User Expanded Support to Travian

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Kpopgurl, Mar 26, 2018.

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  1. Royou

    Royou Avatar

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    I think you will find that the answer to this, will be that you will not be able to log onto the US store as all your account details will have been transferred to Travian system, and if you set up another account you will not be able to gift the purchased items to your main account as they have stopped that, so you will not be able to even gift it to a friend in the US region, that can then give it to you in game, only way I can see around this is to send your money to a friend/guildy and have them purchase it and give it to you in game. By them stopping gifting it say's to me that they have given this a lot of thought, and looked at all the go-arounds and tried to block them, the only people I see making on this are third parties.

    As I said in an earlier post, I'm worried that us Europeans will become the silent voice as we did with EA, EA were happy to take our money but never treated us with respect, and this is what Port are doing with their lack of a comment, as another player said earlier, it feels that the problem has been passed to Travian to deal with, so they can wash their hands of us :( I'm not saying that they have done that, just that is how it feels. I just hope that this is not the first footstep in the direction of separate servers for the different regions, and that next we will have player migration! just speculation at the moment but without any more information that is all we truly have.

    When I back Shroud in kickstarter I always looked at it as an investment and to help make a dream come true, I never thought that it would make me rich or that I'd ever be able to get all of that investment back, but I did at least believe that I would be able to recoup a good part of it, all I see now are walls being built in front of me, walls to prevent me from achieving that goal, I've had a pit in my stomach since the announcement of all this, and the more that our big questions go unanswered the more it feels like a betrayal of the support that us Europeans have given, as if they never really wanted us, just our money! Beginning to feel like I did with EA, a second rate unwanted player, that is best ignored :(

    "Edit" I keep looking in the mirror to see if I have sucker tattooed on my forehead, I feel that it is, if my wife knew how much I'd invested in the project, I'd be living in the garden shed, and fed food through a hatch in the door :( I pray that she never finds out :(
     
    Last edited: Mar 28, 2018
  2. Mykll

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    From the KS FAQ: "100% of the money raised in the Kickstarter will go to make a better game and the community involvement is a huge bonus for US."

    We all read that wrong. It was not a capitalized US as in Portalarium, it was talking about the huge bonus for being a United States community. Isn't everyone glad they went to Kickstarter so they didn't need publishers?
     
  3. Val Ravar

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    This starts to be not acceptable in my humble opinion. The account transfer date is closing in on us by the damn minute and we have less and less time to react. All of these questions should have been thought BEFORE even announcing the account transfer. (specially if this allready went totally south on the russia/easter europe account transfers).

    That being said, as @Spoon mentioned about emote rewards on accounts that allready have them and other rewards that are not "physical" - when the account transfer occurs will these be transferred to the bank as items?! OR do I have really limited time frame to do some recovering / selling / panic moves?? - its probably too late to add some code to actually save the digital things on our accounts IF this is the 1st time Port / Travian thinks of how to handle these digital goods.

    There is LOT of other players that haven't read this thread, me included. I just found it out and read it and allready there has been more than half a week gone from time to react.

    Second thing I dind find answer here but was asked multiple times is: How are telethon donations handled?

    Where I live there is no VAT or tax on small donations (under 5000€/3 years). Telethons are donation/crowd funding events and should not be handled from Travian site at all if there is a delay of anykind. I should be able to donate money to anyone I want, period.
    This means that I want to access portalariums site for this thing. For others I can use Travians front and pay more (or buy my cotos ingame with ingame gold). I should have choice in this matter and not to have to resort on VPN or other tricks to get to the actual site to get telethon rewards. Remember that in the past part of the telethon rewards have been non items / purely account bound so I cant pay for my american friend to get all the things - I would miss out with out say on the matter.

    Mayby just postpone the transfer for like 2 months and really figure things out before this gets even worse mess than it is.

    @Cerus @Berek
     
  4. Royou

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    I have a few questions, for me they are big ones.

