Blizzard may put out great games, but they have a lot to learn about customer service. Having purchased the World of Warcraft game to upgrade my trial account, I also set up a Paypal account to allow me to continue my subscription. Blizzard advertises that you can use Paypal if you live in North America. This works for me as I don't and won't use credit cards (Why pay a mint to rent other people's money?).
What Blizzard doesn't say is that even if you use Paypal, you still have to use a credit card. They require Paypal (according to the information provided to me by Paypal) to ask me for a credit card before they will allow me to set up Paypal as a payment method.
But that's not even the true customer service failure. The real failure was achieved when I contacted them to find out why they require this. I've run into one of the classic service failures. The complete failure to pay attention to what the customer is saying. At best Blizzard's responses imply that they haven't even read my email. At worst they are being deliberately obfuscatory. And we'll see if they even keep my business.

I've pasted the Email chain below. I have deleted a fair bit of the header information for readibility. I have not edited either my emails or Blizzard's.
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I was trying to use my PayPal account to continue my subscription to World of Warcraft, however when I got to the PayPal portion of the process, it demanded I put a credit card on my PayPal account to complete the purchase. When my friend JP convinced me to give World of Warcraft a try, one of the only reasons I was willing to do so was that you had started to accept PayPal. I don't use credit cards, and being mobility challenged I don't want to have to get to a store to purchase your game card options.
My first assumption was that this was a PayPal requirement, but their customer service department assures me it is your requirement. I would hope you would reconsider that requirement. As a former Customer Service Analyst (admittedly not in the computer game field), I can see supposed business reasons for making such a decision, but none of them are truly customer friendly reasons.

David B.
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Greetings David,

If you would like to change your account's payment method to use PayPal, please visit the Account Management page (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account). To use PayPal to pay for your subscription, simply select the PayPal option on the subscription setup screen. You will be required to log in to your PayPal account and agree to the Terms of Service.

**PLEASE NOTE: After successfully setting up a PayPal subscription via Account Management, payment validation may take up to 60 minutes before you will be able to login to the game. Once this process is complete, you will be able to start playing again. Thank you for your patience and understanding.**

For more information on PayPal, or to set up an account, please visit http://www.paypal.com/. Please keep in mind that you can *only* process a PayPal payment through our website; due to privacy concerns we are not able to manually add PayPal payments over the phone. Any specific questions about your PayPal account should be directed to PayPal support.

For more information on using PayPal with your World of Warcraft account, please review our FAQ at: http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=20518

If you have further questions or concerns, Billing representatives are on hand to take your call Monday through Friday between 8am and 8pm PST, at 1-800-59-BLIZZARD (800-592-5499). Customers in Australia should call 1-800-041-378. Our Billing team will be happy to assist you with any billing related questions. You may also contact them via email at [email protected].


Regards,

Blake R.
Billing and Account Services
Blizzard Entertainment
[email protected]
http://worldofwarcraft.com/account
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Blake,

Well that was an amusing use of script. You might want to consider reading the email and responding to the actual issue.

Care to give it another try?

David B.
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Greetings David,

Allow me to point out where your question can be answered. Since Paypal information as well as the use of credit card information is all considered highly volatile, we do not handle these over e-mail.

"For more information on PayPal, or to set up an account, please visit http://www.paypal.com/. Please keep in mind that you can *only* process a PayPal payment through our website; due to privacy concerns we are not able to manually add PayPal payments over the phone. Any specific questions about your PayPal account should be directed to PayPal support."

Which, if you note, specifically gives you our answer to the question, which is, "I can't discuss that."

There are plenty of other methods you can use if you'd like to not have a credit card trail on our servers. The game cards that you mentioned are another viable option. You can also attempt to use the phone subscription method if your phone would allow for it.

Unfortunately, there are no other methods in place for payment outside of this. If you'd like assistance setting up any of the latter ones, I'd be more than willing to help or at least point you in the right direction.

Regards,

Blake R.
Billing and Account Services
Blizzard Entertainment
[email protected]
http://worldofwarcraft.com/account
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Blake,

So let me see if I understand your answer.

My question was "Why do you require Paypal to ask me for my credit card information before you will let me use that as a payment method." Your answer is that Paypal and Credit card information are too volatile to discuss in email. That seems to be a bit disingenuous to me. I think a more frank answer would simply be that you do not know why that is required. I'd probably have accepted that and simply asked for you to pass the feedback on.

Ah well, fodder for the mill I guess.

Thank you for responding as best you can.

David B.