Turbine is holding your credit card hostage

MMOCrunch has a customer service horror story up about trying to get their credit card info back from Turbine. After Mike canceled his Lord of the Rings Online account, he tried to get his credit card information off of Turbine's servers, but they told him that if he did that, he would never be able to play his copy of that game ever again. They told him that once he "deactivated the account," he would never, ever be able to reactivate it again.

Now, there aren't that many companies out there that will actually delete your credit card information and let you keep your account-- I'm told that NCSoft will let you "remove card" from your account, but that's pretty much it. So Turbine's inability to remove the card from the account isn't surprising. What is surprising, however, is that by deactivating your account, they remove the ability to ever play with that disc's key again. Turbine's LotRO EULA says nothing about canceling your account, either, although it does say that if they "are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us," then they can "terminate your license to the Software."

But whether it's legal or not, what's the point of spending $50 on a game disc when, after canceling your subscription, that disc becomes a coaster? Not cool for Turbine to break the game you paid for just because you'd like to keep your credit card information as safe as possible.