Mails!

Someone in my wing sent an email and got a response so I am posting both of them here. The response is exceptionally enlightening. (Names have been removed to protect the innocent).


Hello Travian Plus Support,

I am writing you today to ask about some recent concerns I have with the gold system and billing. I play on the account XXX on the USx server, and have recently started to purchase gold as I see the power it offers. My trouble comes from an alliance member who has run into an issue with the gold system, and it raises concerns in my own mind. One of the effected accounts is: XXX for reference sake.

To make a long story short, XXX and others have been banned recently as a result of a bug on your side of the gold buying system. Essentially this player purchased gold twice, but was charged a total of 14 times on her credit statement, and never received the gold she was falsely charged for. As if this is not scary enough, the real trouble comes from the lack of help travian offered this player, claiming that she some how spent 7200 gold in less then a month, and that the player had no options for bad gold purchases. She was even threatened, saying that if she alerted his credit card company she would be banned.

This raises a number of questions that I need answers to as a player who has recently started to purchase gold of my own, and I am going to be watching my credit card statements much more carefully:

1. What can I do if I buy gold and don't get it credited to my account?

2. What is the company policy for refunds based on unauthorized gold transactions? Weather a bug in the system or some other reason. We live in an insecure world, if some one steals my CC number and buys gold with it, am I at fault? From your responses to my friend it would seem so.

3. What is the company policy concerning accidental multiple purchases? If my computer locks up and I have to resubmit a purchase form, but I am billed twice, what happens?

4. What kind of logs are kept of all this? From what I have seen so far travian does not have logs showing gold being put into an account, or what it's spent on. It appears to be untracked totally.

Overall I am very concerned about both the safety of my credit, as well as the account I put a large amount of time into. It appears that travian is unable or unwilling to track and investigate money issues concerning an account. And that a normal reaction to a faulty charge -calling your credit card company- is met with hostile recourse.

Thanks for your time,
XXX

Hello,

Thank you for your question.

The first thing that is worth mentioning is that when a credit card payment is cancelled from the other end it actually charges Travian money, so that is why we ban accounts that cancel payments from their end. Furthermore credit card payments are controlled by a company entirely seperate to Travian.

1. If the gold isn't creditted then you can just email us with proof of purchase and we will find out the problem and credit the gold.
2. In this case it would not be you at fault, if you cancel the payment with the credit card company then the account that used it to purchase gold will be banned automatically.
3. In this case we will credit the gold for both payments due to the fact we cannot cancel the payments once they are in the hands of the other company.
4. We cannot discuss what logs are kept, but we do have a fair degree of information available.

One further word of advice would be that if you purchase gold through paypal Travian has far greater control over the transaction, so that can be simpler sometimes.

Kind regards,

US GameAdmin
Travian Team