Posting it here in hopes that it may reach someone relevant because I swear to Light, Blizzard’s support isn’t able to help me with that.
TLDR: Registered this account when I lived in Russia, it’s technically a Russian-coded account. I have exclusively played on EU-Silvermoon since 2017. Also since 2017, I don’t live in Russia — moved to the USA. Currently, I cannot pre-purchase the new expansion because of all the gazillion limitations Blizzard put on Russian accounts. What are my options? Apart from crying and punching the wall.
Long story for more context:
At the beginning of June this year, Blizzard suspended all Russian and Belarusian accounts from receiving gifts. Earlier, we lost the ability to pay for the game or other services so accepting gifts, whether from friends or your “foreign” account, was the only way to obtain game time or Blizzard games. There was no official notification about it, and I only knew about it when I went to buy 2 more months of game time and couldn’t do it.
I created this account when I was 15. It’s been a wonderful nearly 15 years of exploring the world I love. 6 years ago, I made a very painful but needed decision to leave Russia and relocate to the United States. There’s no option to transfer regions; the only “option” I got from the support was to start a new account on the US servers, which isn’t really an option for someone who wants to keep their almost life-long account.
When the war started, I tried to change the account settings — to no avail. You can only change the account region to the country you live in and if I want to change my account to be EU, I need to live in the EU.
So here I am; can’t change the region, can’t pay using my card or any other payment method, can’t accept gifts from my lovely guildmates who expressed the desire to help, can’t send myself a code for this new expansion’s pre-purchase because code is not an option in the store. Support gives some generic advice. Is it the end of the journey?