Xbox Live Accounts – Great But Don’t Move to Another Country! 105
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!
No related posts.
Same problem same, answers from MS.
Q: So how do I change my country?
A: You can’t create a new acount.
Q: So what happens to my remaining Gold Time.
A: Just wait till you’re gold acount runs out then do it.
Q: What happens to my downloaded content and gamer score / achievements
A: Gone.
F*ING awesome MS! I moved to the US and bought GEAR2 just to find out the stupid map pack code is region encoded and I can’t download it. This is freaking retarded. If I have to make a new account then there should be a MIGRATE option to bring all my old stuff across to the new one. PS3 is looking better and better all the time.
I moved to Canada 3 years ago with my original xbox. I bought a 360 2 years ago and a subscription card as well and had no problems, though my billing info and location was us. I just bought a card(points) the other day and the same problem. I contacted ms and they said dump you old profile. This is BS! Ms is a multinational corp and it cant change 1 line! So I cant use my credit card or my prepaid points card! Even worse the idiot at c.s. told me 1 3 optiona 1 get a us credit card I live in Canada 2 do to the us everytime i want points that’s stupid 3 move back! Are they f#$king serious! Will a silver membership work for using points and playing with gold membership?
The sad thing is, this isn’t the only common issue for abandoning Gamertags.
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=6c7f57dbb0f15cafb50b2c7c86cb61a5&t=1362047&page=2
A big warning to everyone, log into your Windows Live ID every so often or get buttraped by MS. Again.
That just happened to me AND I plan on moving to the US in the next several years. I really hope they fix the problem by then. Or they go and die. Either of those 2 solutions would make me happy ^^
this is extremely annoying. while i didnt move country i have a similar problem:
region set to Austria. imported Fallout 3 so i dont have to deal with the german text and dialogues.
now i wanna buy the addon. but there is no way to get the english version. it will download the version that is associated to my region.
intended to change location so i can get the english version.
never believed it would be that much of a problem. totally unacceptable.
even worse when i read about the problems u guys have (like not being able to pay with credit cards from a different region. i mean wtf?)..
FUCKING HEELLL I HAVE THE SAME
PROBLEEEEM
MS SHOULD FIND A DAMN SOLUTION, :@ :@ :@
is there a solution to change your country on the DAMN xbox 360
i can’t add any points to my account or do anything is fuck.
and im not going to make a new gamertag to lose everything, fuck that.
you’d think that this was illegal within the EU.
come to that why is it that the EU sue’s MS for giving away free stuff (explorer) but does nothing when they nick stuff off us.
more stupid still is that ms is moaning 2 years after I moved that it cant charge my valid uk credit card… because I’VE entered the wrong adress.
idiots!
hi guys,
well i have even a bigger problem , i live in Luxembourg , some people might have heard of it … obviously Microsoft hasnt… my problem is that Luxembourg doesnt even figure in the list of available countries fir an xbox live account !!!!
s i have to actually lie to them i pretend im from another , bigger country just to open an account
what the hell is that about ??? how the hell am i supposed to use my credit card which is from luxembourg also obviously…
i mean seriously , did you microsoft guys set all these servers and systems over night over a couple of beers ????
it’s so awful that i understand perfectly why everyone prefers the PS3 which i have also …
i cant believe that microsoft doesnt even care anymore on losing a couple of million dollars to users that cant connect properly…
its a shame that they aren’t smarter.. but well .. since they aren’t i’ll keep lying to them , i know a way around their system . takes very long but i dont care..
its like re-using a windows XP key over and over again hahahahahaahahahahaha
=)))))
Moien, ech hun deen selwechten Problem! Mee wei kreien ech dann lo ‘MS Points’?
Merci
As you can see, almost two years has passed without any improvement in the situation.
So I am going to take it to the big cheese himself, Major Nelson and see if I can get some kind of response out of him that isn’t the canned replies you get from MS Support.
Wish me luck!
Same goes with PS3 …. very annoying ….
