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The original was posted on /r/swtor by /u/gaverhae on 2024-11-19 13:10:20+00:00.

Hi,

I recently decided to play again with a couple of friends after a five-year hiatus. I have been a long-time fan of the game, having prepurchased the collector’s edition way back in 2011.

Between my very-long-running Security Key (the one from the Collector’s Edition still works!) and having had a subscription at various points in time, I had some accumulated Cartel Coins. I wanted to make the experience as good as possible for my friends, to maximize the chance that they’d decide to play past the free story. So I looked in the Cartel Market for ways to do that.

I found the account unlocks, which seemed like exactly what I’d want. The UI even explicitly told me that, while those unlocks were not applicable to my own account, I could buy them as gifts. That was nice and reassuring, as the Cartel Market has no refund policy that I know of and the unlocks were, relatively to my own Cartel Coins supply, pretty expensive.

So I bought those unlocks “as gifts”, as suggested, and since then things have been a lot less nice.

First, once I bought the unlocks, they appeared in my inventory with a 3-day “bound” countdown. That was not mentionned in the Cartel UI and was not a welcome surprise. It really screwed with my timing; fortunately, I had meant the gift as a surprise so my friends were not disappointed. Still, I was.

Then, when the countdown elapsed, I thought I could give them the unlocks. So I told them I would. Then we tried, and that was a huge disppointment mixed with a lot of confusion and frustration. We eventually figured out that the trade had a multi-million credit tax to give items I specifically bought as gifts with Cartel Coins. I understand that there is some incentive for developers to make the game annoying to push people towards subscribing, but I expected them to try and make spending money in the game fun, rewarding, and working as expected.

I still had a pre-hiatus level 63 character, so I decided I’d try and see what kind of money I can collect with her. I originally did not want to play her, as the whole point of this operation was to get my friends up there so we could discover the new content together. Also, at this point I remember almost nothing of her “story so far”, so playing her was an unwanted, subpar experience in many ways. But by this point I’d made a commitment to my friends so I wanted to try.

I logged in with that character, and discovered she had a total wealth of 60k credits. So that wasn’t a great starting point. Still, I thought perhaps I can farm crew skills (she had three skills above 500) and heroic missions for a while and see what kind of money that makes.

After a week of mostly unenjoyable farming, I reached 800k credits and a pop-up told me I could not accumulate more than 1 million credits as I don’t currently have an active subscription. I tried splitting the unlocks to give them one at a time, and the cheapest exchange fee is above 3.5 million credits.

At this point I feel very frustrated. This really feels like a scam. The UI explicitly told me “You may purchase this as a gift”, and I spent half my Cartel Coins on them and I cannot give them.

This was about two weeks ago. I spent some time on other things for a while to let this cool down, and yesterday I decided to try playing with my friends again, but I find myself unable to enjoy the game with this burning feeling of having been scammed constantly distracting me.

How do I go about enjoying the game again? Right now, I have a strong urge to ragequit, but part of me feels like I’ve been invested in this game for over 12 years now so it’s worth telling this story to some sort of customer service and see if they can do anything to make me feel like I can enjoy the game again. Only I can’t find out how to reach any kind of customer support. All I found was the /bug in-game command, but that seems targeted towards other kinds of issues. (Also, I tried it and got no response.)

I feel stuck. The obvious answers don’t work:

• Getting a subscription to remove the credit cap will not magically give me the 50 million credits I’d need, and I’m not willing to grind for over a year just to get the money to give gifts to people who need them now in order to enjoy the game.
• My friends getting a subscription would effectively give them everything my unlocks would, but wouldn’t change the fact that I’d still feel I’ve been scammed out of a lot of my Cartel Coins, so that wouldn’t really help me be able to enjoy the game again. They’re not yet at a point where they’d keep playing if I quit, so that option does not work either.

What I think would work for me:

• The best option I guess would be for some sort of customer service to transfer the unlocks to my friends’ characters. I’d still feel annoyed that we’d had to jump through these hoops, but I wouldn’t feel cheated anymore.
• Barring that, getting the Cartel Coins refunded would also get rid of the “I’ve been cheated” feeling, though in a much less satisfactory manner.
• Ragequitting is not a great option but it feels like the only one under my control.

Does anyone have any advice on how I could go on enjoying the game, or how to reach someone who can help?