Hellgate: London Subscribers Report Extra Charges, Restricted Access to Membership Benefits

Well, I keep getting this response and they keep taking my money every month. since last year.
So someone should report stuff like this as well.

This is an automated response:

Your cancellation has been submitted to the Shacknews LTD credit card handler. If you signed up with a regular credit card this is all you need to do. You will not be charged by Shacknews LTD any further and your Mercury account access will be closed.

PAYPAL SUBSCRIBERS:
If you are a PayPal subscriber you cancel yourself. Just log in to www.paypal.com and select your original subscription in your transaction history and then click cancel and confirm. Please note that you must use the original subscription date transaction to cancel.

We hope you enjoyed the service! Check back with us at www.fileshack.com for more great gaming!

-FileShack Support

I don't really feel sorry for any of the gamers that subscribed/bought this game. They want to support a massively bug-riddled alpha of a game and the publishers that pushed the developers over the cliff, then they'll have to face the consequences.

This whole debacle makes me think about Master of Orion 3, but on a whole new level.

Nick & Co.,

Just so you guys know, this story was linked on the quite popular MMORPG forum http://www.fohguild.org in a thread that is now 3 pages. It was linked in the original post so if this page is getting an oddly high number of hits, that may be part of the reason. Nice writeup!

Hey,
I'm Ivan. I work at Flagship.

Just wanted to let you that 3% of the subscriber base had billing problems. Every one of those people has since been contacted individually and all the problems should have been resolved.

I installed Diablo 2 and decided to skip Hellgate. So far I'm having a blast (and am not having to pay for anything). It's funny how a game that came out 6 or 7 years ago is more fun than this recent big budget title. It's weird because the levels aren't any less repetitive than Hellgate's but they are more expansive feeing and the game mechanics are more fun so it doesn't matter. And don't even get me started on how much more interesting the characters and setting are.

Wow, I'm surprised at all the hate here.

I played the beta and decided it wasn't for me, but jeez...you'd think this game was eating babies and torching orphans.

I realize they're having problems, but come on...this isn't the end of the world. In a month or two they'll get all the launch jitters out and they'll be running smoothly. Most MMOs had disastrous launches and they survived.

Of course that doesn't mean the game will appeal to me. It's just not my thing.

Just my opinion, but i feel this game may have worked about 2 years ago, but its already dated upon release. I was in Beta and Alpha, I kept waiting for it to improve but it just seems to be getting worse.

I know im an exception, but I havent had any issues with subscriptions or gameplay, or the crashes, etc.

I am thoroughly enjoying playing this game so far.

meh, ill buy it for 14.95 on steam in 6 months

I only got billed once, but I haven't even finished the first act because of the landscapes available in the game at this time:

Steamy Tunnel. Steamy Hallway. Demolished Street.

The minions are almost counter intuitive and a downgrade from Diablo 2, killing themselves off randomly while you sort through your inventory, not even visable on the less then helpful radar.

I do have a LifeTime Sub, and will be finishing the campaign in MP mode when I get a tick more time. But overall I'm not impressed, hopefully they'll add a few larger, more free roam, areas... even Diablo 2 had those.

If this game dies it will be, in part, related to the devs lack of attention to what the gamers were wanting. Several months of comments about the repeated tile sets were met with "yes, but there's more than in D2, and everyone loves randomly generated levels." Complaints about the wep system and poorly designed talents were met with "there's LOTS more weps than in D2, and lots of talents in D2 were broken".

Breaking news....comparing yourself to a game shipped in 2000 is a VERY bad sign. The video game world might have changed a bit in their expectations in 7 years.

Hi I´am from Germany,

1. I subscribed, then the Hallowen Event startet all worked fine.
2. On the next Event, i can use the items but every item was without any description, it says "you must be a subscriber" ???
3. 2 Days later i wanted to cancel my subscribtion.
4. Now i log in and suprise I´am still a subscriber????
5. Same again, but the System doesn´t take my "CANCEL SUBSCRIPTION" first it says "Cancel Pending" but when i log out and in again i´am still a subsriber
6. SUPPORT In Germany isn´t available it links to the US Site, and there i can´t log in with my EU-Account ????? Can´t access the forum whatever

Great Game!! and it doesn´t matter if i only buy a game and play without subscribtion. But when the Creditcard System for subscribers doesnt work, its a shame for that company.

What if some folks out there were charged the lifetime subscription fee multiple times? D:

Do not subscribe for this game. They will steal your money.

What's up with the RTS level in act 2? Please tell me there aren't any more of these, its terrible.

I hope there's one of those Post Mortem articles written about this game. It sounded really promising a while back, and still might turn out to be something good, but it's obviously been pushed out before it was ready with so many bugs in so many areas and an apparently inadequately tested payments system.

Whoever's fault it is that it wasn't tested enough and pushed out early with bugs, I do feel sorry for the developers. Nobody wants to ship with known bugs, and it sucks to ship something and then have more bugs found when people start using it, and that's when it only affects gameplay/features. When it affects people's bank accounts that is pretty serious and no doubt the devs are working their arses off now and feeling very bad/guilty (or very angry about management forcing them to push it out, depending on whose fault all of this is).

Code that deals with money is like any other code, it's just numbers and algorithms, and it's easy to get blasé about it after a while but when it goes wrong it all becomes very serious again.

