Just in time before the new year, we will upgrade our payment system to a completely new implementation. This has to happen mostly for technical and accounting reasons but also has a few implications for end-users. As such, I have summarized the key facts about the switch below.
Upgrade and Downtime
The switch to the new system will take place today, the 27th of December, probably at some time between 11:00 and 16:00 CET. During the upgrade, the registration, login and account management system will be briefly unavailable. Payment will be disabled for a longer period of time until the new system comes online and has been fully configured.
Should you encounter any payment issues after the upgrade, please contact our special support address payment@simulogics.net.
New Credit Card processor
After we have seen a lot of issues with our previous partner for credit and debit card processing, we have switched to a new provider that will hopefully be more reliable and work better with a larger variety of banks.
Prepayment and Online Bank Transfer offline until 2018-01-01
For accounting reasons, the two payment methods mentioned above will be unavailable between today and the end of December.
No phone payments after the upgrade
We have decided to discontinue phone payments (through Micropayment) for now. They pose an accounting nightmare, are very expensive (often with payouts of less then 50% of the actual amount) and only used by a small fraction of our customers. If you rely on phone payments because you have neither a credit card nor a bank account available to you, we suggest you look into paysafecard as an alternative. If that does not work for you either, please contact support to look into workarounds.
New (and old) payment methods in the future
The new system makes it a bit easier to integrate new payment providers. This will come in handy once we bring back support for Bitcoin payments some time in 2018 as well as when we come across interesting new providers that we haven't been aware of so far. If you know of a payment method that's popular wherever you live and you think we should support it, please get in touch!