by Jeromy "Doc" Adams

This website, along with a host of others, expressed its incredulity at the 10 dollar price tag originally tied to the Player's Pack Black Edition for Rainbow Six: Vegas. Less than 24 hours later, the Pack disappeared from XBL Marketplace entirely. Another days passed and it returned absolutely free! As someone who now has to wait 8 weeks for a refund, I have a couple of questions about this whole thing.

1. Was this really a mistake? - The word free (or the number Zero) are quite different than the number 800 (MS Points) .
2. Did MS and Ubi get caught trying to make a few bucks on what they thought was a slam dunk.
3. Why is the Red Edition going free as well? Will I get a refund for that too?

Do you folks that were following this situation think that this was just a simple clerical error on the part of some digital stockboy? Or do you think Ubi and MS went too far and got caught with their hand in the cookie jar?

I think their following Manhunt 2. They wanted to make themselves look like the good guys.

"Oh we're sorry we really didn't mean to make the error of charging for the Black Pack, we're gonna change it to free and give those who paid for it a refund. Ah heck just for the fun of it we're gonna give you the Red Pack for free too."

I read this story on 1UP.com last night and it seemed that's just what happened to the person writing the article. He was saying about how great it was they were getting it for free and how great it was to be able to keep saying free and refund and all that jazz and that more than made up for it.

From what I remember you will get a refund on Red Pack also.

If I remember right, MS doesn't like to put things on there for free (GoW maps for instance). Maybe Ubi wanted it to be free, but the big boys wouldn't let them do that at first then saw how little the stuff sold and so therefor they make it free. Possibility?

Oh a lot of people bought it...

I remember when I couldn't find the Black pack because they had removed. I had to call Doc and make sure I was looking in the right place. I think its shitty that both packs are now free. It kind of makes me wonder why spend my hard earned allowance when in a few months it'll be free.

I remember reading that Ubisoft had publicly stated that they would not charge gamers for xtra content if it was given for free on another console. So when the ps3 R6V came out, it contained the black and red map packs... without additional charge. Well, outrage ensued and Ubi said that the black pack charge was a mistake... Anyway, i also read that people that bought the black pack would get a refund....As for those of us suckers that bought the red pack.... no refund for you. Sucks to be an early adopter... hey? is that an iphone? brb.

I'm glad I didn't buy when I saw that. Thank You Forza 2! That really sucks for those who did shell out the points. Hope the refunds are quick for you.

Seems strange that you have to wait 8 weeks for a refund - surely they could just credit you back the 800 XBL points - or am I being too simplistic here?

I try and try not to be one of the many MS-bashers. But they just seem to make it so easy...

Seems strange that you have to wait 8 weeks for a refund - surely they could just credit you back the 800 XBL points - or am I being too simplistic here?

I try and try not to be one of the many MS-bashers. But they just seem to make it so easy...




Pretty tame for a bash. Sadly this isn't a typical credit of points. The way I understand it (from the GamerScoreBlog guys) is you're being credited the price of those points to your credit card (which typically results in a multi-week delay). Now that we've gotten that out of the way, why in the hell does it take so long for credit card companies to credit money that they can instantly take from you? It's simple. The longer they have your money (in aggregate with thousands or millions of other people's money) they earn interest on it. And since you're the one typically in debt to them, they're not too terribly concerned what you'll do to them if they don't get you your money quickly so it's all rolled up into some "when we process all credits at the end of the month... but if it's too close to the end of the month already, it'll possibly get bumped to next month"... I wish I had a small fortune to start my own credit card company... those guys are "legal" bandits!

The longer they have your money (in aggregate with thousands or millions of other people's money) they earn interest on it.

...don't get me started on that - I only have 10000 chars to use up. Here in the UK, there was a bit of a storm about the time it takes a cheque to clear, seeing as money transfers are instantaneous here - but that seems to have died down somewhat. But it's early, I haven't had my first coffee yet, and I would like to stay calm.

As for not being much of an MS-bash, I mainly keep that for offline. I (as most people) work in Windows, but quite a bit of my job is developing in Visual Studio, linking into IIS, etc etc. So I see the gruesome underbelly of the hideous dragon sat perched on my hardware - so my MS-Bashing gets restricted to when the whole edifice comes crumbling down due to it cratering *in* some error-trapping code - maybe I should build some error-trapping code to catch the error-trapping code... totally off-topic, and potentially never ending. However, my first coffee of the day has turned up. Time to concentrate on more important things...

Seems strange that you have to wait 8 weeks for a refund - surely they could just credit you back the 800 XBL points - or am I being too simplistic here?

I try and try not to be one of the many MS-bashers. But they just seem to make it so easy...




Might want to tread lightly with the MS bashing... lol