Everquest II Starter Kit

MMORPG addiction can lead to seriously bad ideas. Now I'm usually rational enough to avoid the worst excesses, and I haven't quit my job or my family to get more time to play. But I just tricked myself into paying $125 for Everquest II, two-and-a-half time of what most other people will be paying for it.

It all began with the announcement of the Everquest II Starter Kit. You pre-order EQ2, and you get the Starter Kit for free. The Starter Kit contains 2 CD's with bonus material, including a character generator which allows you to already create a character before the game is released. But the reason I wanted this Starter Kit is that it also contains a code which would give your character a pair of journeyman boots in game, increasing his running speed. This was one of the highly desirable and hard to get items of EQ1, and I never got any. Sure, my main character was a druid and had the Spirit of Wolf spell that worked even better. But those boots really made me want to get my hands on the Starter Kit. Hey, it's supposed to be free, what could go wrong?

First thing to go wrong was the world-wide distribution of the Starter Kit. EQ2 is distributed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) in the US, but by Ubisoft in Europe, where I live. And while SOE distributed the Starter Kit in the US from the 1st of August, Ubisoft did no such thing. You simply can't order the Starter Kit in Europe right now, and it isn't really sure whether there will be any, and then if there will be enough of them to go round.

While a first announcement from SOE had said that if I bought the US version of EQ2, I would not be able to play on the European servers, and vice versa, they then had an unprecedented attack of customer friendliness, and decided to make an optional patch available so every version could play on every server.

So as I couldn't get the Starter Kit in Europe, I decided to get it from the US. My usual import place, DVDBoxoffice, with it's free world-wide shipping, unfortunately didn't offer the Starter Kit, probably because they are in Canada. So I decided to get the Starter Kit directly from the Station Store of SOE. As SOE is well known for giving preferential treatment to people giving money to them, that might even increase my chances to get into the beta.

I go to the Station Store and click on the EQ2 Starter Kit "add to cart". I get a message that I would need first to pre-order EQ2 before I could order the Starter Kit, fair enough. I add EQ2 as pre-order to my virtual shopping cart, price tag $49.99, and proceed to the checkout. The usual pages of entering shipping and billing address, and my credit card number. Then the shipping page: Ouch! Only option available for Europe is UPS first class worldwide shipping for $33. Well, seeing how late Ubisoft is with the Starter Kit, getting EQ2 from the US with first class shipping might at least get me the game faster than I can get it here. The confirmation page adds another unpleasant surprise, value added tax (sales tax) of 17.5%, bringing the total price up to $92. This is the point where my brain should have rung an alarm bell, but didn't. I wasn't thinking too clearly and just acknowledged the order.

Finally, I get a message to "click here to order the free EQ2 Starter Kit". It is added to my shopping cart for $0.00. Then the same series of pages follows as in the pre-order of the game. And I find myself on the same page with the shipping options. Yes, I will have to pay $33 for shipping of the "free" Starter Kit. I'm trapped: If I don't pay, the whole exercise was for nothing, and I don't see the option to cancel the EQ2 pre-order. So I ended up paying a grand total of $125, of which $66 are for shipping.

And I should have known that. Because I had an invite to the Star Wars Galaxies beta last year, and didn't accept the invite because that would have meant paying $5 for the beta CD plus $30 shipping. And knowing my luck, Ubisoft will probably get around to offering the Starter Kit for the European version of EQ2 next week or so, and I paid all that extra money for nothing. Sometimes I'm just stupid.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link