    With my pledge I received a lot of items, some that I planned to sell at some point, a few most likely for in game gold, but the rarer ones I was thinking of Real money. But I am now worried as with Travian T&C's that it will get me banned from the game.

    How does this affect RMT????????? are the items/goods that I received due to my pledge level affected by this if I sell them? the pledge items have never been sold in the store so don't have a price, so anything sold will be sold as a profit, so where do I and others stand over this? I recieved my items from Port not Travian but as I will/may migrate does this put me under Travian T&C's as to the sale of items??????
     
  5. Kara Brae

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    Although it would be interesting to know the details of the pricing, I don't think I have a right to know that and I don't expect any further clarification.
    I think it is only reasonable to expect that Travian will earn something on the games. They can't work for nothing, and they certainly
    are
    working. The Travian website looks better than the Portalarium one, and they have integrated the foreign language forums into the existing ones, adding convenience to our foreign language speaking players. If they are successful in marketing the game in the countries they are managing, they will be adding value to all players, including those located in the US.

    Although I have been highly critical in this thread and I am still quite angry, my dissatisfaction stems from the completely inadequate way the migration to Travian was communicated. I blame Portalarium for this and not Travian. Travian, as a recent newcomer to the world of SotA, could hardly have been expected to know what questions needed to be answered regarding store credit, COTO pricing, unclaimed rewards, POTs, etc. etc. It was the job of Portalarium to work with them to make sure all would run smoothly. Thank heavens we have someone like @Spoon who is willing to invest hours and hours of time to get things clarified that should have been clarified before the announcement was made.
     
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  6. Numa

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    Tell her early and get your garden shed sentence shortened by 50% :) She's bound to find out eventually you know. Or sell some stuff so the total amount isn't too large :eek:
     
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  7. Last Trinsic Defender

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    Yeah guys. In the end stays the sentence: "What did you expect?". Lets summarize the troubles.

    Many here, including me, warned about the uprising problems with DSG18 (changes in data-warehousing) and the tax-problems. Some of my posts got deleted and the admin told me that this is offtopic. Ok - now it's ontopic. Did anyone really think that Travian is the perfect partner - ever took a look at their games and their work in the last years? And it can get worse when SOTA isn't the top-game they expect .. then Portalarium may lose the european partner and the invested money is "frozen" if not lost.
    Additionally many warned that paying a big sum - some payed here a really really big sum - in advance is risky and paying a monthly fee is preferable because I can head out of this contract anytime. Now many made an investment and have to live with it under unsatisfying conditions. And on top the start of this game was ruined with bad PR, rants, deleted thread at this board (I saw a thread vanishing yesterday with already 3 pages about the state of this game) and many more troubles.

    Was this foreseeable? Certainly.
    Was the reaction of the press evil? Nah. Writing every day about new games with no new ideas, no inspiration and maybe the 23rd part of an old idea is depressing. SOTA offers possibilities to rant, the lack of improvements is inspiring and rollout-troubles are the wind under the wings of journalists.

    Is this the end? Nope, don't think so. Portalarium made a big bunch of money and can be happy. They had something to do the last 10 yrs and followed their dream. Many players found fun and friends in this game. Some have been angry and left. Some are furious right now. Nothing out of the normal. Travian may not be the best partner but that wasn't EA back in the Origin-times either ;->

    There is always a last sidenote .. it is certainly not the best time to invest more into this game. An episode2 and the monetary support for it has to be postponed - not by Portalarium but by the customers.
     
  8. Cock of the North

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    This thread is so confusing now. I basically want to know how much I am going to have to pay for a COTO and if I am going to excluded from Post Mortems gift rewards which was pretty much going to be the only reason I was ever gonna buy COTOs anyway.
     
