Moria Expeditionary

Turbine announced officially that the Mines of Moria expansion for Lord of the Rings Online will be released November 18th, 2008. As part of the announcement, Turbine is offering current subscribers an early digital upgrade price for the expansion, $29.99. You don’t get a hard copy of the game, but it’s $10 off what you pay for the box. In addition, you get the title “Moria Expeditionary,” two cosmetic cloaks, three tokens for items to be made available on the game’s release, and reduced subscription options.

I went ahead and upgraded last night. At least, I tried to. Reading the fine print, apparently the digital upgrade isn’t available for residents off Washington, California, and Texas. Something to do with taxation. On a whim, I went ahead and hit submit. What’s the worst that could happen aside from a rejection screen?

To my surprise, my order went through! I logged into the game, and sure enough, the title and one of the cosmetic cloaks was already available. I logged out and hit the forum boards to see if I could discern why my order went through when it shouldn’t have.

Turns out Turbine has a bug in their billing system that isn’t properly filtering out Washington, California, and Texas customers. My order went through when it wasn’t supposed to. After I checked my email receipt, I saw the mistake. The game was billed at $0, sales tax at $29.99.

The good news from all this is Turbine knows of the mistake, but won’t retroactively attempt to correct the customers that accidentally got through. A Turbine forum moderately wrote that the company would have to work out the tax mistake implications on their end.

Which is great news for me. I saved $10, got some phat lewtz, and a cool new title. Plus, when MoM goes live November 18th, the game should already be downloaded a ready to go.

Now all I have to do is get my minstrel to 50 by then