3. More Billing Problems

More Billing Problems

  • Culture

    Today the Quorum account was shut down because apparently it's subscription expired. This is an issue for me for a number of reasons-

    • I never received any notification from xsolla or Screeps that the autopayment failed.
    • The last email I received from xsolla was January 4th, after successfully renewing.
    • I have no idea why the payment failed, because no one bothered to tell me (this is on xsolla of course).
    • I was given no time to correct the issue before my account was shut down. None at all.

    This is a really frustrating billing experience, and I know I'm not the only person to get burned by this.

    Talking with @o4kapuk in Slack and brought up what he believes to be the issue-

    As far as I know xsolla doesn't provide billing information to our side so we can't tell if billing is failed, the only answer we're getting from them is 'yes, this player has subscription' or 'no he does not subscription' without details.

    While annoying that xsolla refuses to give you more information, such as when the subscription became inactive, I still feel there are better ways this can be handled on the screeps end. If it was me, I'd change the work flow from-

    1. Check to see if subscription is expired.
    2. If it is expired stop the code from running.

    To-

    1. Check to see if the subscription is valid.
    2. Update the "last valid subscription" field with the date of the last successful check from step 1.
    3. For any user where the subscription is more than 4 hours out of date send an email.
    4. For any user where the "warning" email was sent more than 24 hours ago stop the user's code from running.

    This would likely prevent a lot of frustration from occurring.

  • Culture

    I had a similar issue a few days ago, autopayment failed and no notification or emails were received. I caught it before my empire could suffer from low CPU, but its still annoying.

  • Dev Team

    There is a 3 days grace period on all subscriptions. You should have been notified, and then your subscription should last for 3 days after it is expired. Could you please double check your mail, spam folder, etc?

  • Dev Team

    I've contacted Xsolla regarding this case. Grace period for Quorum has been successfully activated, there were 5 failed attempts to renew on February 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and after 3 days the subscription has been turned off. The issue here is that Xsolla lacks a feature of sending email notifications on failed auto-renew attempts. I'm a bit surprised they don't do that, but they realised it's important and promised to add it ASAP.


  • Wouldn't it be possible and viable to implement your own subscription system and tell Xsolla that a renewal is a Microtransaction?

    Gives you more control...

  • Culture

    Yeah the fact that they don't notify people when charges fail is the big issue here, and I'm also pretty shocked they don't handle that appropriately.

  • Dev Team

    Just received confirmation from Xsolla that they activated mail notifications on failed charges during the grace period.