Holy shitballs made of smaller nuggets of shit wrapped in a sheet of pressed manure.
They wanted you to answer all of those questions or just a selection of them? That seems way over the top if they require you to answer all of them.
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All of them. And some of them I literally cannot answer, as this is my first attempt to actually pay them for anything.
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Had to try it myself. Been wanting Journey for a long time anyway.
Worked fine here. Used Visa. Never bought anything before. Only picked up freebees so far. Just like OP
Am I special? Or has OP been in a rut with their support before? < actual question, not bad mouth'ery 👍
Why would they lock an account in good standing?
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No rut that I know of. This is my first contact with their support.
The only reason I can think about is connecting from multiple IPs.
I was traveling a lot recently.
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This is almost certainly the reason that the issue may have cropped up. Connecting to various services through widely different IPs, VPNs and from multiple different locations can trigger various kinds of red flags, soft bans, lockouts, and other kinds of restrictions to be placed on various different kinds of accounts and websites. Had never heard of it happening with Epic before, but it does not surprise me.
The list of questions seems like a bit much, but you should have been able to answer most of them with at least some level of detail. Include the fact that you'd been travelling, list the likely places you accessed the accounts, how long you'd been away from your primary access location. You'd probably know if you linked any accounts, and would be able to tell them that you've never made any purchases before. You'd also likely know the original display name for the account i'd assume. (Were they asking because it'd been changed recently?)
It is a little strange that they'd deny a purchase from an account in good standing, but if you'd recently changed any of your details like username, password, or account info, that plus accessing from multiple different locations probably just flagged the account for suspicious activity. Large shifts in geographical login locations plus account detail changes often indicate compromised accounts.
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"you should have been able to answer most of them with at least some level of detail. "
- not really - I searched, I don't have account registration confirmation email any more. I've never made any purchases, so no invoice numbers, no credit card, no purchase cities.
Gathering past IP adresses is nigh-impossible.
Besides, consider this - most of the answers could only be got from my mailbox or epic account. So considering, that I am using my registered email to exchange info with support, any one that would hack my email would have the same chance for answering these questions.
It's a lot of hassle for an ineffective security measure
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Yeah im not saying the questions are an effective security measure, but if you've never purchased anything and you clearly indicate that to support, that is another piece of data that they can verify. Gathering exact past IP addresses is much more difficult, but you can give them your current location that you were trying to purchase from, as well as your home IP once you return there. Also unless you've been travelling for many months, it should be fairly easy to say 'i added everything to my account from my home state of X' and only recently added these two games while travelling, i was probably in this city/state when adding those.' If you added all those freebies to your account from home, except one or two, then giving them that information may help. Or it may not be specific enough, hard to say.
It may be that you just need to wait till you get home to resolve all of this, so you can access the account from a known / similar location to previously. Or if you were trying to make a purchase through a VPN, maybe they were simply denying the ability to purchase while connected to a server they'd marked as untrusted.
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but if you've never purchased anything and you clearly indicate that
The free games are still technically purchases even if no funds changed hands. "Purtchasing" the free games and then claiming you have no purchases on the account is outright wrong. Sure you won't have a payment method on file but you'll still have Invoice IDs.
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Free additions do appear to contain order IDs, but my point was more that if they've never spent any money before, the OP should indicate that if they had not done so already. It almost sounds to me like somehow they ended up in 'account recovery' as opposed to 'there was a problem with my purchase' territory where support wants them to prove that they can access the account as opposed to trying to troubleshoot purchase troubles.
After looking deeper into the process of sending a support request, it looks as if the support request form does not collect identifiable information about account ownership which is probably why they're asking so many questions to prove that the OP is the owner of the account in question since they seem to be corresponding over email. Additionally, there does not appear to be a support category for 'i cant make purchases' and as far as i can tell the closest one is "Delete / Update Billing Information".
Its unclear which info the OP has provided to epic, however they should be able to provide pretty much all of the following info:
1: Your public IP address - https://www.whatismyip.com
2: Date account was created (Estimate based on what the first free game they added was.) Heres a list with dates: https://www.fanbyte.com/trending/epic-games-store-free-games-list/
3: An invoice ID# - https://www.epicgames.com/account/payment/history
4: Locations (city, state/province) where you made purchases on the account (OP's home city/state.)
5: Original display name for the account (The current name is in the upper right of any Account page.)
6: Last 4 digits of the first payment card used on the account ~("I have not used any payment methods before on this account.")
7: Date of your last login (Use current date if logged into the account.)
8: Names of any linked accounts and the dates they were linked. - https://www.epicgames.com/account/connected (Not sure if this contains dates. If no accounts are linked, "I have not linked any accounts." or link one and then provide that info.)
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Thanks Ratha,
Thing is I've done that.
