Actual conversation between me & SWTOR Customer Support
August 2nd, 2013
My first inquiry to them on Nov. 30 (They promise to respond within 24 hours):
Thank you for contacting Star Wars: The Old Republic Customer Service
Your inquiry was received as ticket# 620250
INQUIRY:
SUBJECT: [Pre-order]
EMAIL: My Name sent a message using the contact form at
http://www.swtor.com/support/form
I am unable to pre-order the game due to the fact that I live in Mexico, however, I live only a few miles from the US border. I would like to know if, on December 20th, I can simply drive across & buy the game from a US retailer & then return home to play the game from here. Will I be unable to create an account because my IP address will show me to be in Mexico? Should I not bother buying the game until it is supported here? And if so, can you tell me when that will be? I do have a US-based mailing address, bank account & credit card if that makes a difference.
Thank you,
My Name
Four days go by with no answer, so on Dec. 4 I sent the exact same message except I chose [General Comments] as the subject. Today I finally get a reply & by the ticket # it was the second message I sent that they were replying to:
Greetings My User Name,
I am Protocol Droid B3H6 of Human-Cyborg Relations…
Star Wars: The Old Republic is available right now for pre-order.
You may pre-order Star Wars: The Old Republic from EA’s Origin, as well as many video game retailers. Check with your preferred video game retailer to see if they are offering pre-orders for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Please be careful when pre-ordering Star Wars: The Old Republic and only pre-order from respected retailers or EA’s Origin.
Visit the Pre-Order page and click on your preferred edition for Star Wars™ The Old Republic. Then click “Purchase Now” to see a list of retailer links in your territory.
If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact us again.
We do not intend to have region restrictions on our servers, so you should be able to play on the same server as your friends, no matter what location or country you are playing from.
We hope this answers your question – if not, please feel free to contact us again.
Galactic Support is our specialty…
Sincerely,
Protocol Droid B3H6 (aka Karl Leister)
I was very excited to read this, so I immediately went the swtor main page & clicked on “Pre-Order Now”, but same result. “Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is not available in your region.” So I submitted a new ticket:
Thank you for contacting Star Wars: The Old Republic Customer Service
Your inquiry was received as ticket# 757569
INQUIRY:
SUBJECT: [General Comments]
EMAIL: My Name sent a message using the contact form at
http://www.swtor.com/support/form
I sent the following inquiry to swtor customer service under the the General Comments category on Dec. 4:
Your inquiry was received as ticket# 718390
INQUIRY:
SUBJECT: [General Comments]
EMAIL: My Name sent a message using the contact form at
http://www.swtor.com/support/form
Here I quoted my original message from above.
I also sent an inquiry with the identical text as above under the Pre-Order category on Nov. 30 with a ticket # of 620250, but I have yet to receive a reply from that one so I am sending this under General comments as you seem to answer those faster. I finally received a reply today from Karl Leister. This was it:
Here I quoted the reply from above.
So I immediately went to the swtor main page & clicked on the “Pre-Oreder Now” picture, however I still get redirected to the same page with the following text:
Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is not available in your region
To maintain a high quality of service, only certain regions worldwide will be able to pre-order Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.
Sign up for the newsletters on SWTOR to learn when the game will be available in your area.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
© 2011 Electronic Arts Inc. Trademarks belong to their respective owners.
All rights reserved
I am also still unable to order from Origin’s website. Now I am still fine with my original plan to buy the game from a US store on Dec. 20 & bring it back here to play, but if your own customer service people are unable to provide me with factual information about something they stated with certainty (“Star Wars: The Old Republic is available right now for pre-order.”), which was a direct quote from your customer service rep Karl Leister, then I am not exactly filled with confidence about the other important thing he wrote to me (We do not intend to have region restrictions on our servers, so you should be able to play on the same server as your friends, no matter what location or country you are playing from.). He didn’t even seem SURE about that one! So my original questions remain with one new one, Should I even bother buying this game at all? Because you guys seem determined to not let me purchase it & since the way you’re doing it is by reading my location via my IP, it’s not that hard of a stretch of the imagination to see you guys preventing me from logging into a game server by the same method.
So could you please bump this up to a higher-level support person so I can actually have my questions answered by someone who knows the answers.
Thank you,
My Name
Got a reply only 10 minutes later, thought “finally I’m getting somewhere”. This was it:
On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Star Wars: The Old Republic – Customer Service <support@swtor.com<mailto:support@swtor.com>> wrote:
I am Protocol Droid M0-T0, of human-cyborg relations.
Thank you for contacting us about your pre-order issue.
In order to investigate further we require an image of your pre-order code to verify the exact nature of the problem.
