I signed my six year old up for Wizard 101 which purports to be a free on line adventure type game where you interact with other people and develop a character and acquire things for your character. However, once you start to play, in order to get the cool stuff, you have to buy crowns. Crowns cost ten dollars for every 5,000 and some of the cooler stuff costs 8-9 thousand crowns (nearly twenty dollars per item). So, I bought my kid a forty dollar starter pack with a bunch of cool stuff including some pets and then a week or two later another ten dollars in Crowns as a little present. He came to me hysterical and crying that he had left his pets from the game in his backpack or in his home and now they were gone. I spent an hour or two trying to help him find them but couldn't. He was heavily invested in developing his character and Wizard 101 had become his favorite past time so I contacted the company to see what had happened and this was their response to me: "Hi there, I've checked your sons account and it does appear a bunch of items as well as pets were deleted the day you bought the packs. However, the items were deleted over a period of time (at least 5 minutes) which tells us that they were intentionally manually deleted and not caused by any sort of bug. I also checked your account for evidence of hacking just to be safe and found none, so it does not appear as though the account was hacked. I'm sorry but there is nothing we're able to do about this. Please let us know if you have further questions!" Ok, I believe it - it is entirely possibly, actually likely, that my 6 year old may have screwed up somehow. But to permanently delete items that I paid for? To have a game that allows a six year old to make such mistakes and then when they confirm that all his items were deleted for no apparent reason to tell me "there is nothing we're able to do about this." Obviously, they could replace his items but want me to rebuy them. I can't afford to spend another fifty dollars everytime my kid makes a mistake. He is heart broken. I wish I never got him started.
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