Xbox Live Accounts – Great But Don’t Move to Another Country! 118
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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i live in autralia and ive just brought a new account off an american that had no xbox live on it and when i try to add credit card details there is no option for me to choose any australian states @!
fuck you ms im buying a fucking sony
Oneske, i’m buying an account off an american, can you still use the account over hear, and not just put a credit card on or what?
Microsoft failed completely with the xbox account management. I can’t believe they don’t want my money! am so pissed of at them for this…
I too, have just run into this problem. It is completely baffling that it is impossible to change the Country, Why put the Box there when you can’t change it, I’ve read around and hear many different things, But apparently MS Card’s ( The Subscription Cards that is ). Work In all Countries that support XBL. So what that, Zone Free ? Well, I was curious, not looking forward to spending a crazy amount of Kroners for a Sub Card to find out it doesn’t work. Anyone, Anyone at all know if this is true?
My account is “Canadian”, now I live in Norway.
Any Feedback on this would be good, haha. Creating a new Tag isn’t a suggestion from MS, It’s an exuse to shrug off the disgruntled MS Customer and basically tell them. ‘TOUGH LUCK’!
Pff it’s just stupid that this isn’t possible! I spent a half an hour on the line with the most incompotend customer service of Xbox in the Netherlands. Same problem as you guys. No help for me as well, even worse a own a 360elite just because i prefer a black layout. But if your freakin cheapass headset fails, the only MS version is white!!! :@
even worse to be irish,select your country “ireland” because i live under british occupation in belfast i was told by a mircosoft operator that i’m british and should have selected uk………….what a dick.
i know man i fucking hate this shit im from mexico but i live in borders so it is very hard for me to get microsoft but the pretty fucked up thing is that it does accept american xbox live cards but it doesnt accept american microsoft points cards i fucking hate this shit cause most of my credit cards are from the U.S. fuuuuuckk i was thinking of making a new account but im a high level in modern warfare and i have 10,000 gamerscore so im pretty fucked up.
I have the same problem!!! I created my Xbox live account in Italy 3years ago using an Italian credit card, but now I am in Switzerland and my Xbox live has expired, so now I’m fuckt coz I can’t change my country and I don’t own Italian credit cards anymore, plus I am sort of a achievement hunter, I got 20,000 gamer points wasting allot of time getting them. And now they tell me to create a new account!! F@ck that!!!!!
But the gay thing is that I can get Microsoft points by buying Microsoft points cards here but I can’t buy subscriptions cards coz they don’t work!
yeah im from the uk and moved to australia, and i get my subscription cards alright, then the 200 points i get with the subscription works, but i go and buy 1500 mps and it doesnt work, then created a 1 month trial account with australia as the default country, and it worked, but i cancelled it. im gonna phone microsoft about this
yeah i just found out theat we here in swedwn don’t got as much stuff on our dashboard as amerikans do (i don’t know if it is the same in other contrys) so… WTF!!! is up whit that shit? they got more game in games on demand more demos more News i start to think Ps3 is beter then 360
and i ain’t happy about it
I had the same problem, i lived in Ireland and moved to France, only to find that half the stuff on the dashboard does not work, i.e sky player, games on demand 1vs100 all because it says it’s not available in your country i have 14000 gamer score and it means losing all this and starting again. Which by the way i tried only to be told that when i enter my email address that it already exists even though i am trying to use a different gamer tag, so it means deleting my old profile setting up a french email account and trying that way, i just hope that if i did this it would not change everything to the french language.
By the way the rubbish that microsoft xbox support saying that they cannot add your credit card details so you can buy map packs and games is complete rubbish, I have a french credit card with a irish region, i rang they told me there was nothing they could do until i argued and said thats funny as last time you added it and i have been using a french visa card for the last 2 years and i have just changed it, it took the customer service support agent all of 2 mins to add my card details and it works fine.
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And by the way I know no microsoft/xbox service support manager might read this but I relocated in Singapore, the fellow on the phone not just had the worst service attitude besides being rude and ignorant, still scolds me for calling the support line:”Why bring your console buy a new one and get new game card lah”, what kind of answert is that. If i want to pay MS in gold coins or coca seeds and they take both why this issue with not able to change the location!
Any way SINGAPORE’s support line blows, no wonder every body over here plays PS3.
i was able to change my info by going to this info,
i moved to the USA and i was so pissed getting my account locked to my previous country.
hopefully all will be fine, otherwise will call microsoft and give them Sh**
http://account.live.com
Ziad, what happened?? did it work?? I entered the page and found out that it actually lets you change the country of your account. Did it work??