/snip/
and they still won't budge. At this moment I feel like I have to prove I'm not a camel.
I really understand the questions and the rationale behind them.
I think it's too much, but that's not the main issue.
At this point the problem is that they do not have any alternative authentication mode.
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You might not want to provide all that information publicly here, but if you gave them most of those details (i'd include order numbers since there are no invoice IDs) then im not sure what else you can do except try to buy again when you reach your primary location. With regard to 'making purchases' i'd still provide the city/state you were in when you redeemed the freebies. I'd think that they should be able to confirm you're the account owner if you can give multiple order/invoice IDs with inclusion of the account name. But if they cannot then its hard to say what else you could do besides hope to have the issue escalated or get a different support person. :\
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And let's not forget one thing: I'm not trying to recover my account here.
I'm not locked out, I haven't lost my password. I am using the email associated with the account.
Even if someone else would put the request I did on my behalf (please allow this account to buy things) I wouldn't compromise my account in any way.
The only case I can imagine that would support this kind of verification would be a kid trying to buy something on his parent's account
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have you bothered to change your password, or are you afraid they'll lock you out altogether?
I might be blind, but do you have 2FA enabled on the account - it's practically mandatory, based on my experience with them.
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They don't require one, you can literally sign up for an account with any emaila dress you can imagine and they won't actually confirm its yours.
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Not sure if you'll see the message i posted as a reply to someone else since I dont spend much time using SG forums, but if you are still pursuing this issue, i provided a few links in the following post which may be of assistance:
https://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/Rt44wmY
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Yeah, that might have triggered an automatic "suspicious activity" flag.
Hmm.. I'm sure u can get it sorted.. with patience.. if u really want to. Luckily it's only freebee's in the account.
Still a pain in the arse though 😣
GL
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Reminds me of Microsoft who required me to remember 5 of the latest email titles for an account I haven't used for 6 years.
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Yeah, I've seen that too. Not really surprising for a new store that they mess up with their procedures but I though they'd have fixed at least that by now.
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[Sarcasm on] Disappointed, I thought they would at least ask for iris scanning or blood veins scanning for identification which is already being used in Hungary for identification at some football stadiums lol
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so staying for the freebies only, is better than buying
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I guess so, the freebies are good most of the time.
They fit my taste.
Pity about the Journey though, I was looking forward to it.
On the other hand, backlog awaits :)
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I contacted support twice so far, it was rather unpleasant each time.
Even though I'd consider Epic Support worse than Valve Support, by my personal experiences neither one ever results in a productive response, so the distinction is just one of presentation. Y'know, with Valve being drunken monkeys incapable of understanding your topic and Epic being rude advertisement-spammers who just don't care what your topic is.
The main issue is that, other than Valve refusing to take any kind of responsability for willfully broken or abandoned games, notable issues with Steam are fairly rare [and honestly, probably more likely to pop up as a result of spekaing to staff than for any other reason]. Epic, on the other hand, has been plagued with issues. Sure, that can be attributed to their being new, but the problem is, we don't know how long it'll take until they lose that distinction. Or, in fact, if losing that distinction will in fact make any difference.
So yeah, I wouldn't advise investing into Epic until after there is clear indication they've improved their conduct and/or stability.
Bright side, if they keep overlapping promotions with Uplay, that does seems as though it'd help mitigate some of the risk.
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Considering it took me over 3 weeks and I had to talk to 3 people to get my account delete I can't even say I am surprised. Even Valve wasn't that bad when support was at its worst.
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insert Roblox OOF here
Guess this is some sort of peasant joke they are too rich to understand!
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Tracking dates of what you are doing on your account? Nobody ever does that, how are we supposed to provide such information??
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Customer: Hello store! You want money?
Store: NO!
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trash store/company/service/support is trash
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WTF?! That's probably the best way to scare your new found customers away.
The funny part is that you somehow triggered their fraud detection without even buying anything before.
Thanks for warning us!
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Step 1: Give away bunch of cool free games for promotion
step 2: block all the accounts that didn't buy anything but got the free games, so you can tell devs there's less active accounts that have their games and save some pennies
step 3: ???
step 4: profit!
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How come?
And besides, they didn't block me from getting freebies, or playing.
Literally the only thing I cannot do is to give epic my money
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Well...epic have good things then. It protects your wallet of their sh*t store
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thanks for this, juicy real data, here.
best part, imo, is that "110%".
it kinda smells as a mix between Groupees selling bundles, curated by Microsoft.
Support and whole website done by interns, as usual.
time -and market- will tell. luckily.
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Let me get this straight:
-
You pre-ordered a game
-
Got an error that you are blocked from making purchases
-
They ask you a ton of absurd account verification questions
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They refuse to resolve your block/error
-
You are not blocked from getting free games
They're screwing themselves here. /r/fuckepic on reddit would have a field day with this. If you have an reddit account please post there, and if not, I'd love to share this there.
