Blizzard has one of the worse billing systems ever, and the conversion from a trial to a paid account is an unpleasant experience too.

First of all, I tried to update my trial account to that of a fully functional, paid account. After being firstly greeted with an invalid credit card number while trying to do so, I proceeded to try a second time, thinking that I must have mistyped some bit of information even though I’ve committed my credit card details to mind a long time ago. Nope, it did not work, but I took out my card, verified, and preceeded to try another three more times. At this point I suspected the error might be on their end and did a Google search for it.

The result is this thread here on the official WoW forums. 449 posts and 23 pages since 2007 of the same problem. Reading the users comment, I checked with my bank and there were four billing requests totaling up to a over SGD$100.

The suggested fix by one of the posters was to enter the last four digits of the card number in the zip code field, and that worked for me. Though having over $100 on hold, and me praying hard that they get released after a few days and don’t actually get charged makes me a really unhappy customer. It makes me want to dish out all the slurr for WoW I’ve always held inside me.

I’m frankly shocked at how a company that boasts a 6 million subscription figure can have such a huge problem with its billing system.

Not done yet, this is the first MMO that I’ve came across that actually takes time (up to 72 hours) for a trial account to be upgraded to a full account. It’s 3 hours and counting and having paid for my game, I’m still waiting to be given permissions to talk in the channels, to IM people, to use the broker, and so on. It should require nothing more than for a few shell scripts to run and execute and few SQL update queries the moment I hit the upgrade button. I sure hope it doesn’t have to be done manually.

To summarize, my WoW experience was great until I actually tried to get a hold of the game, which was where it took a sharp ninety degrees downturn.