(Not that related but I find it amusing all the same: I remember the first "business" call I listened in on at work where people were talking about $10 million transactions like it was nothing to them but me and the other IT guy on the line were gesturing "HOLY SHIT!" to each other. Now I often write code which interacts with those kinds of figures and it's just a number to me now. Of course, we test the hell out of each release and do take things seriously, but it is just numbers and code like any other code.)

Hellgate Gate?

These guys founded Blizzard, you would think they would have learned a thing or two about a) taking your time to release a game and b) polish.

These two things are not present in Hellgate.

Personally I figure I'll just wait a year or two to pickup this game. At that time I'll have a computer that can run it very smoothly, it'll have been thoroughly patched, AND I'll be able to play with the main game and the boatloads of added content that was developed over the 1 or 2 years.

I've beta/alpha tested about a dozen MMO's and there have been releases far worse than Hellgate. Anyone remember SWG? Anyway, I haven't encountered one bug as of retail that I found in the beta...maybe I am just lucky. I get practically no lag, my latency hovers around 25, and I've ground through level 20.

Having made it through alpha and beta, I can tell you that it was the gaming media that first blew the bugs in the game out of proportion. Yes, it was trying at time, but thats why it was called a beta. A beta is not a game preview.

Anyway, the game is live and seems to be running fairly smoothly to me. The servers are being updated with game fixes every day and I regularly see 20k+ players online. Give it some time to breathe... the WOW lauch was 3x as bad with far more bugs - never mind that the servers were down so often during the first two months that they ended up giving everyone an extra two free weeks of subscription.

It is unfortunate that people are having problems with the payment issues (I am not one of them) - that is probably the worst bug of all.

I just reconciled my bank statement last night and noticed I was charged twice. I'm glad I'm not alone.

They should have call this Hellgate: Crdit Card Scam

WalletGate:Where is your money? It is quest!

Hellgate:Order Now!

Hellgate:Copy Paste Hallway

Hellgate:Sorry

HellGate:Skip Quest Text Please

HellGate:PCgamer

Another blunder. This is pretty upsetting, as Flagship was supposed to be the beacon of hope for another PC gaming company done right. While I think Hellgate will eventually be a "good" game, unless they re-write most of the dialog and add in voice overs to tell the friggin story, and give us some goddamn cutscences, it's nothing more than just a good game, so long they fix all the outstanding bugs.

I've got a good 35+ hours into this baby and while a part of me loves the game, the other half of my demented brain is telling me i'm a dumbass for buying it despite my many complaints in beta that I knew would be an issue come release. I guess it's the kid in me that is always striving to find the next big and best game. On the one hand, I'm loving my engineer to death, getting cool loot, building my character, yeah, it's fun, but at the same time, I'm crashing to desktop, I have to turn down the settings big time just to get it to run for more than an hour and without hiccups and crashes, and I have to keep re-specing my drone every time i log in and find a new gun to put on it since it's still losing guns/armor. Not to mention, the loot space for us non-subs is atrocious. I don't give a bleep what other games are like, this isn't enough space for a loot driven game, not even close.

I think if FSS did a better job at writing a fully fledged out RPG Epic Story, like we were all assuming they would, I think many people would be more inclined to be positive about this game. It's really hard though, seeing just how sloppy the story is, to the point were it doesn't even matter what the hell they are saying. At the the end of the game, you don't even feel like you did something on a large scale, it just feels, meh. ok. They really really needed some ingame cutscenes between acts and around large boss battles, you know, what we should expect in the year 2007. I would be excited for an expansion or premium content, but with a story to forget, there's nothing to be excited about other than new loot. Also, I don't think I'm ever playing another game with friggin sewers, I've had enough in this game to last a life time, over and over and over again.

The beta was their alpha, and retail is their beta. The game itself was shoved out WAY too early. I am just waiting on them to be acquired by EA. Mark my words!

I've been enjoying the game and have no problems. Lifetime.

I subscribed and a portal to hell opened up and took away my firstborn, then the game charged me TWICE

Then it crashed.

I remember reading about this game a year ago and thinking how freaking cool it looked. What the hell happened?

Oh right, EA bought Flagship. :(

This is hilarious, I'm glad I canceled my preorder.

Releasing a game full of bugs is one thing, having your credit card processing go apeshit and start charging people extra money is completely unacceptable.

It's too bad, this game has lots of potential but with all the negative press this game is getting and the slew of other games coming out this holiday season, it doesn't bode well for them.

They should have skipped the monthly fee, and just worked on an expansion pack.

Did they build this game on a sacred Indian Burial ground? This thing is cursed.

God, this game had so much good PR at first and so much potential that it was near the top of my list. What a difference a year makes.

Wow really? They screw ups keep on coming...

Know what I would pay $9.99 for? The behind-the-scenes story of Flagship studios from conception to present.

I'm enjoying Hellgate but I'm really glad i didn't subscribe.

That's what happens when you hire employees that don't know what SQL is.

I've been enjoying the game, but I'm not a subscriber. Stuff like this is unacceptable and needs to be fixed NOW.

:( down goes the game.. i was not impressed with the demo.. good thing they released a demo

This game was a joke in Beta with completely un-fun gameplay and the same two tilesets repeated indefinitely.

It then took the un-fun to a whole new level in that atrociously bad Demo.

And now the Retail game itself has won the un-fun Nobel Prize for a killer combination of the same two tile sets for 30+ levels, lag-o-riffic multiplayer with no one playing, and an innovative "$9.95 + $9.95 + $9.95 + $9.95 PER MONTHHHHHH" revenue system.

Way to go guys, way to go.

That'll teach 'em to leave Blizzard! :D