With all due respect to any WoW players on my friends list...
Background: My husband and I are currently actively involved in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), and spend many hours running around together on there. Although the vast majority of individuals on LOTRO who do annoying things readily admit to coming from WoW, a mutual friend informed us that things were improving over there, and that we should give it a try.
So we tried to download the 10-day free trial. It didn't work, which I thought was a bit odd, but I figured maybe their online download was temporarily unavailable. And next time we were in WalMart, Jared suggested we try the $1.99 14-day trial DVD. So we bought one for each of us.
When we tried to set up the account, it gave us a 203 Error. Odd, we thought again, and called the mutual friend. He suggested trying to log into the game anyway -- maybe it had gone through, but just wasn't able to transfer to the appropriate screen. So we tried, and managed to get through six or eight hours of downloads. And then it stopped recognizing our usernames and passwords.
I went to the website again, and it didn't recognize the appropriate e-mail as being attached to an account. So I e-mailed billing/tech support.
This is the e-mail I got:
> Hello,
>
> I am sorry to hear of the difficulty you have
> experienced. The "Error 203" message indicates that
> your trial account could not be created at this time
> with the information provided.
>
> As an alternative, all boxed retail copies of World
> of Warcraft include a free 30 days when you activate
> your account. This is the most reliable workaround
> solution we can recommend for you at this time.
>
> If you are trying to set up your account with a full
> boxed copy of the game, and continue to have trouble
> getting your account created, please give us a call
> so we can troubleshoot this issue further. When
> calling, please have your contact information handy
> and reference the specific error you received.
>
> Our Billing Team is available Monday through Friday,
> 8am through 8pm Pacific Time at (800) 592-5499.
> Customers in Australia should call 1-800-041-378.
> If you are currently located in New Zealand,
> Singapore, or Malaysia, please reply to this email
> for further assistance.
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> XXXXXXX
>
> Billing and Account Services
> Blizzard Entertainment
> www.worldofwarcraft.com
...
So we're supposed to buy two full copies of the game software? And then maybe they'll actually bother troubleshooting the bug? No. We're not paying full price for the full software just to figure out if we even want to play the game in the first place. If this is Blizzard's sorry excuse for account services, we're not wasting any more of our time or money on them. If they'd given us a solution that didn't involve spending money, or told us that this is an issue with the site, but they expect it to be resolved in x hours/days/weeks, or in fact given any indication that they cared about a potential future customer in any way other than as a "you haven't spent any real money on us yet, so don't bother us until you do," we might actually have investigated the game. We might well have become longstanding paying members. But if this is the sort of treatment they're handing out now, when they're supposed to have improved, I don't want to pay to find out what they'll be like later.