I decided to take advantage of Turbine’s 7-day free trial for Lord of the Rings Online and get in a few hours of play time this weekend. So I downloaded the 5+ GB client and created an account. While I was browsing around, I decided to check out the purchasing options. Cool! They have a digital download purchase available. Since I’ve downloaded the client anyway, I can just purchase a key and I’ll be set. If only life were so easy.
I decided to dispense with the 7-day trial and dive right into purchasing it. So from my account management screen I clicked on the Buy It Now icon and got presented with an order form. I filled in the credit card info and then started in on the billing address section. I went to the drop down for the countries and found that there were only three options available: North America, Australia and New Zealand. That’s not going to help me, since my billing address is in South Korea.
Next, I follow a few support links from my account management page and get to the email contact form. As I’m getting ready to fill it out, I see they are asking for the last four digits of the credit card I have on file and that the field is marked as required. Well, that’s interesting considering that I haven’t given them a card number yet! By this time, I gave up.
The internet is becoming increasingly regionalized. Whatever the reason, it sucks. This is not the first time I’ve been ready to make a purchase, or a subscription, only to find out that my Korean billing address disqualifies me. Direct2Drive has several games marked as being available on certain continents only. Adidas forces you to order from the online store that serves your country, prohibiting you from ordering from one of the others if you don’t have a billing address there. I was going to buy some shoes from the US store and ship them to someone in the US, but couldn’t. When I contacted them, they said I had to order from the Korean site, where the same shoes weren’t available, but even if they had been I would have had to ship them to the States myself.
Anyway, I’ve now wiped LOTRO off of my hardrive and have no intention of pursuing a purchase of it. If I really wanted it, I could order it from Amazon (a company that understands what the phrase global internet means, even if they can’t ship some items overseas) and have it shipped to my father, who could then package it up for me. That’s how I got my hands on most of the DAOC expansions. But for a game that’s available as a digital download, one that I’ve already got sitting on my harddrive and that I was going to pay for on an impulse, that’s too much to bother.
So instead of becoming a Turbine customer, I’m now rather inclined not to look at any of their games in the future. I was looking forward to Age of Conan, as I was a rabid Conan fan in my youth, but I’m not even going to bother now. I’ll be looking more at games from companies like NCSoft, who don’t care where in the world you live when you buy their games online.
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