Blizzard pissed me off. Badly. It’s one thing that battle.net redirects me to the korean website, even though my account is south-east asian–apparently all japanese are considered to be able to speak korean too. But whatever, i got used to typing sea.battle.net instead of just battle.net.
Actually it was all fine when i got the game (StarCraft 2 we’re talking about here). I completed the campaign, wrote a blogpost about it and since then played against harder and harder AI’s. Not against humans for the sole reason that the people i would want to play with are in another region. And StarCraft 2 is geo-locked, just like World of Warcraft. Meaning you can’t play with people from other regions, and even if you got access to another region, your achievements and scores will be stored only for the region you got them in. Even better is that although SEA apparently got merged into the north american region, technically the two are still separate, just now i can have a NA character too. Great.
I hoped it was just some temporary thing that i couldn’t even add my friends from the EU region, but it’s not… I’m locked into NA. Okay then, after a nice fit of rage i gave up and set out to buy yet again that version too. Of course not another boxed, cd version, just the digital. So i headed for battle.net and after logging in like five times on different occasions (without logging out or changing sites even once) i switched to EU region and clicked to buy StarCraft 2. Entered my credit card (japanese VISA) details and everything, and clicked “continue”. No good. I triple-checked my details, tried my name with all possible capitalizations, but still nothing.
That was when i decided to email the support. They responded with an automated email, saying that if my problem was not covered in the mail, i should call them, on either a north american or an australian number. Well, screw with your mother, not me, thank you. Luckily my problem was probably covered in the email. Let me quote.
Any credit card used must be from within the supported North American region (the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia or Thailand). Any credit card with a billing address residing outside of this region will be rejected from our system, regardless of your current geographical location. In addition, the billing address of the credit card should match that of the World of Warcraft account.
Excuse me? EXCUSE ME?! An embossed, “globally usable” (more on that later) credit card, being denied on basis of its billing address? Are you serious? Which world are these people living in? I don’t give a flying fuck about what kind of security issues they are avoiding this way for World of Warcraft, when i’m smashing my keyboard instead of their faces.
No, something’s wrong. Damn it.
