So subscribed for year, terminated auto-renewal - no SC cash?!

That's a real cynical brain you got there. I like it
And seriously, why move an important problem with Accounting and Billing to the General Forum if not to hope it disappears. Taking SOE on face value they acknowledged a problem and were going to fix it. They haven't fixed it and moved this thread away from the forum where people with questions about billing might see it.

Convenience would be remembering my billing information, and popping up to let me know my subscription expired, and then asking me with a yes/no box if I want to re-up. I would be fully behind that design, as it satifies your desire for a painless renewal as well as my desire to avoid risking money on my fallible memory. Auto-renew (for annual subscriptions) isn't about convenience. Convenience is the shield used to defend it. It's about making money off of your customers mistakes.

Auto-renew for monthly charges makes sense, as that is a much greater convenience than re-upping once a year. Nobody (not even you) can accurately predict if you will want to play this game in a year. That's a huge amount of time. It's entirely possible that you get in a tragic accident, or you lose your job, or maybe you just find a better game (or stop playing games). The fact that all those possibilities exist means you must acknowledge the fact that you might not want to renew in a year. If there's even a chance of that being true, there's no reason for SOE to hold your money hostage to your own memory, except that they profit from it.

Again, I'm not disputing the concept of monthly renewal. At that scale, the convenience factor is larger *and* the potential money lost is much lower ($15 at most).

Putting the onus on the customer unnecessarily is slimy, that's my point. It's not hard to cancel subscriptions, but people forget to do it all the time. Not everybody is as organized as you are, or has the memory that you do. If we all know it happens, why put the customer into a situation where it might happen when you don't have to? Answer: because it gets you free money. That's slimy, and you having the memory of an elephant doesn't change that fact. Not everybody is as organized as you are, or has the memory that you do.

It's called a metaphor, and the point was to disprove your claim that "optional things can't be slimy."

The comparison isn't complete unless there is some unnecessary onus put on the customer. To complete it I would add that if customers forgot to bring their card with them, they'd automatically agree to pay extra instead of getting a discount. Sure, it wouldn't be hard to remember to bring your discount card every time, but why punish the customer for a burden you put on them when you didn't need to put it there in the first place? Because if the onus is on the customer, people like you will defend the practice instead of decrying it as the anti-consumer slimy practice it is.

Again, this isn't about the existence of monthly auto-renewals. It's the combination of: 1) Annual renewals (nobody can see that far ahead) 2) Providing incentive for their customers to risk their money and 3) It could be done much better.

You cannot tell me that clicking a "yes" box once a year is preferable to risking $120 on fallible human memory.

There's no 'might' about it. Go to planetside home and click shop>membership. Listed on the left are the membership benefits, including 500SC a month. At the bottom is the obvious statement that if you cancel your sub then your benefits will be removed at the end of your billing cycle. With a 12 month sub your billing cycle is every 12 months ... so if you cancel then 12 months after start date you will lose the benefits: the resource gain, the XP gain, priority login and the 500sc.
Just because you cancelled your sub (i.e. removed billing info) you don't expect to lose the XP gain or priority login until 12 months is up, so why would you expect the 500sc to be any different? You are still a member up until 12 months has elapsed.

Taking SOE at face value and accepting it is just a mistake on their part then why haven't they corrected this information? In-game purchasing also gives the same information by the way. We're talking nearly a week after the problem was acknowledged.

You can be sure that if players were getting 10000sc by mistake they'd have the problem fixed within hours or the service shut down, but when it involves customers getting the raw deal they are in less of a hurry ...

Not self-explanatory at all - if you read the posts and follow the two routes given to buy a membership: either use the shop>membership link from www.planetside2.com (http://www.planetside2.com/shop?buy=membership) or do it in-game. Neither of those places state there are two incentives in place, just that as a member you will get 500sc every month.

It's really pretty clear, but apparently not what SOE meant to offer.

You and your companies information don't match up.

