Do You Want Me to Subscribe or Not??

My 60-day pre-paid subscription ran out yesterday evening.  Because my husband and I are using SWTOR as our long-distance dates while he works away from home, we decided it was worth the money to go ahead and place the game on a recurring subscription for now.  (Money being tight enough we weren't sure we should ding our card for $30 right this minute for a 60-day prepaid . . .)

Accordingly, I went to the website and clicked my way through, receiving the appropriate response which said I'd successfully subscribed.

I knew from the message I had received that I may need to restart the game client to see the changes, which I did.

But when I logged on, this is what I saw.

Hmmm?  Did I log in to the game client too quickly?  I gave it a few minutes, then tried again, but the result was the same.

Thinking, somehow, that repeatedly doing the same thing would bring a different result (Hey, it sometimes happens in computers,) I exited and restarted the game client twice more.  No change.

I checked my subscription status on the SWTOR website.  This one produced mixed results.  On the one hand, the main account page said I wasn't a subscriber, but on the other hand, in the details, it said I had 29 subscriber days left.

With a sigh, since it was our scheduled long-distance date, I decided to just live with Preferred for the evening and submit an in-game ticket.

But guess what?  You can't submit an in-game ticket when you are Preferred.  (Even if you are really a subscriber, trying to tell someone the system isn't working.)

Every time we turned around, there was something which I couldn't do.  We die . . . "Um, Honey, I'm not sure it's going to let me rez here . . ."  (Luckily, he could just rez me.)  I think about picking an herb . . . "Um, it's not going to let me do this unless I unlearn one of my skills . . . Not likely!"  (Remember, I've submitted my money and am waiting for the computer to catch up with me.)  At the end of the night . . . "Well, we're done on Tatooine.  Let's just Fleet Pass."  "Um . . ."  "Let me guess:  you can't Fleet Pass."

Of course, my pants couldn't match my top, but I could survive that (After so many years in WoW, I can deal with that . . .) but not being able to hide my head slot (again, after I've PAID my money) was annoying.

My husband comforted me by saying that on Tatooine, this was probably pretty sensible headgear.  (Living in a desert climate as I do, I could see his point.  One windy spring, I priced bourkas, thinking I'd rather wear one of those as I did my outside chores, instead of having all the sand get in my eyes, nose, ears, and teeth . . .)  But even so, I'd rather be able to see my eyes.

After we'd finished playing, I exited the game and tried starting the game client again . . . no luck.

I finally put in a message via the "Contact Customer Service" link, somewhere around 11:00 pm, but as I received no feedback from the webpage, I had no idea if it actually went through.  Just in case, I did it again, with an apology if it turned out to be a duplicate.  I decided to give it until today before I started calling.

This morning, I checked my e-mail and found a message time-stamped 1:10 am saying my subscription had been changed.  I guess someone got the message.  Now to check tonight to see how many subscription days it says I have remaining.  If it ticks down, and I find they've not given me back my one lost evening, I'm going to have a word with them.

Postscript:  I guess nobody did get my message . . . it just took the computer that long to process it.  This morning, one day later, I received responses to my tickets, saying for this issue, I would have to call them.  And, yes, my account time was docked.  So in essence, I paid for an evening I did not get.  I guess I'll have to pick up my phone and spend some time on it this afternoon . . . /sigh . . .