A player spent over $300 on Overwatch and then lost all unlocks. Even with in-game credits, he was in the negative.
Errors in games are simply part of everyday gaming life. However, it becomes more serious when money is involved, such as when purchasing loot boxes in Overwatch. On Xbox, the user Kaleptik enjoyed playing Overwatch and after spending nearly $300 on loot boxes during the Summer Games, he had every single item available during the event. One could be happy and satisfied with that, right?
- On September 1, a strange error occurred. After logging into the game, Kaleptik noticed that he suddenly had 100 loot boxes in his inventory – and his credit balance had fallen to the negative value of -1,815.
- 3 days later (September 4), the loot boxes had vanished and the credit counter continued to decline to -8,535.
- On September 6, the next error followed: He earned a loot box in the game but received 101 boxes – Kaleptik had enough and contacted customer support. However, the support team couldn’t help him, as they had little insight into server actions on consoles – he was advised to contact Microsoft (who – surprise – also couldn’t help).
- Shortly thereafter, on September 13, the incident reached its peak. With 42,535 credits in the negative, unlocking things was out of the question. But that wasn’t all: More than half of Kaleptik’s hero gallery was taken from him – a large portion of his unlocks disappeared.
Kaleptik decided to do what everyone does nowadays – post the story on Reddit. Customer service representative Araxom took on the case and set many levers in motion. After extensive research, it seems the reason was a PayPal refund request that was immediately revised. The servers registered this request, but likely not the cancellation – hence, Microsoft’s customer service could not detect an error, as there was no reversal in the system, but there was an effect.
As compensation, Kaleptik received 500 fresh loot boxes – 400 of them from the “Summer Games” event, allowing him to successfully complete his collection again. He is also out of the negative credits. Lucky him, just before interest was due.
The ranking in Overwatch is now more accurate – but not all fans are happy about it.