In the event that the customer discontinues his auto renewal of Premium Membership the benefits will be removed at the end of the purchased billing cycle.

You have advertised the monthly five hundred (500) station cash in association with the Premium Membership as a benefit, which is exactly what your fine print clarifies.

Edit: You are also obliged to give the 500 station credits to anyone who have bought it before you changed the terms as the purchased product ( by your written terms ) included these 500 monthly station credits.

And 6 days later the incorrect information is still on the website, catching people unaware.

I think you're a bit confused, or didn't read the posts adequately. Or both.

The information isn't everywhere, and it certainly isn't shown on the multiple steps you have to go through to purchase membership - let alone plastered all over it. Out of the 3 routes to purchase membership it seems only one of them has the correct information. The other routes state that membership benefits only come to an end when your billing cycle ends, and that 500sc is a membership benefit.

Top tip: calling people 'not very bright' and then getting your own information horribly wrong paints an unflattering picture of yourself.

In 12 months, your proposed system requires a subscriber to make 12 actions - setting up a sub and confirming another 11 times at the end of each cycle.

That is not as convenient as doing 1 thing (or 2 if you include cancelling at the end of the 12 month period).

It's 1200% the number of actions! I do not want that, as I said in the post which you quoted. It doesn;t satisfy my desire for an auto-renewal if I have to manually confirm every month. That's very un-auto.

I don't need to accurately predict it, I'm able to cancel when I stop playing or set a reminder to cancel before the 12 months is up.

Imagine, letting the customer decide if he wants to let it auto renew or not! THE CHEEK OF IT!

No one is forcing you to auto-renew. Although I suppose manually renewing isn't really viable for people with a lack of memory either. They would need the awful reminder system that you proposed.

But then, how will they remember what the different classes do? Let's dumb the whole game down to the lowest common denominator! No memory? No problem! The entire game is one repetitive tutorial! No need to remember what team you are on, it's now deathmatch!

OK, I may have been less than serious there...

metaphors only work when they relate to what you are discussing.

Picking a random example which makes you look right but has no relation or parallel in what is being discussed is not a metaphor, it's a brain fart.

You see, this is what I'm talking about. It has no relation to the discussion.

You are saying that having a card (subscription) but not bringing it to the store (auto-renewing) means you not only don't get the discounts (monthly SC) but you also get charged extra (?????).

What does this charge which you are adding in relate to? Why is it being added? Someone with a sub but no auto-renewal is not punished when compared to someone with no sub, but in your metaphor the person with a card who hasn't brought it *is* punished compared to someone with no card.

That's why your metaphors don't work, you are just making up scenarios which support your arguement. That's not the same as a metaphor.

They don't have to.

Like getting the max boost percentages right away instead of having them build up 1 month at a time?

"more how I like it". Unless you can quantify how it is "better" it's just preferable to you.

Why can I not? Is every opinion other than your automatically wrong?

Nobodys disagreeing with you that it's confusing, but still, if I can figure it out, you can..get over it

Okay, to all of you defending this money-grabbing scheme by SOE: They don't need you to defend them. Its a multi-million dollar company. They have their own PR guys.

More on topic, this completely sucks. SOE has lost our information to hackers once already. I really don't think SOE has improved much since then. Also, I don't like auto-renewal. If I take a break, I don't like to find out I've been auto-billed for services I don't use. I routinely cancel auto-renewal in every other game/service without any disruption to my service.

Frankly I'm not surprised that a lot of people are unsubscribing over this. A lot of us believe that when a company keeps treating you ufnairly, you don't just keep throwing money at them.

The reason I was able to figure it out before making the purchase was because of this thread.

Therefore, this thread is useful and it is good to keep it active until such a time that SoE makes the changes that they said they would or they fix the bonus for reoccurring payments to be a bonus on top of the 500 SC that people are supposed to get (based on SoE's statements) from being a premium member.

We certainly appreciate everyone's feedback on this topic. As this seems to have been discussed thoroughly and is getting a little non-constructive I need to close it up. Thanks!