Re: Free trial not free
Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 8:06 pm
Folks, please don't get confused by that part of the registration. You are not being tricked into subscribing to the Game here. There's a row of reasons why we ask you for your billing information, they are listed below. Further:
- After registering, you can simply go the website, to the "edit your account" section and state that you want to "unsubscribe". That will avoid your free trial turning into a subscription when the trial period ends and you can do this at any time you want.
- Your trial account will stay open until the end of the trial, even if you unsubscribe on the first day.
- That 1 Dollar you get charged (which is the only charge you will see during your trial - you will not get charged a subscription fee of any kind) will be returned to you in any case, it's a common procedure and the safest way to avoid fraud and verify that a credit card is valid.
As previously stated:
- After registering, you can simply go the website, to the "edit your account" section and state that you want to "unsubscribe". That will avoid your free trial turning into a subscription when the trial period ends and you can do this at any time you want.
- Your trial account will stay open until the end of the trial, even if you unsubscribe on the first day.
- That 1 Dollar you get charged (which is the only charge you will see during your trial - you will not get charged a subscription fee of any kind) will be returned to you in any case, it's a common procedure and the safest way to avoid fraud and verify that a credit card is valid.
As previously stated:
lawrence wrote:We actually have a row of good reasons to ask for your billing information during the free trial registration process. I will use the opportunity and explain why entering your billing information is necessary.
1) It is a precautionary measure. Without verified billing information, people could and would just go ahead and enter false contact information. It would be tough for us to track their real identity, in case they abused any of our services, in the worst case scenario for illegal activities. People tend to misbehave more in places where they remain anonymous and cannot be identified. We don't want to go down that road.
2) To be able to actually subscribe to the Game after your free trial period ends, you either need one of the supported Credit Cards, or one of the alternative listed payment methods. People do not always read up on those kind of things - most people actually. By verifying right away that you would actually be able to subscribe for the game later, we will save some folks out there and ourselves some time and trouble.
3) While you can cancel the free trial at any time you want, you can automatically convert it to a normal subscription at the end of the trial period. We wanted this process to be as comfortable as possible for our users (understandably!), so you won't have to bother with going through all the registration and verification of your billing information later, so you can continue to play without any interruptions when your trial period ends.
4) The technical side of things: Free trial accounts work in the same way as normal accounts, because we wanted trial users to have full access to our real servers, not just a restricted demo server. Therefore it would require significant changes to our database and other areas if we wanted accounts to be able to connect to the game without being flagged as verified users.
I hope this clears things up !
