Raskolnikov posted:

fuctifino posted:

Those images aren't mine by the way. I found them on GIS.

AP posted:

Heh, I don't really care about elite. I'm interested in consumer rights and how the refund thing relates to Star Citizen, Frontier's actions were odd as it would never stand up in court. Frontier settled every case in the end and the one guy who did file for court had his filing fee refunded by them too. That's why they changed policy on it, they wouldn't win, it would be expensive to fight and the public relations issue would be worse than it was.

The odd thing was they tried no refunds in the 1st place to those who'd played an alpha.

ad hominem against a game company, good job you were here to defend them.

Also your last line is wrong, kickstarters are just contracts between the customer and the company, if the company doesn't fulfill the terms of the contract, which involves anything advertised about the game by any member of the company then the customer can fall back on contract law. However as I said before in the EU since June 2014, you're covered far beyond that for a no reason refund up to deliver +14 days. Kickstarter have their terms but that doesn't affect anything as they just want to stay out of any dispute.

I can back all this up with evidence if you like as I followed the issue quite closely but considering you don't really care about refunds I'm going to put your behaviour down to just being terribly misinformed about your rights.

McGiggins posted:

Does Sandy make faces for money?

Wuxi posted:

I'm not sure how someone can sing the Horst-Wessel-Lied on loving livestream and not be completely insane. How can you even think that this is a good idea?

Devian666 posted:

CIG are threatened by legal rights that they are required to fulfill. Every refund is pushing this project closer to extinction now if they are responding like this. Maybe there's only a few hundred thousand left?

Cheatum the Evil Midget posted:

Derek you've made some extreme claims in this thread and i think it behooves you to provide som clarity on the following points:

1) Have you ever had a banh mi sandwich
2) Have you ever had a tim tam
3) have you ever experienced wasabi mayonnaise

CrazyTolradi posted:

The reason why I'm of the opinion chargebacks are the best way to go is because of this"

They're now telling people that they don't have a right to a refund, which. depending on your jurisdiction, may well be a flat out lie (as an Australian, it would be for me). Screw it, don't bother wasting any more time and effort on this abysmal failure of a project than you have to. You shouldn't have to hold a chargeback over their CS rep to get your money back

It's also highly loving hilarious that CIG finds it "threatening" to have people exercise their rights as a consumer. How dare the non-believers doubt the glorious vision of mush mouth prophet Croberts.

Olesh posted:

Derek is half right...

peter gabriel posted:

I have Salad Cream on sausage sandwiches

MeLKoR posted:

Wait, what? I thought when you people mentioned "the nazi anthem" that she had just stupidly sang the entire german anthem not realizing that the first 2 stanzas had been memory-holed after WWII. She sang Horst-Wessel-Lied? How the gently caress does that happen?

ideate posted:

I was kind of wondering if it's her since I'm "Concierge" and I've seen her sign emails with the "Best," thing.

gently caress I'm an idiot

concierge good christ

peter gabriel posted:

Is this why people are getting refunds from all kinds of different companies? So CIG spread the burden and don't get bitchslapped?

Olesh posted:

Derek is half right, but only in theory - if enough people actually chargeback them over this, they lose their ability to process credit cards for an indeterminate period of time on that account. The target number isn't very large, either - either a fixed number (something like $50k) over a certain period of time or 1% of their transactions over the same period of time, whichever is lower. The major card brands (Visa/Mastercard/etc) are the ones who won't tolerate this, but on the one hand whoever they're using as a payment processor is liable to turn a blind eye to things like account juggling (to spread out chargebacks and avoid hitting the limit on any one account) because they're making a crapton of money off of CIG so long as nobody officially reports them doing it. On the other hand, there's not exactly a mechanism for reporting this sort of thing and even if one of their accounts gets closed down they can just funnel transactions through another account in future.

That's why this is only half right (sorry Derek) - it's not really remotely plausible that enough people will go through the chargeback process to get any of CIG's processor accounts shut down, because CIG is capable of juggling the accounts to spread out the chargebacks to avoid any one account getting hit heavily enough to matter. Even if one of their accounts gets shut down from an excess of chargebacks, their related accounts are not likely to be touched - it would take at least two accounts shut down in this way to demonstrate a pattern of behavior, and we've already got demonstrated proof that they've got transactions coming through multiple sources, meaning the bar for any individual account to get nailed for chargebacks is going to be rather high, let alone multiple accounts crossing that threshold. In practice the chance that they'll lose the ability to process credit cards through any of their accounts is so remote as to be effectively zero, let alone all of their accounts.

On the other hand, chargeback fees are _totally_ a thing; typically anywhere from 25$-75$ a transaction, and not only do payment processors take a percentage cut of the transaction, about half the time processors will also charge the same cut on issued refunds. If my payment processor charges 4% on a 100$ transaction, that is later refunded via chargeback, that means that not only do I have to refund the full $100 to the consumer (as per Visa and Mastercard, fees for using credit cards cannot be passed to the consumer), I get hit with a 4$ charge for accepting the transaction, possibly hit with a 4$ charge for refunding the transaction, and also hit with a $25 (or more!) fee for the chargeback. So that $100 in (that's actually $96 in pocket) ends up being a total of $129 or more out.

