Hi all,
I thought I'd share my current experience with SE and their customer service department. Last week I decided to return to the game and play. I went to reactivate my account and use my debit card to pay the fee. I was then surprised to learn that my Visa debit card got declined knowing that I had the funds to pay the fee to play. So I tried to enter my card details again and found the payment had got declined. I was now a bit confused and then decided to try my Visa credit card. This also got declined. Error 601 and 401 was shown on the screen when trying to register both cards.
I checked with the banks that issue the cards and both confirm no blocks had been placed on the cards and had no idea why the payments were being declined. However, both banks did state that a £1 fee had been placed on the cards even though they had been declined. I thought this might have been some kind of security check?
So, I now decided to contact SE and find out what was going on. I spoke to someone at SE using the live chat service, who told me that a block might have been placed on the cards due to the payment being declined. They wouldn't tell me why the payment got declined in the first place though! I told them about the error 601/401 but they didn't seem to have much knowledge about this and told me to clear the browser cookies and cache. This of course didn't help at all.
After a few days have gone past I've received a couple of emails from SE stating that the cards had been blocked for 24 hours and that I should try one of them again. I did this and it got declined again and with another £1 "fee" taken from the card. However, I did notice that the first lot of £1 fees did reappear back on my card after a few days.
I've since managed to pay FFXI by purchasing crysta with lucky enough worked! The strange thing is though, I managed to purchase Seekers of Adoulin with the same card that got declined without any issues at all!
So, my reason for sharing this experience is to ask if anyone else here has ever had these issues with SE and did you ever manage to get it sorted? Because even now I cannot register or use either card to purchase anything within my SE account and I still have no idea why.