Blizzard Offers Full Refund to Disgruntled South Korean Diablo 3 Players

Blizzard has made the decision to offer gamers in South Korea full refunds for Diablo 3 amidst backlash against the server issues it suffered at launch.

The move comes after the government of South Korea began investigation into the Blizzard Seoul office.

Many experienced issues logging in to Diablo 3’s servers at the title launch, encountering the now-infamous Error 37. This mightn’t have been a huge problem for a lot of single-player games but Diablo 3 requires an always-on connection.

Before this offer Blizzard hadn’t previously offered anything in the way of compensation, but in South Korea consumer protection law requires companies to offer a full refund for any issues out of the control of consumers.

Wall Street Journal posted a translation from a post on the Korean Battle.net site, explaining that Diablo 3 players with a level under 40 are able to apply for a refund between June 25^th and July 3^rd.

Blizzard has also come out and said players lower than level 20 can claim a refund within 14 days of purchase from hereon out. By the looks of things, it’s too bad if you’re over level 40.

Blizzard has issued the following statement on the status of Diablo 3’s game service:

“As you may be aware, the Diablo III real-money auction house launched in the Americas game region earlier this week and in Europe on Friday, and players are successfully buying and selling the spoils of war with their fellow heroes of Sanctuary. With the arrival of this major new feature – and the recent one-month anniversary of the game’s release – we wanted to provide you with a quick update on the state of Diablo III and catch you up on some of our upcoming plans for the game.

“Recently, we gave players a preview of what’s in store in the upcoming patch 1.0.3, which includes some key changes to item drop rates and the challenge of the Inferno difficulty level, along with Blacksmith and Jeweler changes designed to make them more appealing to players in the late game. We recently applied additional hotfixes to address some key gameplay issues, including changes related to player survivability in co-op games, and released patch 1.0.2c to address some bugs and other minor technical issues.

“Prior to the real-money auction house release, we issued our first wave of suspensions and bans to players found to be cheating or using hacks, bots, or other game modifications. Read more on our stance on cheating in Diablo III here.

“We also wanted to provide an update on the status of the Diablo III service for European players. As we announced previously, Diablo III represented the biggest PC-game launch in history and became the fastest-selling PC game of all time. However, as discussed in our earlier post-launch update, despite our very aggressive projections in terms of server infrastructure, Diablo III players initially experienced some difficulty logging in to the game due to the sheer number of people accessing our servers at the moment the game launched and at peak times.

“In the weeks following the game’s May 15 launch, we added hardware infrastructure to improve capacity, and during that time the game’s European servers were accessible and stable for the great majority of the time. Since June 2, players in Europe have been able to consistently access and play the game in their home region, though we occasionally perform routine maintenance from time to time. We are continuing to work around the clock to provide the best possible service and deliver a great gameplay experience for Diablo III players around the globe.”