In-Game Premium Time Will Remain At 10 Silver

[Myriad 52]

I don't know if people should get so hung up about this VAT thing. What if the price of Köttbullar* had gone up by a lot, he would have had increased costs as well. If he increased the price of Wurm because of that, would he get protests that non-Swedes don't have to pay for that as ground meat remained the same price elsewhere?

At the end of the day, he has to make Wurm pay (for itself, for development and for Rolf-maintenance). He has these costs and has to pay them (no one here works on the assumption that Rolf is a millionaire, right?), what does it matter exactly how they're broken down?

*(traditional Swedish meatballs)

[yarnevk 257]

It matters because it affects what non-EU should pay for the game. It also matters because Rolf is collecting more VAT than he has to by not invoicing VAT properly.

It is in fact not Rolfs expense, it is not like his salary that he buys meatballs with. It is the customers expense, as Rolf is only the collection agent. He is not supposed to consider VAT as income, nor is he supposed to expense it to pay it. His income is prior to applying VAT. His salary for meatballs is an expense. VAT is never his money, it is our money which he is supposed to transfer to the EU (or not if non-EU)

My brother runs a pizza shop and nearly got padlocked by the state for making the mistake of thinking he could use the state sales taxes he collected to buy a new pizza oven. Biz does not get to decide how to spend this collected sales tax. It is not their income to spend.

Edited May 2, 2013 by yarnevk

[Kadore 926]

It matters because it affects what non-EU should pay for the game. It also matters because Rolf is collecting more VAT than he has to by not invoicing VAT properly.

It is in fact not Rolfs expense, it is not like his salary that he buys meatballs with. It is the customers expense, as Rolf is only the collection agent. He is not supposed to consider VAT as income, nor is he supposed to expense it to pay it. His income is prior to applying VAT. His salary for meatballs is an expense. VAT is never his money, it is our money which he is supposed to transfer to the EU (or not if non-EU)

My brother runs a pizza shop and nearly got padlocked by the state for making the mistake of thinking he could use the state sales taxes he collected to buy a new pizza oven. Biz does not get to decide how to spend this collected sales tax. It is not their income to spend.

Seriously, how many ###### ways are you going to find to say the same thing?

[Myriad 52]

It matters because it affects what non-EU should pay for the game. It also matters because Rolf is collecting more VAT than he has to by not invoicing VAT properly.

It is in fact not Rolfs expense, it is not like his salary that he buys meatballs with. It is the customers expense, as Rolf is only the collection agent. He is not supposed to consider VAT as income, nor is he supposed to expense it to pay it. His income is prior to applying VAT. His salary for meatballs is an expense. VAT is never his money, it is our money which he is supposed to transfer to the EU (or not if non-EU)

My brother runs a pizza shop and nearly got padlocked by the state for making the mistake of thinking he could use the state sales taxes he collected to buy a new pizza oven. Biz does not get to decide how to spend this collected sales tax. It is not their income to spend.

Edited May 2, 2013 by Myriad

[yarnevk 257]

Apparently I do have to repeat myself because people do not read threads they post in anymore or try to challenge what I just said. You have the option to ignore me if you do not want to read my posts for I am not breaking any rules here, so stop trying to moderate me.

If he does not invoice VAT then they will presume the invoice is the service price, which means 16e needs 4e VAT paid, which he has to take from the 16e 'sale' because he never collected VAT, rather than the intention it be 12.8e sale + 3.2e VAT. Intention is irrelevant when it comes to tax bureaucratics. The state made my brother pay sales tax on his employees pizza slices, which he never collected because they 'dined-in' on 'free' pizza, but take-out only place always has to collect sales tax, and there is no such thing as free pizza as far as the state was concerned.

CodeAB is paying 25% more tax than required if it had been a proper customer sale that listed VAT. Someone already said they already did setup validation for their biz, and it cost them a few hundred. So no it does not cost Rolf more to set this up, it cost more to not set it up. It also cost from non-EU rage quits when they realize Rolf is charging them a higher price that includes VAT for a service that he is not supposed to collect VAT on, yet they cannot even try to claim a refund because it is not on the invoice.

Edited May 2, 2013 by yarnevk

[Void 75]

You have the option to ignore me ...

Good Idea, thank you for the advice.

PS: and stop whining and try to get special conditions, if you don´t like the price of goods that don´t come from your country then don´t buy them.

Edited May 2, 2013 by Void

[Evilvision 301]

From what I read non EU can only claim a refund if they purchased the item in the EU. Internet and catalog sales you are unable to claim the tax back

Mind you I am not posting any of this because I am for or against the price increase Rolf has made but just was curious after reading everyone elses interpretation of how VAT can be handled. I decided to do some reading.

Disclaimer------I am not from EU so I only know the few things I have learned reading online tonite but hopefully all the info i read and am now sharing is accurate. From what I have gathered the merchant is required by law to list the price of the item being sold including VAT for EU customers.

