WTF! Vault empty! I want a refund of everything.

[anonymous_user_128d48a2]

@jwatte;590323

I guess you didn’t read my original post?

Free time is extremely precious to me. There is no next day to wait for, Not being available today is like booking a vacation, only to be told that the hotel will be available a week after you arrive, after you’ve already gone back.

What I, as a customer, am buying from EPIC is the access to content. They choose to give creators money to provide content to them, but they themselves provide the access.
When I, as a customer, don’t get the access, I expect EPIC to make me whole. Whatever business relationship EPIC chooses to have with creators, is none of my business.

Btw: 45 days? Most big box stores don’t pay their suppliers until 90 days after sale (not delivery) – because the stores, in turn, don’t get paid by the credit card companies until 90 days after customer purchase settlement. So 45 days sounds unsafe on behalf of EPIC. Chargebacks can come way after that.
And, yes, this means that the seller of silverware shipping stuff to Target to be sold, does so without immediate payment. In fact, Target probably charges them a slotting fee to put them on shelves at all.
Life in retail is absolutely brutal on the sellers. Because the customer reaaly shouldn’t have to pay if they don;t get what they pay for. As a customer, I’m OK with this!

Next time my banks ATM fails, I’ll make sure to claim my compensation from them

[eXandric]

Try it again, the launcher is working again just fine for me.

Hope your huge game company didn’t lose so many profits from the 12 hours of downtime.
/s

[jwatte]

Next time my banks ATM fails

If their payment infrastructure fails, they absolutely make customers whole!
I’ve seen a bank bungle paycheck deiivery, and they covered any late/bounce charges.

Look, my beef is with EPIC, for ruining a day of my life, not with the creator community.
You’re saying I shouldn’t complain to EPIC because they may in turn complain to creators? That makes no sense to me.

Anyway, day’s over, and the system is back, but my opportunity was lost.
If you don’t have the work-family-house-medical-financial stress with a bunch of teenage kids on top, just be happy that an undisturbed day isn’t that rare for you!

[anonymous_user_7b31d2ec]

@jwatte;590379

If their payment infrastructure fails, they absolutely make customers whole!
I’ve seen a bank bungle paycheck deiivery, and they covered any late/bounce charges.

Look, my beef is with EPIC, for ruining a day of my life, not with the creator community.
You’re saying I shouldn’t complain to EPIC because they may in turn complain to creators? That makes no sense to me.

Anyway, day’s over, and the system is back, but my opportunity was lost.
If you don’t have the work-family-house-medical-financial stress with a bunch of teenage kids on top, just be happy that an undisturbed day isn’t that rare for you!

Next time, you should read the EULA more carefully. I’m not your lawyer, but I am capable of reading words; even big, fancy legal ones! Let’s read the EULA again together shall we?
(The emphasis here is mine; worth noting that in the original document, the text is entirely in bold.)

The Licensed Technology, the Marketplace, and all other materials and information provided by Epic (the “Epic Materials”) are provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis, “with all faults” and without warranty of any kind…]Epic, its licensors, and its and their affiliates do not guarantee continuous, error-free, virus-free, or secure operation of or access to the Epic Materials.

Wow! There’s lots of large legal words, but I’m fairly sure it means that they won’t offer compensation if the servers are down. They don’t even seem to promise any form of uptime at all! It also has this to say about refunds, specifically:

E. No Refunds
Except to the extent required by law, all payments, fees and royalties are non-refundable under all circumstances, regardless of whether or not this Agreement has been terminated.

What’s that? You read something different somewhere else? Maybe you saw something vague about refunds on the FAQ? Your cousin’s friend says they once got a Marketplace refund from Epic? Tough! Well-written EULAs are a bit like Simon Says. If you read something contradictory elsewhere, it only counts if the EULA says, and what it says is:

This …] constitute[s] the entire agreement between you and Epic relating to the subject matter covered by this Agreement. All other communications, proposals, and representations with respect to the subject matter covered by this Agreement are excluded.

It’s clear that any refund they choose to provide is intended as a courtesy, not a requirement. If you actually bothered searching, you’d notice that The FAQ gives steps to ask for a refund. “Complain on the Marketplace forums” is not one of them. A strict refund policy is necessary because the Marketplace lacks any type of DRM. That’s because DRM would be impractical—for some assets, impossible!—to implement. If they give you a refund, there’s nothing physically preventing you from retaining a copy of any asset already downloaded.

So yes, your “beef” might be with Epic; but it’s still the creator community that’s forked.

But let’s ignore the EULA, and pretend that you are entitled to some sort of compensation. What is a fair amount, anyway?

You’ve bought a lifetime license to use assets purchased on the Marketplace. You couldn’t access the Marketplace for around four hours (from time of post to time of developer all-clear response.) Let’s round that up to 24 hours, since you claim the whole day’s opportunity was lost. I don’t know exactly how much you’ve spent, but I don’t care. In this make-believe, fairytale land of ours where everything’s made up and EULAs don’t matter, we can just pretend you spent $38,459.99 on the Marketplace. This is enough money to license every asset on the Marketplace at the current price! Let’s pretend you’ll live only another 40 years, after which both you and your license will expire.

Assuming all of the above were true, then the amount “owed” to you in compensation for one day of downtime comes out to $2.63. Tell you what; PM me your PayPal address and I’ll happily send you that amount, or a calculated amount based on cost of assets licensed versus your life expectancy, whichever is better. It won’t be much, but it’s more than what you’d get from Epic.

(Fun fact: Even in a worst case scenario where you bought a license to every single asset on the Marketplace yesterday just to find out that you’re going to die in a year, a fair compensation for one day of downtime would only amount to $105.30. That’s still negligible compared to a full refund.)