The reason CIG is trying not to issue full refunds is because every refund is a loss for them; even if their processor doesn't double-dip on refunds they're still out a percentage of the transaction, and chargeback threats are not only worse but require administrative oversight to ensure that the funding model isn't accidentally taken down by having too many chargebacks issued through the same processors. When they're trying to deny any individual their refund, it's because ANY refund is a net loss, and they're trying to balance how much they can try and hang onto without refunding vs the likelihood that you'll actually go through the chargeback process and cost them an extra chunk of change. They can juggle accounts all they want, there's no getting out of the chargeback fees which is why they still want to avoid them.


Edit: This is really as simple as a discussion of this gets - without knowing the specific details of the contracts they signed with their payment processor(s), whether or not they're held to stricter standards or the specifics of what might happen IF an account gets taken down through chargebacks aren't really on the table for speculation. Any individual payment processor IS absolutely capable of connecting the dots between companies, but in general due diligence on the processor side is limited to the primary account holder and whether or not that individual has the authority to sign for processing on behalf of their company.

Olesh posted:

Not really. CIG's ability to juggle around chargebacks is limited, as that's initiated from the consumer and follows the channel the consumer used to pay. What CIG CAN do is spread incoming transactions through multiple accounts (instead of through a single account) in order to spread the risk, and when issuing refunds can choose favorable refund sources. Chargebacks are their own separate things; a high volume of refunds issued doesn't negatively affect the account and as long as the customer is happy with their refund and doesn't initiate a chargeback they (CIG) essentially have discretion to funnel that through whatever accounts they want for that purpose.

Octopode posted:

CIG uses Stripe as their payment processor, which has a flat $15/dispute fee (except in Australia, where it's about $25), and doesn't generally take any other action until more than 1% of total transactions are disputed.

Olesh posted:

chargebacks!

Wuxi posted:

Isn't there a video of that stuff somewhere? Now I'm really curious.

Dirty Hairy posted:

CS finally got back to me a few days ago to begin the refund dance, but I'm once again waiting for them to respond. I haven't gotten the "half of your account" offer...yet. My issue with chargebacks is that some of my payments are from 2013, some from last year, others from earlier this year, but all through PayPal. Is it possible to issue chargeback requests on everything, and if I did, would I just be taking a big chance of losing money?

Olesh posted:

Derek is half right, but only in theory - if enough people actually chargeback them over this, they lose their ability to process credit cards for an indeterminate period of time on that account. The target number isn't very large, either - either a fixed number (something like $50k) over a certain period of time or 1% of their transactions over the same period of time, whichever is lower. The major card brands (Visa/Mastercard/etc) are the ones who won't tolerate this, but on the one hand whoever they're using as a payment processor is liable to turn a blind eye to things like account juggling (to spread out chargebacks and avoid hitting the limit on any one account) because they're making a crapton of money off of CIG so long as nobody officially reports them doing it. On the other hand, there's not exactly a mechanism for reporting this sort of thing and even if one of their accounts gets closed down they can just funnel transactions through another account in future.

That's why this is only half right (sorry Derek) - it's not really remotely plausible that enough people will go through the chargeback process to get any of CIG's processor accounts shut down, because CIG is capable of juggling the accounts to spread out the chargebacks to avoid any one account getting hit heavily enough to matter. Even if one of their accounts gets shut down from an excess of chargebacks, their related accounts are not likely to be touched - it would take at least two accounts shut down in this way to demonstrate a pattern of behavior, and we've already got demonstrated proof that they've got transactions coming through multiple sources, meaning the bar for any individual account to get nailed for chargebacks is going to be rather high, let alone multiple accounts crossing that threshold. In practice the chance that they'll lose the ability to process credit cards through any of their accounts is so remote as to be effectively zero, let alone all of their accounts.

On the other hand, chargeback fees are _totally_ a thing; typically anywhere from 25$-75$ a transaction, and not only do payment processors take a percentage cut of the transaction, about half the time processors will also charge the same cut on issued refunds. If my payment processor charges 4% on a 100$ transaction, that is later refunded via chargeback, that means that not only do I have to refund the full $100 to the consumer (as per Visa and Mastercard, fees for using credit cards cannot be passed to the consumer), I get hit with a 4$ charge for accepting the transaction, possibly hit with a 4$ charge for refunding the transaction, and also hit with a $25 (or more!) fee for the chargeback. So that $100 in (that's actually $96 in pocket) ends up being a total of $129 or more out.

The reason CIG is trying not to issue full refunds is because every refund is a loss for them; even if their processor doesn't double-dip on refunds they're still out a percentage of the transaction, and chargeback threats are not only worse but require administrative oversight to ensure that the funding model isn't accidentally taken down by having too many chargebacks issued through the same processors. When they're trying to deny any individual their refund, it's because ANY refund is a net loss, and they're trying to balance how much they can try and hang onto without refunding vs the likelihood that you'll actually go through the chargeback process and cost them an extra chunk of change. They can juggle accounts all they want, there's no getting out of the chargeback fees which is why they still want to avoid them.


Edit: This is really as simple as a discussion of this gets - without knowing the specific details of the contracts they signed with their payment processor(s), whether or not they're held to stricter standards or the specifics of what might happen IF an account gets taken down through chargebacks aren't really on the table for speculation. Any individual payment processor IS absolutely capable of connecting the dots between companies, but in general due diligence on the processor side is limited to the primary account holder and whether or not that individual has the authority to sign for processing on behalf of their company.

Cheatum the Evil Midget posted:

A tim tam is an australian chocolate biscuit

D_Smart posted:

No need to say sorry; I don't profess to have all the answers. Ever

Great write-up though; and it makes sense.