So here’s the tea on Guild Wars 2’s bubble tea promo – and why EU players are now being excluded

Last week, we covered Guild Wars 2’s bizarre but fun promotion with bubble tea vendor Kung Fu Tea. As originally announced, the promo was supposed to grant mobile users keys for in-game cosmetics in exchange for their personal information from social media.

I went to a store the first weekend and they didn’t yet have the drink; a message on the retailer’s mobile website said the promo had suffered a “delay,” so I figured we’d just have to try again next weekend. But what I didn’t try to do was actually grab the promotional codes from the app – and apparently, that part has also gone awry.

Kung Fu Tea’s Facebook page has been chronicling the problems. On September 1st, the first day of the promo, the company said that the wild traffic from the promo was causing outages and that it was working on it. On the 2nd, it apologized to fans and said that it was fighting “bots/automated scripts,” hence the DLC code claiming problems. “We will make sure that you guys get the DLC codes anyway,” it said. But on the 3rd, the tea vendor announced that it was halting the promo temporarily because of the bots.

“For the past few days, there have been a considerable number of users abusing the promotion by using bots to claim thousands of DLC codes at once. This has unfortunately interfered with the code distribution process.”

Reddit, meanwhile, noticed that Kung Fu Tea appears to no longer be offering the mobile promotion to non-US users, prompting players from the EU and elsewhere around the globe to call it a “bait-and switch” “scam” since KFT got their personal information but didn’t actually deliver the codes. Players on the official forums aren’t much happier.

“Both promotions have always been limited to the US only,” Kung Fu Tea posted to Facebook. “We are sorry for not emphasizing this sooner.” Multiple Redditors report that the promotion was advertised in the EU launcher, and I’ve double checked the original press release; it does not mention the online/app portion of the promo being restricted to US users. Here’s the terms before and after shot, courtesy of a Facebook user:

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We reached out to ArenaNet this morning to inquire about what was going on with the promo, whether there would be an alternate method to pick up the loot people are missing out on, and what players should do if they handed over their personal info and received no codes. The studio has declined to comment.

In the meantime, presumably EU players have the right under the GDPR to have their information deleted from the KFT servers.