Letter sent – a copy of it is here:
http://tf.erzz.com/2009/02/18/letter-to-major-nelsonletter-to-major-nelson/
[...] is one thing that has gotten this site more hits than any other topic, it is the billing problem described here when moving from one country to another with an XBox Live subscription. After two years of inaction [...]
I’m also from Luxembourg, and I can also tell you that’s a real shit…, now we can’t even restore the profiles on the xbox… it’s not available in our region (I’m gave Germany as country of course, cause that we are not in the list), now this is also verified by MS. If you lose your profile or change the console … you have to create a new account
or you have to find a way to get a country IP, normally that should work
…
Moved from US to Pretoria, South Africa. Bought a xbox360 approx 2 months ago. Anxious to register xbox live only to be told there is nou XBL in my LOCALE (obviously after I’ve entered my country )… Call A friend, he registered his locale as UK to be able to get onto XBL can’t even get Gold. So what now?
well said, finally a good report on this stuff
well said, finally a good report on this stuff
That’s not the only issue, I was so pissed of that I called the XBox live Support, Haha what a thing
after all this, they were accusing me that I where not giving the right information … There “Solution” was to great a new account (of course an losing all my reputation points). So I told them that Luxembourg is not in the list, but the women on the other side was sure that it’s in, even that was repeating my self again and again, and after all accusing (because she was really repeating me the conditions, again and again). I said ok I will try.
And so I was filling out the first Steps of creating a new Xbox Live Account AND AND no Luxembourg is not in the List.
So I called again, I got another guy on the phone, I told him that I god a women first so they she was telling him my problem… but NO SOLUTION, he also said that I it’s discriminatory, but he couldn’t do anything…
So last few days I got a mail from Microsoft doing a Poll
asking the country you are in, with the famous list AND Others Maybe they got now little more problem with there banning users using or restoring there profile …
I hope for the best.
And that I never have to restore my profile… otherwise I have to find a way to get a German IP on my Xbox360 do get it work.
Incredible, I just spent +30 minutes with the norwegian Xbox Live Support with the same issue. They were very rude and un helpful. They had no reason for why they couldn’t change my region from German to Norwegian (where I live now), and just referred me the the EULA (which he said “you probably didn’t read when you signed up)… They were very unfriendly and when I asked for his name he put me on hold — amazing!!
I also asked if they could somehow compensate me for all this to which he replied “no, not at all. we have done nothing wrong.”
Terrible policy, even worse support.
I didn’t even move country with my xbox. I moved from england to australia and bought my 360 IN australia, sut up my live account with my hotmail.co.uk account and it automatically set my region to UK without asking ME where I was….. So I had to get my mate in england to get me a ms points card because I cant use my credit card on the market place here, or use ms points prepaid cards. anyways, he sent me the code and whoop deedoo it worked, so I go to download the new map pack 1 for COD:WAW and get the message ‘this item is not availablt in you location..’ WTF? I could download the free makin map so why not this? my internet has been slowed to dial up because i went over the download limit so hopefully when its back to normal it will work… but its absolute bullshit that you can’t just change your region!!
I have the exact same problem with downloading the new map pack 1 for CoD:WaW it sucks!!! Does any one have a solution other then creating the free silver, buy new points and then download content?
For people who just need to get gold og gamer points for their region you can visit https://www.gamepointsnow.com/
Thats what i did. I moved from the US to Denmark, and of course i use the same email account as i always have. So couldnt use my credit card or pree paid cards from a store.
*ucking MS! burn in hell with you shit!
Any one wants to buy an xbox 360 with or exchange with a PS3????
http://forums.xbox.com/2/26552313/ShowPost.aspx#26552313
[...] with an XBox 360 in another country can be a pain, and Microsoft is being a bitch. You will encounter the following [...]
Got the same fucking shit with my xbox360 form norway!
FUCK YOU MS! I Hate you more now than ever!