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  9. Pounce

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    Artisan backer
    Shoved of to another company
    Way to go Lord British
     
  10. Aurelius Silverson

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    Fair enough, although it seems reasonable to point out that the tax related issues were raised in a forum admin post,

    I suspect the heart of the question is not the taxes levied though, since those are massively complicated and vary greatly both for countries within the EU and European countries outside that jurisdiction, which are not under the control of Travian - what does at core matter is what is determining the basic price before those taxes come in to play. As far as I can tell, that's simply a decision made by Travian - which is not something we can fairly or usefully debate since it's an internal business decision of theirs - but the repercussions of that decision, which are then further modified by the relevant taxes each of us will face, matter a great deal to us who have to pay the money.

    Significant discrepancies between the price from Travian and the Portalarium store price would be troublesome for both of you as well as us, since one simple alternative for the people still playing will be to buy coto in-game for gold, or from friends in the US - or vice versa in the admittedly unlikely case that they are significantly cheaper from Travian. This isn't a 'tax' issue - it's a 'which of you gets our money' issue. If, to avoid a continually fluctuating price by linking frequently to current exchange rates, there's a fixed price for a given period on the Travian store, in an internet driven world any significant difference in the price players can obtain the coto means they will 'buy' from the cheaper option. I can't see any way Travian can come out ahead on this.
     
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  11. ChavaiotH

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    Maybe my question is stupid, but why should I pay VAT for virtual items in game?
    I pay VAT for the game itself. Thats ok, but virtual items?
     
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  12. Cordelayne

    Cordelayne Bug Hunter

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    According to this website, sadly yes:

    The EU VAT Rules for digital goods
    The Value Added Tax, or VAT is a general tax in the European Union assessed on the value added to goods and services.

    According to the EU VAT rules on digital goods, a merchant must pay VAT, if customers from EU countries purchase digital goods from their online store. The VAT rate is based on the EU country where the buyer is located regardless of from where store is.

    https://support.ecwid.com/hc/en-us/...-with-the-VAT-Rules-for-Selling-Digital-Goods
     
  13. dopedwizard

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    I do not know much about Travian except that they are in Munich, Germany and that their first game as far as I remember is a browser game called Travian.... so far so good. What actually pisses me off is that I enjoyed the telethons and that everyone was in one boat.. now I feel like a second class citizen. I hated it in WOW and in GW2 that you could not properly play with people state side and this game actually did allow it (and hopefully continues to) but this seems like the start of the end of the one thing this game has absolutely going for it.. the community. Hope they proof me wrong but this seldom happens in the PC game industry.
     
  14. Hornpipe

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    http://lmgtfy.com/?q=vat+virtual+items

    > https://support.ecwid.com/hc/en-us/...-with-the-VAT-Rules-for-Selling-Digital-Goods

    According to the EU VAT rules on digital goods, a merchant must pay VAT, if customers from EU countries purchase digital goods from their online store.

    Note that it's for the European Union. If you are not living in the EU, VAT rules may vary, but not so much I think as long as the VAT usually apply to any purchase, no matter the concerned good.
     
  15. Berek

    Berek Portalarian Emeritus Dev Emeritus

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    Hi all!

    Thanks for the great questions! We have updated the transition FAQ again. Please see the new reply by @Cerus here: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...d-user-expanded-support-travian-games.114679/

    Please read through the updated FAQ, and then if needed, feel free to contact the appropriate support channel if you have any questions specific to your needs.

    Be assured that Portalarium and Travian Games are working on all necessary steps in order to have a smooth transition and customer experience for all players. We will of course keep you informed about all relevant information and announcements about the support as the date comes closer. Updates will be published here in the forums and elsewhere.

    We are going to close this thread as you have posted about it becoming confusing due to the large amount of comments and questions. It's also becoming difficult to keep our messaging clear to all of you, so we again encourage you to please keep watch on the FAQ for updates.

    We will also have a separate VAT announcement coming out shortly and posted here in the forums as well. Please standby for that update.

    Thank you for expressing your concerns, as they help us on ensuring a smooth transition for everyone!
     
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