On Monday I placed an order for World of Warcraft over at gogamer.com. It’s been continually sold out at every retail store in the area, so instead of playing the waiting game I took the plunge online.
My box shipped the same day via FedEx 2-day mail, was set to arrive today and did. I crack the box and much to my overwhelming amusement I see that I was shipped a WoW prepaid two month subscription card instead of the actual game. Mind you, I paid $50, and I didn’t accidentally throw the wrong item into my virtual shopping cart.
Their lines were tied up for a few hours, and they didn’t return my voice mail, but eventually I got through to their customer service line. They cut me a deal on the card (since I’ll be playing for at least a few months anyway) to save each side the trouble of returning the box, and charged me the difference minus the discount for WoW proper.
A planned gaming today day is ruined, and for that I’m irritated, but gogamer handled itself reasonably well and I hope to see my damned product soon.
Seems a bunch of QT3 folks use gogamer; anyone else have issues similar to this, and if so did they resolve smoothly?
It sure sounds like the classic bait-n-switch if you asked me.
So you honestly think it’s more likely that GoGamer.com has a high-level, systematic plan to ship out the incorrect product in hopes of slightly increasing sales than that some guy in a warehouse read a SKU wrong?
The classic bait and switch is to advertise one thing (the bait) at a super low price, and then have “sold out of it”, and proceed to convince you to buy something more expensive once you have entered the store (the switch). Car dealers do this all the time, and you’ll often see the words “Only two at this price” hidden deep down on the bottom of a page.
If they had said that they had WOW, but then only had the Collector’s edition when he went to the site, that would have been a “classic bait and switch”.
I have no question that it is an evil masterplan. I ordered “Dawn of War,” but for some reason received “Backdoor Sluts Volume 5.” This happened at least 3 times, with each time bringing a shipment of a different volume of “Backdoor Sluts” instead of “Dawn of War.” Eventually, I simply had them give me a discount on Dawn of War and they shipped it properly, as opposed to going through the hassle of returning the various volumes of “Backdoor Sluts.”
On second thought I guess it’s more like the bait and fuckup then. If this was a completely isolated incident it seems that they would be likely to make him prove that he got the wrong thing.
Who knows.
All I know is that when I got my copy of Riddick today at EB I made sure that they put the CD in the box so that I didn’t have to pull an E5 and charge back their asses.
If you have the regular box of WoW, it is almost identical to the WoW game card box. I can imagine some min-wage guy just picking up the wrong one. Blame Blizzard for making them so easy to get mixed up.
My copy of World of Warcraft came from GoGamer.com today and looks fine, so I’d say you just ran into bad luck. Now I just need to see if I can actually play it on my ancient 1GHz machine while awaiting my fancy new box…
So far it has far exceeded my expectations… only real trouble is in big cities, where the game turns into a slideshow. However, I can certainly live with that until the new box arrives (another week or so, I think).
I just went to GameStop and picked up City of Heroes Limited DVD version and DAOC Catacombs, (Among other things), and went home, and opened the boxes and neither contained the games. The dude at the store gave me the display boxes by accident. Have to go in tomorrow (I called, no problems) and do the switch. Lesson learned here… Check your bags before you leave the store.
Kevin, that happens a lot at those stores, and at Best Buy too. You have to check your box sometiems to make sure the game is even in there as people have scammed a return.
The copy of Bloodlines I’d ordered from Gogamer wouldn’t install. . .bad #2 CD. So I e-mailed their customer service, waited a few days, never heard back, and then called. Their CSR informed me in broken English to just send the CD to them and they’d replace it. Just the CD, not the box or anything else. He was quite adamant about that. So at that point I figured I’d lose the CD and be hosed, so I bought a copy at my local EBs for a friend for Christmas, swapped the bad box with the new receipt for another, working set of discs, and all is well.
I know, very dishonest passing that original box off as the one I’d bought at the store and I’m not going to justify it by mentioning how much money I’ve spent in that store since the mall was built 11 years ago. . . . :P
I’ve always one of three paths when dealing with a bad disk situation (it’s happened a number of times to me unfortunately). First I try and bring it back to EB (whether or not I brought it back there). The one i used to go to all the time never gave me a hassle unless it was a game they didn’t sell (or didnt have any copies of). Another option is to bring it back to Wal Mart (if they sell it) or Target. Wal Mart is the ultimate because they have the ultimate no questions asked exchange policy. The last option is to call the publisher’s support line. I’ve done this with EA and LucasArts and they sent me a replacement disk. Interplay would do the same thing but you had to pay $5 or something to cover shipping.