Looks like some companies choose to break the price down and show the cost of the item and the VAT.

Example

2 Months premium time -------------------- 10EU

VAT 20%---------------------------------------- 2 EU

Total ----------------------------------------12EU

Some Choose to list the combined price

2 Months Premium Time--------------------12EU

Now it seems most EU companies will just list the price of a item with the included VAT like my last example and charge that price to all customers and then since they know which customers are in the EU (I presume these sites require you create a user account with them including your address) they pay the tax on them and the non EU customers will as in my example just pay 2 more EU for the same item. Most of those companies seem to tell these non EU customers when they are questioned why they pay the same amount as the EU customers that those 2 EU is to compensate for extra shipping because they are not from EU or whatever excuse they can heh.

Some companies (very few it seems) list the price as in my last example when the customer checks out and it goes through the shopping cart or paypal it will deduct the VAT for the non EU customers and they pay less than what the item was listed as.

Now most of the ones I have been reading about use Paypal. I even took a link to paypal website to show you how to setup VAT for each EU country or even state for US and when paypal processes the payment it uses the country info from where its being paid from. (example you use paypal and then it processes the payment via card or account you have attached to it takes the country or state here in US and uses that and applies the amount of tax that you the merchant specified should be paid by someone from that region where the card or accounts origin is).

So yes apparently its built in for Paypal to collect VAT or Tax from any region. Its just a matter of the Merchant to add them. The biggest issue for most merchants seems to be the requirement to show the full price including VAT. Even though paypal adds the tax it does not know who to charge until it gets to the final stage where you click yes for the transaction. This would require merchants show price for EU and non EU or use one of the two methods I mentioned earlier. Most merchants want to just have 1 price listed as most people tend to get a bit upset when they see others are paying less just because they live somewhere different. In turn this can cause resentment and loss of customers.

So from what I read it looks like yes it would be possible using paypal to only charge EU customers VAT in Wurm with a little bit of configuring on the Merchant account. Would it then be possible for some people to get out of paying VAT that do live in the EU? The answer is yes but the people who work around the system are the ones liable for tax fraud and not the merchant.

For my opinion part now. Being a US customer I would love to not be charged VAT and get Wurm at a cheaper price. I mean who doesnt want to pay less for something.

Now if I am not going to get a discount my next choice would be for Rolf to atleast still verify EU and non EU customers. Yes this would probably require creating some kind of shopping cart account. But he would be able to make 2 extra EU using my example above and invest it back into the game. Sure he is still going to eventually pay income tax on it just like he would on the other 10EU but to just give all that money away in taxes to the EU that they by law didnt deserve seems just plain crazy.

Using my example with just 1000 non EU subs thats a extra 2000EU (3200eu using actual figures) profit that should be way more than whats needed to pay a professional to make a proper shopping cart/account registration system that can be used to verify his customers country. Once that has been created each month after that all those extra EU are just pure profit.

I also used the term EU and non EU for ease of lumping people in categories but just for sake of accuracy I will mention that apparently you can be in the EU but outside the European VAT area. I also used 20% and 10EU in my examples and are not the actual figures. The actual numbers would yield more profits. In hindsight I probably should have just used 12.8EU and 25% in my example.

[Sharkin 1,319]

I've noticed that we haven't had a big drop in premium accounts since the initial announcement was made. Thanks for sticking with us through this transition!

To early to know for sure. They might still have premium.

[yarnevk 257]

Now most of the ones I have been reading about use Paypal. I even took a link to paypal website to show you how to setup VAT for each EU country or even state for US and when paypal processes the payment it uses the country info from where its being paid from.

Just like PayPal handles the currency exchange for Rolf, he gets paid in SEK regardless of where the country we pay in. All the PayPal API code needs to do is ask are they validated PayPal, if so are they on the list of EU countries, if so or not validated add 25% VAT. It cost very little programmer time to do this and does not require keeping a secure privacy database, as that is PayPals job not Rolfs, there are numerous coding sites for many web programming languages discussing how to make this non-EU, EU query because it is obviously something many need to do with the EU assumption change. If you can program a shopping site this is a trivial task, maybe a evening of internet research if you need some help.

When CodeAB gets audited questioning how he determined these character names are not EU, he just needs to say he used PayPal validated country code checked against EU list, and since PayPal is an internationally trusted validator it ends there unless authorities want to go after PayPal to give up EU customers for tax fraud of holding non-EU banking addresses. It would be ludicrous for EU to say you cannot use PayPal when they are in the biz of secure validated checkouts and arguably the most trusted international processor because of EBay (of course many cannot or refuse to use PayPal).

