it for you, its just an unlock in your account.

Edited by Blooming Furore.3612
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23 hours ago, Stelawrat.6589 said:

I'm guessing that these codes are flagged in some way to confirm the region where they're eventually used. So even if you could obtain a code though a favourite ArenaNet Partner / Streamer, you wouldn't be able to use it, unless you lived in the States. 

No they aren't flagged or region locked. Anet confirmed this repeatedly over the years that all codes outside of China can be used globally. Considering that you can play GW2 anonymously if you put a bit of effort in it, I doubt that they even have the infrastructure in place to region lock this game. As far as I know they only geotag your account during creation to suggest your server region which can be changed manually by the player anyway.

There are a variety of reasons why Amazon limits they sale of digital codes to the local country of each individual Amazon store:

- Prevention of VAT/sales tax evasion, and for transatlantic sales also customs and dues evasion

- General fraud prevention; It's much cheaper for Amazon to only have the necessary measures for each shop in place than to build a global system that might run into regulatory hurdles with privacy and data retention laws and such.

- Privacy, data retention laws and other regional regulatory requirements; Even member states of the European Union can have quite different local regulations on some products, e.g. books and similar publishing products in Germany and Austria have some special competition rules compared to most other EU nations.

- Prevention of money laundering; There has evolved a sprawling shadow economy of gift card trading over the last years that is happily used by criminals of all sorts.

- Cutting out resellers; Amazon doesn't want any competition on their own site from marketplace resellers on digital goods. They most likely want to avoid to feed too many codes to those shady small resellers with their own websites as well, although they often undermine that effort themselves by giving away Amazon/Twitch Prime stuff.

- Fear of anti-trust action by both the US and EU; That's probably the biggest sword hanging over them at the moment since the general public has caught on about Amazon's shady business practices.

Edited by Sarajiel.5830
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10 hours ago, Sarajiel.5830 said:

No they aren't flagged or region locked. Anet confirmed this repeatedly over the years that all codes outside of China can be used globally. Considering that you can play GW2 anonymously if you put a bit of effort in it, I doubt that they even have the infrastructure in place to region lock this game. As far as I know they only geotag your account during creation to suggest your server region which can be changed manually by the player anyway.

There are a variety of reasons why Amazon limits they sale of digital codes to the local country of each individual Amazon store:

- Prevention of VAT/sales tax evasion, and for transatlantic sales also customs and dues evasion

- General fraud prevention; It's much cheaper for Amazon to only have the necessary measures for each shop in place than to build a global system that might run into regulatory hurdles with privacy and data retention laws and such.

- Privacy, data retention laws and other regional regulatory requirements; Even member states of the European Union can have quite different local regulations on some products, e.g. books and similar publishing products in Germany and Austria have some special competition rules compared to most other EU nations.

- Prevention of money laundering; There has evolved a sprawling shadow economy of gift card trading over the last years that is happily used by criminals of all sorts.

- Cutting out resellers; Amazon doesn't want any competition on their own site from marketplace resellers on digital goods. They most likely want to avoid to feed too many codes to those shady small resellers with their own websites as well, although they often undermine that effort themselves by giving away Amazon/Twitch Prime stuff.

- Fear of anti-trust action by both the US and EU; That's probably the biggest sword hanging over them at the moment since the general public has caught on about Amazon's shady business practices.

That's all very well, but what it means is that shady resellers is the only way that people in specific countries outside of the region lock, like Australia and Canada, that Amazon isn't selling this through, have access to items from this sale.  I'm pretty annoyed by it to be honest, I was waiting for a sale, can't buy in this one, and now have no idea if or when a sale through their store will ever occur.  Way to lock out half the world, Anet.

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1 hour ago, Blooming Furore.3612 said:

That's all very well, but what it means is that shady resellers is the only way that people in specific countries outside of the region lock, like Australia and Canada, that Amazon isn't selling this through, have access to items from this sale. 

You could always try to use gameliebe.com since they seem to sell to anyone with a working email address and an accepted payment method.

Personally I'm surprised that Anet/NCsoft are doing such a bad job with this sale, especially after that botched one in 2019. As someone who loathes buying anything from Amazon I'm also quite annoyed that they are the only real option for me.

It also seems that Anet doesn't really care if their codes end up at those scummy reseller sites. :classic_angry: 

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