Vikram Bedi
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Posted - 2006.09.20 17:56:00 -
[2]
You know, I normally leave threads like these alone, but I guess not this time.
I'm a member of a number of online pay services. They range from games, to communities, to content based websites, to services. A rough back of the napkin tally gives me a monthly payment number in the range of $400-500 USD a month. Now, most of that is work related, so it's not like I"m just blowing six grand a year on web ****, but the point is, I pay alot of monthly bills online.
To date, I have *never* been cut off from service for non-payment on the day that the payment was due. I'm sorry, but EVE isn't a car, and your monthly payment isn't a tank of gas. Because my payments are spread out over a number of CC's, with varying expiration dates and occasional replacements for fraud, it's not entirely uncommon for me to miss a payment unexpectedly. In every case, I'm sent and email telling me about it, and given a window to make good on my payment. Normally this is from two to five days, but sometimes much longer. That's just standard business practices in this industry. You don't cancel someones service because their CC expired and they hadn't realized it, or because your server wasn't able to contact the credit company, or because they're paying month to month and haven't gotten to it *just yet*. It's not just unreasonable, it's bad business. You're far more likely to alienate your customers with practices like this than you are to save money on the 3 cheap people who will try to "work the system" for those few free hours a month (which btw, you could easily monitor for and simply cancel their accounts).
And for those of you asking about whether you'd expect other services to work that way, I can only imagine that you've never actually paid bills before. I've missed payments on just about every bill I have in the past. The only services that've ever been cut off were my cable, and my electricity. The cable took three months of non-payment to be shut off (they were mailing my bills to the wrong address, I was hoping that they had forgotten to activate billing for my account). The Electricity took six months to shut off (roomate was supposed to be paying it, was just pocketing my half and hiding the "bill past due" notices). So yes, I would expect my phone company to allow me to finish the call if I missed a payment. In fact, if I ever had my phone shutoff because my payment wasn't in exactly on time, I'd have a new phone company by the end of the day.
Having said all of that, I really doubt that this was intentional on CCP's part. Things like this are put in place at the code level without specific intent at the business level sometimes. I'd be surprised if they didn't sort this out in rather short order, and implement some sort of warning system for the day that your account is expiring, and probably ensuring that your paymetn is processed the day before (if it's automated) also.
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