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Live
PTR
10.2.7
PTR
10.2.6
Beta
...only open to users located in the United States
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Post by
Sakkura
That would have been a terrible business decision. Which is worse, from a business perspective:
A contest where you can only be from one country to be eligible,
or
No contest at all.
Sure, it may tick off a few people because they can't enter the contest, but the overall increase in members is bigger than those who would never use the site again.
Which is worse from a business perspective:
Alienating a majority of your customers while pleasing a minority
or
Doing neither, but focusing more on other tasks thus potentially pleasing all customers a little more.
Obviously the second. Being ineligible for a contest because of location is more negative than being eligible for it is positive. And Americans are a minority among WoW players.
Not to mention this affects more than just the chance of winning some prize. You'll notice that the prize threads are very busy, full of comments, discussion etc. - basically the contests are a major social bonding factor for the wowhead users, but non-Americans are excluded.
Post by
blademeld
It seems you missed the post in another thread, but Wowhead gets paid from adverts by traffic as well, and within this traffic, the number of registered members count.
Option 1 is superior in terms of business, some things are not as obvious as it first seems.
@ Faar, it's illegal for profit organizations to
A: go against the guidelines set by the provider of the prize (which was the case of the cards, not confirmed for this)
B: hold contests in other countries without their permission
C: just send the prize without paying for legal fees and taxes
At least, that's how I'm aware of the current system
Post by
Malgayne
I wonder if McDonald's gets complaints like this when they try to give away prizes. =/
The difference between "open to all users" and "open to US users only" is basically the difference between "Can we just give this stuff away, or does it have to be approved by a lawyer from another company?"
The law in the US is specific enough that being a lawyer in California does not license you to practice law in Nevada. The difference between the law in the US and the law in the UK is many times bigger than that, of course. When we can do the contest entirely internally, or when the prizes are immaterial (like WotLK beta keys), we can pretty much do whatever we like. But if, say, Upper Deck is volunteering the prizes and sending them out themselves, then their lawyers need to approve the legality of the contest.
A lawyer in that case is going to look at our traffic numbers, and is going to see that roughly 40% of our traffic comes from the US. The second largest traffic source is Canada, with under 6%. It takes roughly the same amount of time for a lawyer to draft rules for each country, and lawyers are paid hourly. As such, one country costs x dollars, 2 countries cost 2x dollars, and so on. But if the
first
x dollars buys you 40% of Wowhead's traffic, and the second x dollars buys you only an additional 6%--and the numbers just get smaller from there--Upper Deck won't invest the time and money to pay for rules to be drafted beyond the first, especially since as you add more countries the rules get more complicated and difficult.
It's as simple as that, and there really isn't anything we can do. I really like these contests and I want to keep giving cool stuff away, but there ARE restrictions on it that we can't get around. Rest assured, at least, that we will still do our damnedest to host contests that ARE open to everyone.
Post by
17744
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
5200
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Smaragd
Don't take this thread as a
whine-thread
, by the way. Because it isn't that petty.
It's not that we (read:
I
) don't want contests to be held, but with the last two contests I was beginning to wonder if this is a new trend that will be seen as normal from now on. I created this thread in hopes of either making Wowhead aware that the rest of the community don't want to be locked out, and thus maybe exclude whatever is forcing Wowhead to lock the contest to a single country from future contests.
Sure, I can live with it once in a while if that's all there is to it, even if I frown upon it.
Post by
blademeld
I don't think it would actually be ILLEGAL. It could be breach of contract
Breach of Contract is illegal as far as I'm aware.
But the competition isn't held in another country... It's held in the US. ;)
The internet is not US property, no matter how much you want to claim it.
Yes, it's held by Wowhead which belongs to the US (I think) but the location of the contest is immaterial.
What legal fees and taxes?
Swedish law for example does not require paying any taxes for prize winnings awarded from random chance/luck, only when participant skill is involved.
The US Customs Department regulates the import and export of goods & services crossing all United States borders and in doing so, US Customs enforces not only its own import and export regulations but those of other US agencies, as well.
I'm afraid that taxes, and legal bindings can be applied at export as well.
Post by
83654
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
blademeld
Wow, great. So you just won this uber epic loot card but have to pay the taxes to receive it?
Also, for the cards, there's the other problem, how much is the card worth?
If viewed from a booster pack, relatively cheap.
If viewed from as a card, 100+ dollars.
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