Blizzard Blocks Iran From World Of Warcraft: Refuses Refunds
We live in an international world. The games we play allow us to talk with people from all over the world. Some of those can be citizens of countries that ours do not particularly like. Regardless they are gamers too, and today all the cards came out regarding a login issue with Wow and Iran.
Over on Blizzards message boards they posted a response to the hundreds of Iranian gamers complaining they do not have access to their WoW accounts. Blizzards official response was
Our team has been watching this thread closely, and we understand the desire for more information about this situation. Blizzard Entertainment cannot speak to any reports surrounding the Iranian government restricting games from its citizens.
What we can tell you is that United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran. Several of you have seen and cited the text in the Terms of Use which relates to these government-imposed sanctions. This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services.
This also prevents us from providing any refunds, credits, transfers, or other service options to accounts in these countries. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and will happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows.
Now I will try to keep the politics to a minimum here but there is more to this story than just trade sanctions. There is more to this ban than meets the eye. On the 22nd the Iranian government had released a statement that they would be blocking battle.net, this image was released coinciding with the ban.
In English these read as:
- Promotion of superstition and mythology.
- Promotion of violence due to too much violence.
- Abolishing the deformation in sin.
- Demonstration of inappropriate clothing and slutty outfits for female avatars.
So most likely Blizzard was just trying to play the victim in this whole ordeal and come out smelling clean. Luckily for them they do not have to offer refunds for unused gametime OR for purchased copies of Mists of Pandera, due to trade sanctions of course. How convenient.
Now as I said before I do not want to get all politico on you, so lets keep the talks and discussions to the game as much as possible. The real gross part of this is that Blizzard isn’t refunding players. With Mists of Pandera coming out in less than a month, any Iranian players who may have bought the 40 USD game will not be seeing those monies return to their accounts, and if any of them have a year or two of pre-bought gametime then they’re even screwed more.
This isn’t only affecting WoW, players of Guild Wars 2 have been reporting issues from logging in. I will report more info as it gets reported.
