Minecraft Forums

Quote from BanzaiBob

Yet both the brands you refer to manage to run contests outside of the US which curse are unable do as it is "impossible"

From your fellow curse employee coldbladed:

"Again, I made every effort to include non-US residents but it is just impossible. Like, Ethan Hunt would not choose to accept this mission"

They only run contests in countries where they have an international headquarters. Being a global country with a HQ in that country allows them to operate under the legal umbrellas of that country.

Curse is a US company so those same foreign(to us) countries impose additional fees and legal hoops to jump through, which is what I was referring to in the rest of that post you quoted.

Quote from N0MOARBISCUITZ

I tried entering, but it wouldn't accept me. It said that I "did not meet the age requirements". I'm 13, and the rules of the contest clearly states:

"Open to legal residents of the United States including the District of Columbia who are thirteen (13) years of age or older as of date of entry and have a valid, registered member account at Curse.com"

What happened?

What happened is we put in the wrong date for the age cutoff O_O Oops. Should be fixed now, and thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Quote from BanzaiBob

Well I suppose it is an option but hardly constructive.
My point is that curse are happy to follow US law and pay any costs that go along with it yet could not be bothered to do the same for other countries. To exclude a massive section of the members is not a good idea and as can be seen in the responses here its made plenty of people angry.

Because we are a US company the costs consist of a minor inclusion on a tax form we already fill out. European countries want as much as thousands of dollars to run a contest in their country and some add even more fees to companies that aren't based in that country.

With (according to Wikipedia) 50 countries in Europe alone we cannot afford to run the contest for everyone. Throw in the aforementioned red tape and it would be (not kidding) a decade before we had permission to run contests in all the European nations and by that time the rules would have changed on so many that we'd be starting over.

Again, I made every effort to include non-US residents but it is just impossible. Like, Ethan Hunt would not choose to accept this mission.

Edit:
The most constructive feedback I can give you is to get involved in your nation's politics. Find out why they are making it so difficult for companies like Curse to run sweepstakes and, if you still think it is BS, work to change the law. Unfortunately that is not something we have in our power to do, but you do.

Quote from Thraka

HOWEVER, they are obviously not going to include the people who enter free. Just this line: "and receipt of entries will not be acknowledge or returned." states that. Couple that with "Sponsor assumes no responsibility for lost, late, damaged, misdirected, illegible, incomplete or postage-due mail or entries".

No way I'm going to support a company like that with my money.

This simply isn't the case. We don't acknowledge or return the entries because people are all over this and we get a ton of them, we just don't have the man power. Not including these folks would be very illegal and not worth our jobs, the potential lawsuits, etc.

I literally have a giant stack of envelopes on my desk from the Blizzcon contest. Each one of these people was included in the drawing to be randomly selected. As the rules state, everyone has the same chance of winning and I personally ran the selection process. Non-Premium members were among the winners.

As an aside:
Many people even decorated their envelopes or included fun notes. While this didn't help their chances of winning it did make the process of receiving the entries each day an enjoyable one. Many people here in the office would ask me if I got any cool drawings or stickers that day and we really appreciated the folks that had fun with it.

What I'm trying to say is, with the right attitude you can submit an entry and hope for the best, some of you may even turn up winners. While I can understand the skepticism try to understand that we are doing this the right way and keeping it fair for everyone that is an eligible entrant.

Hey all.

Giving away trips to conventions etc was my brainchild and I put a lot of work into getting it set up.

While we want to offer this to everyone (really we honestly do) we simply cannot due to the consumer protection laws, tax laws, and random regulatory fees in all the various countries. Curse is a US company and I had to spend months cutting through red tape just to get it approved in the US, and some US states still won't allow us to offer it to their residents.

If we were to offer it to even one non-US country all that red tape would have to be repeated, weird tax fees would arise, and a handful of European countries would require us to pay tons of extra taxes and regulatory fees to offer a contest to their residents. Additionally, some countries just outright make it impossible to run contests.

Essentially we were presented with three choices, make the contest US only, don't offer the contest at all, or run the contest for everyone and get the pants sued off of us. I really wanted to be able to do contests AND keep my job so I had no choice but to choose option A.

I hope our international audience can forgive us but this is something we just can't bring to you guys. We still feel that our continually evolving premium membership is a great deal and part of your subscription goes to support addon/mod authors in the community, so we hope it will contribute to the growth of Minecraft in its own small way. If you have any other suggestion on how we can improve it let us know.

Cheers!