And I was so happy in my bubble world with my MS live account. It created my account in spain, fuck! I’m from Venezuela, and i fucking hate spanish accent, and they have the horrible custom of dubbing everything here, so i had to play games with the worst audio ever. Therefore I though, maybe if I set my region to UK or USA i could play the games as I want. Well, i0m buying the games from amazon.co.uk to get the english audio, but the fucking dl content is in horrid spanish and i’m stuck by it. Luckyly my CC is from an spanish bank, but if I move to Venezuela again, then I won’t be able to pay anymore? Fuck Microsoft!!! I’ll get a ps3 soon
Well my Problem is Big i live in Dubai i think u know it ok But my Gamertag region is New Zelandian how the fuck i can get an Nz Ms point when i but ms point its USA i cant put it in my tag so i had to Create a us account but i want
Well my Problem is Big i live in Dubai i think u know it ok But my Gamertag region is New Zelandian how the fuck i can get an Nz Ms point when i but ms point its USA i cant put it in my tag so i had to Create a us account but i want soulution
What more can i say… SCREW MS!!
how talk about the most killer thing, i moved from California, to edmonton ab, canada, and i have a cc linked to the account, so i go to download content or anything it charges the card, “i get the ms points added”. and get not avaliable in my area, honestly what would happened if i played on the border? im literally that close wtf. 100ft tops.
Hey guys, I have the same problem…pretty ridiculous really. I live in Canada but my account assumed I was american for some reason soo I can’t do shit. Lovely. But I’m thinking there’s a way around it for me at least, so I ask you this. Will it work if I just buy all cards? Like I can set up a Canadian account for my credit card, to use with downloads, and I have a 12 month card…which I could use and then buy another one in store and redeem it without having to worry about the country issue right? Please tell me this is a fix lol!
I’m from the Netherlands, but set my region to United States years ago, because i wanted the bigger email storage… But i didn’t have my 360 back then yet. Now i do have it for quite a while, but so far i’ve only managed to add live gold a couple of times. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But today i wanted to add points. You undestand where this is going. Didn’t work. BUT! i figured, since it is linked with MSN (Windows Live Messenger), i changed my country there, hoping that it would also change the country on my xbox. But unfortunatly, it didn’t work
Dunno what to do now… Atleast I’ve managed to add another 3 months of live gold. So i guess that’s a good thing.
Same problem, solved it so far by buying MS points on Ebay.
But, just after changing country I got a red ring of death. Support in my home country didn’t want to repair the console because of postage. Support in the new country didn’t want to repair it either, since it was from abroad. So I ended up buying a new one.
ok here wat i facing
i was confused about email accounts and gamer tags
since i live in kuwait which is in the middle east
and i am kuwaity
so all of my friends either using us / uk for thier countries while setting up gamer tag
i used uk
my console is eu which is pal i am not sure in these stuffs
at the first day of buying prepaid live 12 months card when i got my console that guy told me that the prepaid card is us i asked him for more info should my account be an us or my console it self
i forgot his answers any ways those workers are’nt technecaly informed so
i did’nt tear of the live box
i talked to an gaming friend which he told me never mined it gonna work
hoppefuly it worked
lately i wanted to get an points to buy map packs for cod4 + waw
i got 4000 ms points and asked that other guy he told me that its us also shops there stuck with us
i told him that i got the us live to work so he answerd was probably it gonna work coz of live worked
i paid for the points and in home it says code invaild lately i know that we cant change contact country any ways the other address and stuff are’nt even real info but i cant change the country :/ so i even tried some thing i saw some where in market place or demos demo for cod waw i clicked on it and it says its not available in my country
so yea :/ here wat i gonna do
wait for the next year
so my live sub expired
create new gamer tag with brand new email setted to us
and make sure its us gamer tag
and get live
and use the same points card since it dont expire
hopefully those *uckers fix this stupid problem
just becoz of big company cant move little thing the damn contact country
also i am almost 17 so i dont have any criedt card nor i know how to use one which i cant even if i got one lol coz i am living in place diff that card country and place different that contact country
so i am stucked here and gonna lose all my GS / friends achievements and long time to wait :/ maybe up to 10 map packs for cod waw gotta released haha but since the points is prepaid and cant be exchanged to money so wat to do
hope that helps
sorry for annoying u guys with my story
thanks
Yep, same thing happened to me, moving from UK to Spain. The only idea I have to solve it is to use a proxy server in the country you are registered in. One way to do this (and I haven’t tried it), is to connect your XBox via your laptop/desktop PC and set a proxy server on your laptop/desktop. I think that could well work if anyone wants to have a try.
