Complaint Review: Aeria Games and Entertainment - Santa Clara California

I have been a member of Aeria Games since June of 2009. I have only ever played one game they host: Shin Megami Tensei Imagine Online (hereafter referred to as MegaTen). I put years of work into my four MegaTen characters (all connected to a single account). Periodically, I also spent heavily in their cash shops (paying real money for special in-game items). I spent well over $300 dollars on these special items for my MegaTen characters, and considered this an investment in a game I would play for as long as it was around.

Occasionally, I took breaks from the game. This was a very common thing, and I honestly did not know a single player (aside from totally new players) who had never taken a break from the game. Aeria's Terms of Service agreement states that an account will only be deleted for inactivity after six months. Therefore, I always assumed my characters/items would be safe as long as I made sure to log in at least every six months.

The last time I logged into the game was in January of 2012 (definitely not six months ago). I took a break from the game for personal reasons and decided to come back on April 9th after convincing a friend to try the game. This is when I discovered that the game was moving from Aeria to Atlus Online. The catch was that only players who logged in between February 1st and April 7th would be allowed to transfer their characters/items to Atlus.

I was, of course very upset. As I read through the forums to find out as much as I could about the situation, I found out that Aeria had apparently sent out an email about the move. After digging around in my junk folder, I discovered the email. It was sent out as part of their general email newsletter on March 6th, well over a month into the log in time frame, thereby limiting the window of opportunity to log in to one month. This was the only notice they sent. Many users reported not receiving the email, despite receiving other mail from Aeria. Even worse, a few users reported that they received and read the email, then hurried to log in to the game, but were stopped by technical issues. They submitted support tickets to Aeria for help, but were never able to log in.

Now, everyone who did not log in between those two dates is losing their characters and items. In many cases, these people have paid hundreds of dollars for in-game items that Aeria has deleted. What I do not understand is why they did not transfer all active accounts (and by active, I mean any account that has not been deleted or banned). At the very least, I believe they should have honored their own Terms of Service by transferring all accounts that were active in the last six months. Most people assumed they could safely leave the game for up to six months.

I myself sent a support ticket to Aeria as soon as I found out about the move, hoping that something could be done. Their response was, basically, "You're not our problem anymore. Talk to Atlus." I sent a support ticket to Atlus but never received a response, and several days later the ticket vanished from my list of support tickets on their site.

In desperation, I filed a complaint against Aeria through the Better Business Bureau. Aeria responded as smugly as possible by pretending not to know what I was talking about and acting as if I thought my general Aeria account (which can be used for the forums and such) was being deleted even though I was very clearly talking about my MegaTen account with its characters and items (honestly, if they hadn't been so condescending with their response, I might have dropped this).

Aeria handled this move very poorly by having a very narrow window of opportunity to log in and have your characters/items transferred, and announcing the move in a solitary email newsletter halfway into the log in time frame. Because of this, many players have lost years of work and hundreds of dollars.