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I dusted off my reddit account and posted here https://redd.it/bxiqzv
thanks for suggesting it
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make sure that you are the 110% rightful owner of this account
There's your problem: you're only the 100% rightful owner. That's not good enough.
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considering their lack of features as a great example of an Minimum Viable Product approach.
huh what?
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Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a technique used in software development.
Basically, define what is the bare minimum set of functionality needed for the product to deliver value.
In case of EGS, the question is "what do we really need to sell games?"
the first thing on the list is: Games.
but you don't really need shopping cart, search, comments, achievements, reviews, etc.
Stock, purchase funnel, download button is the bare minimum. So that's how they've built it.
And they were right, Origin, Discord, and GOG tried to compete with Steam in terms of functionality, and they are still on the margins of market share (to my dismay in case of GOG).
But epic instead of putting money into developers' work, put it into exclusive deals instead. And it shows results.
The problem is, once you get bigger, MVP ceases to be enough - you need more features, you need more staff (both in Dev and Support).
Apparently they did not manage to get the second step right
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I don't believe so, search can be outsourced to Google, and shopping cart was not necessary as they did not have many games in the store.
So, i can accept them launching the store without these to.
Not having these features after a couple of months and especially during first sale is not acceptable
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search can be outsourced to Google
So you do believe that there should be search.
So, i can accept them launching the store without these to.
Having a shopping is a basic feature of every online store.
Not having these features after a couple of months and especially during first sale is not acceptable
Why is not acceptable? Why is not "the bare minimum set of functionality needed for the product to deliver value" just because some time has passed?
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All of these features are basic and should be part of an established store, but I can accept them missing at launch.
Just the fact that Epic was able to sell many games without them shows that they are not necessary.
But the MVP is a strategy to be used to decrease time-to-value, not to cut down development effort in general.
So yes, just because some time passed (which means they had more development time available, more customers are using the store, more orders are processed) it's not acceptable anymore to lack those features.
Other way to express it is "done is better than perfect" adage - if what you have works, then ship it, don't wait until all features are ready, but that doesn't mean these features aren't required in the long term
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"Just the fact that Epic was able to sell many games without them shows that they are not necessary."
They are not necessary because they have a monopoly on those games. They're having so much money that they don't care but that's not customer-friendly.
"So yes, just because some time passed (which means they had more development time available, more customers are using the store, more orders are processed) it's not acceptable anymore to lack those features."
But if they "sell many games without them"? That shows that they are not necessary so why bother changing it later?
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What works at the beginning does not have to work as well further on.
Without a shopping cart and search they are able to sell tons of single, high-profile titles like METRO or Borderlands, sure.
But during a sale, the situation is different. A lot of customers may want to buy multiple titles, so lack of shopping cart is a greater pain.
Also, when their inventory exceeds a couple dozen of games, search will be necessary - if customers need to leave the store and search in google there's a risk that Steam or GOG will pop-up higher in the results.
why bother changing it later?
the answer is always the same - to sell more
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The shopping cart is a must because otherwise Epic will block your account after 5 sequential purchases because reasons.
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Too bad this isn't an exception, but looking at the amount of cases, it seems to be the rule instead now.
They're basically just cheating people out of their money through their own incompetence. I'm sorry you had to go through that.
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I need to vent a bit, apologies in advance. Turn back if you don't want any drama.
Up until now, I've been using Epic Game Store only to grab their freebies, and it's been working ok.
I was even championing EGS, considering their lack of features as a great example of an Minimum Viable Product approach.
Recently, I've finally decided to pre-purchase Journey - as it's heavily discounted. Boy, was I in for a ride.
Firstly, their checkout page greeted me with a message: "Sorry, but your account is blocked from making purchases. Please contact customer service."
FAQ recommends waiting 24h for the issue to resolve itself, so I did that, then contacted support because of course nothing changed.
First response was a boiler plate "Check you funds and payment method, contact you bank, use Paypal, etc."
After I reminded them that error I haven't even got the paying part of the process, came the kicker.
I present you, the list of questions Epic requires you to answer so they can, quote "make sure that you are the 110% rightful owner of this account":
😤😤😤😤
In short. Epic sucks, Their support sucks. I'm out
Update:
I provided them with some answers, and here's their response:
Epic Games Player Support -
June 06, 2019, 11:00 -0400 |
Welcome back,
Thank you for your answer.
[...] since your answers don't match with our records, there is no other way to confirm that you are the legitimate owner of the account.
Until then, I am not able to take any actions.
Kind Regards,
PS. Well at least I can still get the freebies. Just got Kingdom, and the "purchase" went through.
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