Otherwise as everyone else has said what a bunch of twats Microsoft are.
An ever worse version has happened to me, I’m so fucking frustrated over how incredibly pathetic and riddiculous this is that I don’t know what to do:
SIXS YEARS AGO. I lived in Singapore. This is where I created my MSN account. So when it asked me where I was; I said Singapore (big surprise).
In 2004; I moved to Norway – been living here ever since.
In 2009; I finally get an x-box 360 Elite and decide it’s time to enter the world of console gaming once again (where I have not been since N64 rocked my world as a child).
NOW; creating my account goes fine, I automatically get my freee month and I have a blast on Halo 3 and whatnot online. Month expieres, and I want to buy more time. Well don’t you fucking think that upon creating my account MS locked my Region to Singpaore because thats where my MSN account is, and now; I can either travel halvway around the world, get a credit card, an adress, and money (seeing how I will have spendt it all getting there), in order to buy more time.
Or I could just create a new account, erase my gamerscore, erase all my achievements, erase my friends list, create a new e-mail adress (since my current one will already have been registered in the system, and you can only register it once no matter what).
Fuck you MS. I hope you all get to hell and satan sticks a needle in your eyes.
Same problem here…. Aus to the UK, still billing on my Aus account but can’t switch over. Super annoying.
I love Xbox Live, but this is one of the things that hurts the brand.
im looking how to creat my brother an acont wile i stil have one but non of the other sits tell how neather does this one
got the same problem, moved from the US back to France and I still can’t believe it……………..
I have the EXACT same problem as the guy from the netherlands…
Man this rly sux -_-
I moved to France a long time ago. I bought my 360 online via Amazon.co.uk (so technically it is a UK Xbox). The problem for me here is not that I cannot use subscriptions from within France, its that when I do use them my whole bloody marketplace and everything else automatically changes language to French! This may sound like a small annoyance, but believe me it is very annoying. I have tried changing my contact details, i.e. Country…but as you said: You cannot change your country. All I can really think of doing is trying to buy a subscription bought from within the UK and hopefully this may allow me to change the language/country on my account. Let me know if anyone else has done anything similar. Cheers.
I live in the Netherlands and i have a American account, for sure a American gamertag is better due of the fact that i get more for my Money in terms of features on Live.
The 48 hour code that i used yesterday works pretty good so i am going to test a 1 Month Gold subscription and 800 MS points see how everything goes.
Thank you very much dude for sharing this story, this has definitely made me more carefull not to buy immediatley 5000 MS and 12 Month Live
ok hopefully someone can answer me quickly on this….my parents are sending points across from the UK to Canada for my 2 kids and from what i am reading from everyone is that as long as i create an xbox live account( saying its a UK account) i should be able to register the points easily???? the other issue is that when the points are registered can i sign into the canadian Gamertag that will be used and spend the points or do i have to keep with the UK fake account, soend them and then cross my fingers that the content will work on the canadian account
If your account contains a UK live passport you should do it with no problem at all.
I also found the solution for my issue i just bought 12 months live and 4000 MS points **US ACCOUNTS**
Since i can’t use MS points here in Holland for my American account i just bought one from ebay.com
+ I changed my 360’s it’s IP address to a american one so that i can use Last.fm and 1 vs 100 right here in Holland
With a little bit of google searching you are really good to go
so everything should be ok once the points are spent????? the other question is this…when i spend them and log into the account that will be used for a year will i have to transfer the media rights or will it be good because its on the same console???
It depends,
If you got 2 accounts than it is no problem, so a ”Canadian” and a ”UK account”.
