Currently every e-mail I send is returned with “we didn’t take your money”. EA online store is where I bought it from, but they’re refusing to admit it and refusing to refund.

If I where you I’d have absolutely nothing to do with EA or GOA. You won’t get your login from GOA and you won’t get your money back from EA or whereever you got it from.

STAY AWAY, ITS ALL BAD

Already got hold of my US Beta Key, registered a master account, and now downloading the US version of WAR.

Hope others will see the light and do the same thing, if enough of us do it, someone might actually realize how bad things have got and do something about it.

Sounds simple, but there are a couple of snags. You need to get a US game key, which means getting a US copy of the game. If you try the US Direct2Drive site, it’ll redirect you to the UK D2D site as soon as it sees your credit card billing address is not stateside (and it won’t accept Paypal for it either IIRC) and some US game retailer sites won’t even ship this particular game to Europe.

I’ve managed to get an international order from amazon.com (not .co.uk) accepted, together with the outrageous delivery charges. Only problem with this is that the Amazon.com open beta keys are fubar (I’m trying to get the issue resolved atm), although the early access key works and I have activated it ok.

Also, I imagine that the box won’t arrive for a couple of days after the live release date … so I will have a delay in getting my hands on the live release key. Still, Mythic mentioned (somewhere) that there would be a grace period of a few days to allow boxes to arrive.

Actually getting your hands on the US client, to download the game for open beta and early access is a simple (but long) matter of downloading the beta client torrent. From everything I have read, it should patch itself up to early access and then to release, at the appropriate times.

From my experience with DAoC, the last thing I want to do is play a game that forces me to deal with GOA in any way, shape, form, or fashion. So even if I actually did want to play on the Euro servers (for the better pings and timezone populations), I’d rather not play the game at all (or maybe have half my liver cut-out with a spoon) than have to deal with the incompetence and “laisse faire” that is GOA. As it is, most of my online gaming buddies are going to be on US servers, so hopefully I will be able to join them.

From now on, all discussion on politics, EU corruption, markets, economic theory and semi-relevent Warhammer stuff shall continue….through the medium of dance.

And this is AFTER Reuters reports a slump in the Pound’s worth because of recession fears. Whilst it’s theoretically possible for the Euro to overtake the Pound, it isn’t likely in practice because most EU countries don’t have as liberal business laws as Britain and those that do like Poland have their workers attracted to Britain.

EDIT: missed Gorgeras’s answer. But I have a nasty sense there may be more to it than that.

Oh hell, may as well give GOA the benefit of the doubt for a couple of weeks. But if their apparent competence doesn’t improve, then knit me a Stars’n'Stripes and slap a Stetson on my head – I’ll be joining the Yanquis.

And it doesn’t matter about the normal ups and downs of the money markets: the Euro will never be as strong as the Pound. There are a number of rather solid reasons for why this is the case, the main one being that the EU as an organisation is undemocratic, anti-competitive and intentionally obscure. The common market that was promised hasn’t happened because even the continental nations are just not suited to federalism like the American states are. Whilst the Dollar is worth almost the same in Florida as it is in Oklahoma, the Euro in Italy can often be worth a very different amount from the Euro in Ireland. Europe is not a mono-culture like the US, which is young and whilst having a diverse people, does not have diverse internal influences like Europe, which has nations almost a thousand years old.