the cooldown period could be longer then 24 hours, but its definitely less or equal 48 hours

I made two purchases this morning 5 minutes apart no prob, the third minutes later triggered anti-fraud bullshit. No idea how long it lasts but my credit card is useless now. If it takes days to resolve then that's a real bullshit manoeuvre to say the least.

I had the same problem during the last sale (or during Winter Sale?). It took about 24 hours before I could buy something again.

Stumbled upon this myself during this sale.

The stupid thing about it is that GOG serves you a message that states it's an issue at your end, either with your credit card or your bank.

Well.. Gog always supported gifting, not reselling..

Hm, how many buys do trigger the anti fraud system?

you get that message when you pay via paysafe aswell

ok the cooldown takes exactly 24 hours

Indeed, and I called my card company and they said they did not receive the transaction at all, then GOG said their payment processor blocked it.

3 apparently in my case, about 5 minutes apart. Third transaction failed and it is totally frozen now. They were all made as gift purchases to my own email address as I planned on holding on to the codes for now. No idea if any of that matters, but thought I'd give it as data anyway.

GOG *really* needs to come up with something better than this. The Insomnia sale and other promos they have you're forced to purchase things immediately and can't stockpile them in your cart due to time constraints inherent in the structure and design of the promo, so if you want to buy more than 2 games in a day you're going to have your purchase power frozen, and they expect you to own 50 credit cards to buy things? That's not going to work, people will just buy two games then come back in another 3 months.

In my case, I don't plan on playing any of these games immediately anyway so it isn't absolutely critical for me to buy them immediately, I can just do without and they lose about $30 in immediate revenue. They'll get it eventually when I do buy the games (probably at a lower price due to price deflation over time), but cashflow is king in business.

If there is even the slightest option, I would like to have them put a mark on a file stating to allow my card to purchase whatever whenever. My card has its own anti-fraud built in so in the extremely unlikely chance someone were to get my card and try to use it, it will be legally sorted out with no problem to me nor GOG, only the criminal will suffer from it. In 20 years of using credit cards online, I've never once had my card used fraudulently.

I'd suggest they add other security measures like more 2FA, however Steam did that and requires you to own a $600 smart phone to use it which is bullshit. :)

Ha, that was my experience as well, except that I didn't contact GOG; with my card company having no record of a failed transaction, it was apparent that it was GOG's doing.

They really should make it clear that they're blocking the transaction, making people wonder what's wrong at their end, and contact their card company/bank for no reason, is bad customer service.

Yeah, it's like certain commandline utilities in Linux giving an error message that looks like this:


Critical error: Reason for error - "SUCCESS"

With fraud protection, usually the vendors (places people use the card) are the ones who have to eat the costs. The bank doesn't and the card owner obviously doesn't. Our business lost over $10k due to a stolen card being used to buy from us. It really sucked.
Since when has GOG really cared about good customer service? Or a functioning website with clear and logical utilities? Or anything resembling competent site design?

IMHO GOG has always cared about customer service and generally done a better job than most companies I've ever dealt with on or off line. Providing great customer service doesn't mean that 100% of your customers are 100% happy 100% of the time and that all of their problems can be dealt with immediately or even non-immediately however. They're human, have limited finite resources and try to do the best they can as an honest business IMHO. They're not perfect and have their flaws like any of us do.

I agree that the website is not always functional, and there are quirks here and there in the site, in Galaxy, and other things too, and I get irked by it at times too (and often comment about it, such as being irked about the stupid anti-fraud thing), but everything in life has problems, every business will have problems and it is a part of life to more or less expect that there will be problems occasionally when dealing with any company. I accept that this can happen, and even that some companies (such as my ISP for example) might have a rude employee on tech support some day when I call or similar because they're human and flawed too (although I've never had experiences like that with GOG personally). What is more important to me than having a flawless Mr. Rogers experience with everything working 100% perfect 100% of the time and everyone having a coke and a smile, is that when problems inevitably do occur that they are eventually rectified to customer satisfaction. Now I don't expect that to be 100% either because of the real world, but it is more about the overall experience to me. As long as something that goes wrong eventually does get fixed or handled in some way even if it isn't perfect, then I might grumble about some things but I'll still be overly satisfied.

It's kind of like holiday dinner with one's dysfunctional family, people bicker about this and that but everyone loves each other at the end of the day so to speak.

So I think GOG cares, and cares more than most companies seem to, but I think they do try hard to run a good business that puts the customer first as much as possible but also within the confines of their own limitations and decisions, and realizing that even if one has the best of intentions when making decisions they don't always work out flawlessly. That's particularly true with computer software design and engineering, and that includes web coding. Again, I'll grumble about some flaws like anyone would, but if I was in a bar with the GOG staff, I'd grumble at them over a few things while buying them beers and patting them on the back. :)


I don't think I got the wording 100% exact, but while humourous, I've seen error messages from "rpm" and other commands over time for real. Most likely just bad exit code handling, but still it makes you do a double take and say "huh? wha???" :)