Once you spend the Points on your UK account than everything would be as it is you only get more Ms points wich is a positive thing though
.
The media rights are already featured with your Xbox 360 otherwise it wouldn’t denie UK points on a Canadian account (for example).
Just redeem the codes to your UK account and everything will remains the same.
I already tryed it with my Xbox 360 ,, Dutch aka European MS points din’t work on my US account so it’s pretty obvious that i have to buy Ms point out of the US via Ebay.com wich is a good thing cause it’s very cheap
.
&’nd
Xbox Live Gold : Don’t worry, Live is Worldwide it’s just the MS points that are issue in this story.
If you don’t trust it, buy a 240 or 800 MS points card at a shoping centre and try it on your UK account, you will see that it doesn’ work because it is a CAN Ms points card.
king of cali,
i am not sure if that will work. i set my Xbox live account as me being in the UK. i moved to france and then went back to the UK and bought a microsoft points card. the points went on to the account fine but when i came to download something (call of duty 5 map pack 3) it said “this is not available in your current location.” i havn’t tried it with gold subscription yet and i don’t know whether to try points from france, or not.
i think the reason is because my Xbox live is in english. in french it is called something else and for that reason it doesn’t work, (my brother tried to download something different and it worked – a piece of avatar clothing for modern warfare 2).
i think the problem is the language. if i take the Xbox 360 to the uk it should let me downlaod stuff. my only problen is Xbox live gold. should i buy it in france, or in the UK?
can you find any answers to this (besides creating a new gamertag) please?
I’m having the same problem. I moved to Canada from the United States and have been having constant problems trying to download content that is limited to one country or the other. I really wish Microsoft would fix this.
I buy my MSP and Gold in stores Im moving countries do I still have to make a new one or can I go on normaly?
Omfg… i live in the united kingdom but whenm ever i go on to get xbox live gold membership it says i live in the US so i can’t get gold cause of the billing info needing to know where i live i try to change country or region but its locked on United States i mean WTF!
I used to live in Spain and I created the live account at the time (let’s call it: accA)
When I moved to the UK and bought my xbox 360, I used my live account (accA). My gamertag then, had the country set in Spain! I couldn’t pay by a UK credit card and the market place was all in spanish, etc.
I contacted microsoft and the problem seemed to be that the country is set within the live account, not the gamertag. So a possible solution is to create a new live account at your current location (accB) and replace the current live account associated to your gamertag (accA) with the newly created one (accB).
I didn’t get to try thos though, because I came back to Spain, but I think is worth trying it…
Hi folks… now i also live in Luxembourg and i got a german account which worked fine so far. I usually buy my MS Points in a german shop who sent the code per E-Mail.
So i usually accepted the fact that Luxembourg isn´t listed anywhere on any MS Server. Stunning that thea don´t want my money though.
But now i got a new Problem, you see, I bought the Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edtion with the Nightgoggles and the Redeem Code for Call of Duty Classic on XBox Live Arcade. To be clear…i bought it in Luxembourg. An d now it turns out that the Redeem Code isn´t working because of the wrong IP Region. Tried to confront MS with the problem but they just ignore it.
So i bought a really expensive edition which features i cannot even use.
United Europe is just aweeeesome!
For those of you that wish to join my cause, please visit http://xboxlawsuit.blogspot.com/2010/02/lawsuit-against-microsoft.html for details and updates.
Yeah when I signed up I put austria instead of australian. Whoops I was in a rush to play. Sh@t.
I have the same problem. I was living in Denmark when i created my msn account and without thinking i set my country to Denmark which at the time it was. When i went back to the UK i bought an Xbox and it asked for my msn account i unwittingly entered the account i created in Denmark thus locking my xbox to being in Denmark.
This really wasn’t a huge problem whilst in the UK as i could get points and use my UK credit card just fine. However now i live in the middle east, having an xbox set to Denmark with a UK credit card and understanding no Danish what so ever is causing problems.
I cannot start to comprehend how uttely stupid it is that Microsoft will not let me change my country, i mean seriously it’s fkin retarded.