MagicalTux in Japan

Geekness brought me to Japan!

Posts Tagged Moving worldwide

MagicalTux vs. Microsoft – VICTORY !

Jun 19

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude, IRL | No Comments

A while ago I posted about moving in another country with a XBox 360. At this time it was cool since I still had a french credit card, but when I closed my bank account in France, things went somehow awry. I had to buy a 12 months xbox live code on eBay France to get my account working since you cannot add a japanese credit card on a french xbox live account…

However microsoft had tried to bill my french CC once more and it failed. Of course it’ll fail but for some reason Microsoft has a weird billing scheme. If it tries to bill but it fails, it will still give you what you tried to pay, then it will bug you every now and then to get your money. This is really stupid (they could just don’t give anything) or really brilliant (they can bill stuff you don’t want then try to get your money claiming you asked for that).

Anyway I had my account expire 12 months later so I didn’t care much. At some point I got annoyed by all those emails so I asked the microsoft support which replied they couldn’t help me with their tools, and told me I should contact phone support…
I just decided to ignore those emails until… until microsoft blocked my account. Yes, they just decided to suspend my account because they couldn’t get the money for 1 month, and aren’t intelligent enough to just remove one month from my current billing period… So I had an account expiring in some 10 months suspended because they couldn’t bill one month…

I then tried to add (again) my japanese credit card to see if I could re-activate my account (I really want to play a game right now to cool off a bit, and I hate it when some american based company tries to stop me) and it WORKED! Yeah! Somehow I could add a japanese credit card to a french xbox live account. I’m not sure if this is a glitch or just that microsoft suddently decided that you could want to move to another country without losing all your achievements, but yes, it worked!!!!

So here I am, finally resolved this problem with Microsoft. I posted about my success on the xbox live forums (this thread, page 14) so we’ll know if this was just a glitch, or if microsoft became intelligent.

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XBox 360 & XBox Live, back to hell

Apr 4

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | 2 Comments

Ok, I posted a while ago about the impossibility to change the country associated with a XBox Live Gamertag. Now my situation has evolved since I don’t have a french card anymore. For those who do not want to read the old article because they have time constraints, basically the problem is when you have a XBox Live account, you cannot change country nor use payment method from a different country. Add to this the fact I moved from France to Japan, and you have a nice problem, shared by dozens of people.

Recently my French credit card expired. Because of this I couldn’t buy stuff on Apple iTunes store, and my XBox 360 gold account is expiring.

On Apple, I clicked a nice button “Change country”. There I was asked to enter address and billing informations in Japan (Apple probably verified that my credit card was indeed japanese), and once completed, my apple account was japanese. It took only one minute.

Now what about Microsoft? Why wouldn’t they be able to allow one of their customers to update his account informations to a new country, after proving he is indeed in this country?

Anyway this time I’ll pursue this until I get a GOOD reply from Microsoft. I won’t accept stuff like “create a new gamertag”.

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Moving in another country with a XBox 360

Aug 16

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | 7 Comments

Moving with a XBox 360 in another country can be a pain, and Microsoft is being a bitch. You will encounter the following problems:

  • Your gamertag country cannot be changed. This is annoying, but could be in itself not be a big issue. This is without counting that…
  • Your payment method country must match your gamertag country. You got a gamertag from country X, you can only use a card from the same country.
  • Some downloads are limited by IP, but you won’t know until you’ve bought it. You buy, pay with microsoft points, and then get the great message “This item is not available in your location”. By the way did you know those are not refundable?

Being a geek helps a lot to fix the 3rd problem I listed here as I’ll explain a bit later in this post.

The first point can’t be fixed. Microsoft will just tell you to create a new gamertag (forget about keeping your scores, reputation, achievements, etc). In an international world in which more and more people are moving from country to country, unability to relocate a gamertag is a big drawback.
I can only recommand you to keep a bank account in your original country. If your bank isn’t OK, try asking other banks. From my country (France) almost any bank will accept, and internet service allows me to manage everything from where I am now (Japan).

If for some reason you can’t or don’t want, another way is to have an additionnal free gamer tag (without gold subscription) in your new country, and buy stuff with it. It’s a bit more inconvenient, but can do the trick. As for gold subscription for your main account, you can renew it by buying xbox cards in your original country (ebay has tons of people selling those codes in many country, with delivery of the code by email).

Now for the 3rd point, the only viable solution is to use a proxy in your original country. Being a linux geek I achieve  this by running openvpn+NAT on a server of mine in France, connecting to the VPN from my linux router here in Japan, and configuring a bridge between the vpn’s interface and a vlan. I then configure my managable switch to untag some ports on this vlan. Once I finish that, my switch got some ports which are in another country (pretty cool heh). I can just connect the xbox to those ports to be in another part of the world in seconds (don’t forget to configure a dhcp).

Some people are not linux geeks and have made solutions to get the same result on Windows.

Explanations on how to configure shared VPN on Win32

Finally Microsoft can detect this (either by trying to detect if your ip is a known proxy in the case of VPN, or by detecting the fact you need only a few seconds to travel from one country to another), however I believe they don’t want to act against this as it would have a quite negative impact on their image (“In our mind a customer isn’t someone who travels, so if you can’t fit our image of you, get lost”). Just create a gamertag relocation procedure!
By the way it looks like US military in other countries have the same problem, while XBox 360 and games are sold in military bases over the world, IP restriction also applies to military, meaning they can’t buy some things (I guess US military would love to use the VOD service which is restricted to the US).

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