As you may notice, there is a new Flash Offer available on Steam, Android, iOS, Xbox today (sorry PS4 players, due to Sony’s guidelines, we’re not allowed to have time-limited offers like this on their console ).
Now… to summarize… there is an odd “trick” available on Xbox only where you could purchase limited-quantity items as many times as you wanted, even though those items didn’t appear outside the game in Microsoft’s Official storefront. I believe it’s done through a third party site.
A handful of players (20-30) did this during the last Flash Offer, and I tip my hat to the fine person who had the persistence to sit there and make almost 40 purchases!
Due to the nature of the way the Xbox store is organized, while we can’t stop you doing that, we can instead control what you receive.
The current flash offer has a limit of 3 purchases for US$4.99 each.
While you CAN buy it a 4th time using the above method, it will now only give you the standard $4.99 purchase of Gems (+ VIP Points) from the store.
So PLEASE… don’t try to exploit that! Refund requests, as always are not something we can handle here, and you’ll need to deal with Microsoft and explain what you did!
Like most late game layers I’ve got enough traitstones for all upcoming troops and enough wisdom orbs for Zuul’Goth so I won’t be buying this but if you ever want to do this with ascension orbs I’ll more than likely buy all 3.
They should only offer orange and blue orbs, but never green or purple.
I would buy blue ones over orange ones every time! For the same price or lesser price, like 3$.
It’s not odd, it’s not a trick, and it’s not new. It’s how the MS store has always worked. You can click ‘buy’ button multiple times. Each time brings you through the Credit Card confirmation screen too.
Last I checked, you can buy unlimited daily dungeon deals and guild elite’s too.
They aren’t dumb and know this happens, but due to specifics of the MS store it is risky for them to try and do something about it. If a bunch of people request refunds, it could go south for them really quickly. And if they say “please don’t do this”, it’ll just cause more people to try and figure out how to do it.
So this time they’re trying a new strategy: explicitly explain that there are measures in place to thwart the people who do it, and explain that after 3 purchases you get something different for $4.99. This is probably based on having a handful of discussions with MS and getting confirmation that “so long as you are delivering a published item for a published price, no refund request is valid.”
So they’ve made an explicit contract: you can get up to 3 of these deals for the agreed-upon price, and every deal past that gives you something else. The only way to buy the 4th and beyond is via an attempt to make an exploit, and now they have confirmation the refund requests will be considered in bad faith by MS.
But “being told it’s OK” by MS and “it being OK” can be 2 different things, so that’s another reason to try it with a flash sale. If MS gets confused and swings the hammer against them, oh well, they’ll just go back to not talking about it and give us all worse Flash Sale items. If MS keeps their promise and doesn’t swing the hammer, then it’s worth converting all the other limited sales to do something similar.
I hope this extends to all Orbs in future offers. I’m refering specifically about Orb of Ascensions!!!
I LOVE how you have completely violated your own internal rule to allow X1 players to buy things when Sony players could not due to the extreme limitations placed upon developers by the PSN. Please extend your newfound freedom to “Redeem codes” that were developed and up and working on the Xbox, but then disabled on the X1 “for platform parity” due to Sony’s stance against giving out free stuff to their players.
Probably not long for X1 players with how you can buy unlimited through the shop, that hack Sirrian did to fix the ‘exploit’ can’t be a permanent way he fixes this.
).