If you have purchased the pre-order code from the Origin website, please take a screenshot of the code and attach it to your reply to this email. If you purchased the pre-order code from a 3rd party retailer, we would ask that you provide a photo or scan of the pre-order code.
If you do not have the pre-order code, then please provide a photo or scan of the proof of receipt.
Once we have received your image we will be able to investigate your issue further. If you have received this mail from us before, we do apologize but ask that you reply to this mail with the requested information attached so that we may issue you with a valid pre-order code as soon as possible.
We thank you for you patience and understanding as we work to prepare for the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic on December 20th 2011.
Sincerely,
Protocol Droid M0-T0
Now I am really pissed. Notice this guy didn’t give his name. Here was my reply:
Thank you for contacting Star Wars: The Old Republic Customer Service
Your inquiry was received as ticket# 759704
INQUIRY:
SUBJECT: Re: Star Wars: The Old Republic – Customer Service
EMAIL:
I am starting to wonder if you guys are even reading my entire emails. Let me give you a few quotes from my earlier inquiries:
“I am unable to pre-order the game due to the fact that I live in Mexico”
And after receiving the first reply from your customer service rep Karl Leister who said I could now pre-order the game:
“So I immediately went to the swtor main page & clicked on the “Pre-Oreder Now” picture, however I still get redirected to the same page with the following text:
Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is not available in your region”
And:
“I am also still unable to order from Origin’s website.”
So how could I possibly send you a screenshot of my pre-order code or receipt if one of my main complaints is that I cannot pre-order the game either from swtor’s main page or from Origin?
But if you want screenshots, I will give them to you. This is me clicking on the “Pre-Order Now” picture on the swtor main page:
This is the page I get redirected to:
This is me clicking on the orange “Pre-Order Now” button on Origin:
This is what happens when I do that:
Now I am well aware that Mexico is not on the list of countries in the swtor faq that can currently pre-order the game. It would seem that your customer service rep Karl Leister either didn’t read my original email or mistakenly thought I could now pre-order the game in Mexico. My original question was, since I live only a few miles from the border, can I just drive across & pre-order it from a US retailer (or just buy it on the 20th), then bring it back here to play?
Since you are checking my location via my IP & telling me I can’t pre-order the game, I think it is a valid question for me to ask if once I buy the game, will you prevent me from playing it by using the same method?
And when you reply to me please be so kind as to tell me your name as Mr. Leister did (if you’re not comfortable with that then your employee ID # will be fine), so I can tell swtor customer service who told me to waste $60 USD on a game I can’t play?
Thank you,
My Name
That was 3 hours ago, no 10-minute reply this time. Will update this if you guys are interested.
I am Protocol Droid M0-T0, of human-cyborg relations.
Sincerely,
Protocol Droid M0-T0
Now I am really pissed. Notice this guy didn't give his name.
Yes “it” did. It is an automatic reply from a bot. Not an actual person lol.
Thanks for the laugh!
Oh, you may be right about that.
But that Karl guy called himself a protocol droid also, so that didn’t occur to me. And he definitely either didn’t read my first message or was a complete idiot, so I was prepared for incompetence. I think I still have a right to be pissed just from that guy’s response.
EA is renowned for its horrible customer support after all.
I say continue with your plan to drive over to the USA and pre-order it there. It’s not likely to cause any problems.
Other options are VPNs and proxies etc.
I always knew I could solve the pre-order issue by doing that, but that doesn’t answer the question of whether or not they will block me from playing due to my IP. I will have to learn about Virtual Private Networks, but from what I know about proxy IP’s, I don’t think that would work with public-servers on swtor. Perhaps I should ask a Mod to move this entire thread from Funstuff to Helpdesk.
never buy any crap from origin.
it is a spyware which detects all your pirated games on your pc and if they found a game on your computer that is not purchased on origin (i.e. battlefield3, star wars or nfs) they ban your account. they even ban your account for criticising their products on official ea forums.
Is that true? I can never play swtor unless I remove all my pirated games? Or do you just mean I can’t play it if I buy it from Origin? It’ll take like a year or more for private servers to start popping up, look how long it took with WoW.
I do have a US-based mailing address, bank account & credit card if that makes a difference
Just use a VPN with a US server and pre-order it, or whatever.
As to playing on-line, you can use a VPN with decent US based servers more than likely, but they will obviously be slower than a direct connection.
I’m not a gamer, so haven’t a clue about any spyware in Origin’s stuff, maybe Google can help you out there.
Don’t they like Mexico or something ?
just dont buy from origin, i live in indonesia, same like u, origin forbid me, so i bough SWTOR key from offgamers.com (u can buy from any other website), using paypal to purchased, now im plying it with no problem,