In Australia if the service provider substantially changes the service they are providing, then yes you are entitled to a refund. Say for instance you book first class tickets for a flight and then they try and put you in economy class. You can get a refund for that. Moving you from <20ms ping to >200ms ping is a substantial change in the service being provided. If EA wont refund you (illegal in Australia), contact your bank and get the credit charge taken back due to change in service delivered.

The whole game is dying a slow death. This is just EA consolidating their losses even further. It is purely a money based decision regardless of the PR spin that Bioware flunkies will put on it. This is not best for the players, it is best for the EA bottom line which is hurting at the moment. At its simplest EA says, X% of the APAC players will leave which means $Y in lost revenue per months vs $Z to run the APAC servers per month. If $Z is bigger than $Y they shut the servers down. $Z is evidently bigger than $Y Obviously they will factor in the attrition rate as it currently stands and they may find that $Z is only bigger than $Y some months from now, but it is better to just cut and run now just before the expansion hits on the assumption that more players will stick around just to see that and so they can squeeze a few more dollars out of APAC players before cutting their losses. At some point the whole game will be down to a couple of servers and a skeleton crew of PR flunkies telling you how it is what the players want!

This is pretty much the only point that I disagree with you on. The APAC issue has been on the radar for a good 7 months, and I highly suspect that they knew that they wanted to shut them down, but left it as late as possible to let us know about it. Regardless, it is still a significant switch and they should offer people the chance to take up the expansion now that they know the whole situation or back out and not purchase it. I'm not trying to come up with a solution. Bioware are free to make whatever decision they like about their game. What they should however do, and what I am asking for, is to allow people to make the decision about buying the expansion or not based on all the information. As I said originally, I would never have purchased the expansion had they told me that they were shutting down the APAC servers. I only purchased the expansion on the understanding that Bioware would continue to support the APAC servers which was an advertised selling point of the game. Now that Bioware are no longer offering the service that I purchased, I want to cancel the purchase and we can go our separate ways.

After being sold a Ferrari (<20ms ping) and being delivered a Reliant Robin (200+ms ping) now that the APAC servers are being shut down, can APAC players who no longer wish to purchase RIse of the Hutt Cartel given the bait and switch that Bioware is performing get a refund? Generally when companies alter the terms of a service agreement in such a drastic way consumers are allowed to back out of any contract. Given this dramatic reduction in quality of service, I'd really like to see a refund come my way as I have absolutely zero interest in playing on a North American server and had Bioware told me of their plans to shut down the APAC servers I would never have purchased the expansion.

This is another example of "It is cheaper for us to do it this way, so we are doing it this way" Fantastic customer service once again! If you think most players should be able to fairly quickly convert the time out of PDT and GMT, how about you quickly convert it for them? I mean, it wouldn't be so bad if your "scheduled" maintenance was at all regular and scheduled, but when you move the maintenance around to whenever you feel like it (really, is it scheduled when you decide to do it the morning of the same day?), it gets harder. Really though, it is obvious that Bioware are all just about minimising costs now before the slow decline and shuttering of all the servers.

How do I get a refund for the expansion now that you have decided to do the ol' bait and switch with the APAC servers? Not interested in all in playing your game on the NA servers, so I want my money back.

How do I go about getting a refund for Rise of the Hutt Cartel? I don't want to play on the NA servers and I feel that EA / Bioware has now done a bait and switch with the service being offered.

Still no reply? Your new improved communication is a joke Joveth. Quit your job if you are that bad at something as core as communicating with the community you are supposed to be managing!

Nah, they were just deleting anything that looked like it mentioned this thread. I got a 1 day ban because I nominated a different thread and the Customer Service numpty didn't even look at what I nominated before deleting it and banning me. The simple fact is, Bioware don't give a toss about the Oceanic players. You can see that by the pathetic response that we have received from them so far. Old "we want to be more communicative" Joveth has given us a total of 2 replies, one of which was a lie (we will look at this in the next few days and get back to you) and the second weeks later which told us that Bioware don't give a hoot. Bioware are simply not interested in helping us in any fashion. If they were, Joveth could take a whopping 15 minutes out of his day to throw us a bone and tell us what their plans are.

This appears to be easy for the people that have already cleared Denova, but for those of us still trying to make our way through it, this change makes it pretty hard. Please consider leaving this in for nightmare, but give those few of us still trying to beat it for the first time the same amount of slack as everyone else got for so long.

1.4 release and still deafening silence from Bioware on the Oceanic issues. When are you going to start with the more pro-active communication Bioware?

1. Why do you keep messing with the maintenance window day? Was this some lame attempt to not launch 1.4 with Pandas? It is getting pretty frustrating trying to organise running anything with the limited numbers we have when you keep changing your maintenance day. 2. I see no mention of anything for Oceania players (increases to 12 player slots and most importantly a server merge). What happened to this increased communication pledge? You guys fail so badly at communication, it is honestly laughable.

Praxium is one of the larger guilds on the Imperial side. We have around 30 or so active players and generally have around 20 people on each night. We'd like to get more players involved so that we can do more things! I would say that our focus at the moment is definitely level 50 PvE content. We run Story Mode and Hard Mode Operations over the weekend and our progression group generally run on Wednesday evenings (progression group mainly looking for DPS). Still need to get HM Kephess down, but we are having good success with everything else. We are fairly far behind in terms of PvP (the gear difference between Imp and Rep sucks on this server) but quite a few members play PvP in a semi-disorganised fashion We are a fairly friendly guild; I think you will generally find that you get out as much as you put in (there are almost always people on vent if you want to come chat). If you are interested please sign up on the website for an invite.

What you are suggesting is that if every player on the server decides to all play together they might be able to do 2 operations at the same time? Really? Every single level 50 player on the server can only scrape together 2 operations (or 4 games of PvP in peak time) and you think that there really isn't a population problem? The servers need to merge or free transfers need to be on offer.

Thanks for the update. I know you have previously said on twitter that you want to offer APAC players the option of all the servers, but dead servers are not good for anyone. Please seriously consider either a server merge or free transfers to the PvE server.