If it is not in the invoice then Rolf could later do email domain combined with IP country of origin quicky validations, in the same manner account bans are done, simply because you do what you have to do when taxes are due if the choice is pay up or go out of biz. Just because he told us the price hike is largely VAT does not mean he has to pay it, as long as it is not on the invoice that we did or did not pay VAT, we have no recourse if he decides not to pay VAT because as far as EU was concerned what we paid was the service price not including VAT. This is why VAT is supposed to be on invoices, to avoid companies claiming VAT for themselves.

Edited May 2, 2013 by yarnevk

[Kegan 3,926]

Well the new prices are in he made his decision how he wanted to handle it just let it go either you agree with it and pay the new price or you don't and leave seems simple enough to me.

[RockyBalboa 565]

and we get new prices.... so 16eur 2 month i dont see big market change since there is still ingame 10s... that is good... i just hope wurm will spend more money on advertise in future...

[yarnevk 257]

if you don´t like the price of goods that don´t come from your country then don´t buy them.

Wurm is not an export of a goods, it is an online service. Online services are not subject to VAT for non-EU per regulations. So you can try to shut up people saying this because it does not affect you, but lets make it affect you and instead of 16e service price you will pay now 20e so that Rolf collects the 4e that the EU is going to demand anyways because VAT is currently not on your checkout. Because once they determine the 16e was the service price that non-EU paid they will insist the VAT due was 4e, they are not going to accept him later claiming the service price was actually 12.8e with VAT of 3.2e if that is not what non-EU pays as they will just see that as a feeble attempt at reducing tax owed (just like my local DMV says when I try to say I bought my car for $1). Since you do not wish to reduce his income by dipping into it to pay VAT, I am sure you will be happy to pay even more for your game. Its just a cheeseburger after all.

Edited May 2, 2013 by yarnevk

[Branson 11]

Don't forget this: http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/61990-coinlab-faq-how-to-earn-silver-coins-with-your-graphics-card/ method to get coins, too. Tried it for a while and got around 4s over a week running it in the background while playing.

Edited May 2, 2013 by Branson

[yarnevk 257]

While playing? Did they fix the mining client to not hog the GPU and give some to the game? How much did your fps in game fall? I suspect the game does not fully utilize the GPU so there are some cycles if they made the miner friendly with other GPU apps.

[metis 51]

so....now that I have read all of this and my eyes are bleeding....subs cost went up, and in-game subs went way the hell up. But now did deed purchase cost change? before i was able to spend $10 to get 1 month and a deed which after I bought it I believe I had some extra silver left. Is that still the case?? Also.....why is everyone freaking out...just stop subbing...you can still do pretty much everything in the game on a f2p account except mabey ride a mount/boat or be a priest. 

[joedobo 1,187]

so....now that I have read all of this and my eyes are bleeding....subs cost went up, and in-game subs went way the hell up. But now did deed purchase cost change? before i was able to spend $10 to get 1 month and a deed which after I bought it I believe I had some extra silver left. Is that still the case?? Also.....why is everyone freaking out...just stop subbing...you can still do pretty much everything in the game on a f2p account except mabey ride a mount/boat or be a priest. 

I sympathise with your disappointment. These may answer some of your questions.

--Shop prices went up by 60%:  2 months premium, 10s, or 1 month premium + 5s all went from 10 € to 16 €.

--In game premium for silver fee didn't change, its still 10s for one month.

--There should be a new 10 € shop option to get one month premium and a single silver coin (enough to pay upkeep on a small deed).

 

I just don't' understand why ClubAB can't use an IP and a customer supplied shipping address to assess if it needs to collect VAT. They would generate a receipt that has IP, physical address, service fee, applicable taxes...ie VAT and a unique PayPal transaction number. I would think you could even confirm the physical address with a PayPal shipping address.

 

On a related note, a quick Google search, "Can paypal apply VAT tax" leads me to believe it not so easy for a merchant to set up collection and documentation of VAT.

[Skyrant 15]

EU (or Sweden more likely) wants Rolf to prove that his players are non-EU. They don't give a damn about if PayPal has that info available or not. So Rolf needs to store personal data about all his customers. This is Sweden, not USA, and Sweden, like Denmark, have very strict laws concerning storing personal data about people. It would mean that Rolf would have to pay hundreds of thousands of Swedish Kronar for storage, security and backup equipment to fullfill those requirements. I would rather those money be put into development of the game.

 

 

 

Setting up a payment processor that handles EVERYTHING for you incl. user secured accounts, VAT, fraud protection etc. Takes about an hour and is as simple as including 2 lines of HTML on your webpage. The usual processing fee is 2% per transaction and they offer not only PayPal but also Credit Cards, Bank transfers and much more. There are about 20-30 payment processors for Europe available to choose from.

 

I have set up online shops for multiple businesses in europe and there was NEVER a problem finding the right provider to make sure they are compliant with their countries regulations (which do not vary much in Europe).

 

My Premium has run out and i am not going to spend another dime on this game.

Edited July 4, 2013 by Teutates
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