Trigger Finger

Update Feb 18th 2009 – Letter sent to Major Nelson.. as yet no response

I am sure lots of people are aware, but to those who aren’t please read on (those who are, bear with me while I have a rant!).

I moved from the UK to Sweden about 8 months ago and obviously took my Xbox 360 with me. Afterall, I am not moving to Mars, in fact I am within Europe still and we europeans generally share a territory with most things. We all use PAL, we all like football, many share the same currency, and we all love the french (ahem).

So generally the first few months everything went swimmingly until December when my Xbox Live Gold account expired. So wanting to renew my account I tried, but no matter what I did the damn Live system refused to accept payment using a Swedish card. For some reason best known to Microsoft they don’t want my money because a Swedish VISA card is obviously different from an English one…. right?

I spent a few days hunting around and eventually discovered (whilst looking for something completely unrelated) a seller on ebay flogging 12 month subscription codes from the UK. So I checked his feedback and he had sold millions of the things and had great feedback. Super, I coughed up less than £20 (far cheaper than buying officially from MS!), the code arrived in my email an hour later and I was back in business! Crisis averted… for now!

Then comes more recent times and everyone knows that you need lovely Microsoft Points to get stuff from the Marketplace and I recently went through the hoops again to try and get the damn Live system to let me pay for MS points. No matter what I did I couldn’t get a transaction to succeed so researched some more. It turns out that your VISA card MUST be of the same country as your Gamertag profile. Hmmm fair enough I suppose on a security side of things, but then I realised that my Gamertag cannot be changed to a Swedish one because, of all the details in the profile, the ONLY field you can’t change is ‘country.’

More research revealed that I am not the only one. Plenty of people in Europe move from country to country, that’s what happens when you share landmass! Many before me it seems have gone through the same problems, and been told by Microsoft support that it is simply not possible to change your country. Ridiculous!

The only ’solution’ they can give is to create a new gamertag… great. See all we wanted to do was give you money, but it seems we also have to lose all achievements, lose any remaining xbox live gold subscription, and our valuable tags (thus also friends lists!) and this is why again?

We are talking about the greatest biggest software superpower in the world and you can’t manage a database transaction that will move an account to a new country? Pathetic!

Anyway there is a semi-solution. You can create a new Silver (free) account for your country and use that for the future transactions for MS points (downloads are accessible by all profiles on that Xbox), but you had better make sure there is a friendly ebay seller for Gold subscriptions for your old country when yours next expires or tough titty!

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