Diablo 3 User Contract Potentially Anti-Consumer Says Korean FTC

An updated story on the South Korean Fair Trade Commission's investigation into Blizzard regarding Diablo III has turned up an interesting tidbit of information. Apparently after raiding Blizzard's Seoul offices, the FTC is looking over consumer contract documents which they deem could be unfair to consumers.

Originally, we reported on Korea's FTC looking into the many claims filed by Korean gamers against Blizzard over denying them refunds for Diablo III since the product did not work. According to Blizzard, they explicitly state that they do no offer refunds for a game that has already been used.

The Korean FTC feels that this is could be disadvantageous to consumers who are unaware of the game's issues, mainly involving poor latency for the end-user due to server over-crowding. Blizzard's recourse for the situation was to open up more servers for the Asian territories.

According to the Korean Times, even with maintenance and additional server support, gamers are still unable to play Diablo III adequately, and are adamant about a refund. Blizzard is trying to keep their foot down on the no-refund issue, which of course spawned more complaints from users, and a plea to the FTC to investigate Blizzard over fair trading terms.

Now that South Korea's Fair Trade Commission has raided Blizzard's offices, gathered up the paper work and are looking things over, the general gist is that they feel that the sales contract terms may be unfair, especially to unsuspecting consumers. So why is it unfair? Mainly because it's looking as if Blizzard may have set up terms to be absolved of all issues, problems, glitches, outages and down-times associated with Diablo III that could result in people wanting a refund for the game. In other words, they void themselves of accountability so they don't have to issue a refund.

What makes matters worse is because even people who don't plan to play with others and just want to log-on and loot and wank for a bit will still take up space on the network highway. This means that even people who are playing single-player are still clogging up the infrastructure as if they were playing multiplayer. There really isn't any way around this, so Korean gamers whether they play solo or in a party are experiencing horrible lag, rendering their gaming experience unplayable.

If Blizzard can't find a way to fix the situation fast, investigators are expecting that the FTC will issue a mandate to enforce Blizzard to issue refunds to everyone who requests one...in Korea, of course.