I'm not here to make a big issue out of it as I very rarely enter sweepstakes on the Internet but I find myself wondering what is going on at Curse in regards to your competitions?

MMORPG.com, TTH and other sites that operate in a similar way all manage to have international competitions with no legal issues and often award those living outside of the US. It seems a bit odd that Curse can not find a way round these issues, where as similar sites have no problems what so ever.

For the longest time, you as a company have been saying, "we will be offering international sweepstakes soon," and soon has never come. When are you going to start offering your loyal user base that resides outside of the US?

There is usually 2 problem with international sweepstake:


1- the sponsor usually only cover 1 country:
example: ncsoft us doesn't do business with europe (there is ncsoft europe), etc.

2- the regulation are different from country to country.
For example, province of Quebec got stricter rule than the normal US states, and are usually excluded from most sweepstake.
Alot of european country got different / stricter rules as well.

3- Alot of similar website 'don't have any issue' with that since they don't follow foreign law and prefer to pay penalty fee if someone sue them in the process (since the value of the prize is usually small, penalty is usually small).
It doesn't make them better business (ethic wise)


I live in province of Quebec and have to live with the fact that most online contest are closed to us.  sad but unavoidable.

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Flisher

There is usually 2 problem with international sweepstake:


1- the sponsor usually only cover 1 country:
example: ncsoft us doesn't do business with europe (there is ncsoft europe), etc.

2- the regulation are different from country to country.
For example, province of Quebec got stricter rule than the normal US states, and are usually excluded from most sweepstake.
Alot of european country got different / stricter rules as well.

3- Alot of similar website 'don't have any issue' with that since they don't follow foreign law and prefer to pay penalty fee if someone sue them in the process (since the value of the prize is usually small, penalty is usually small).
It doesn't make them better business (ethic wise)


I live in province of Quebec and have to live with the fact that most online contest are closed to us.  sad but unavoidable.

Again, I maintain that MMORPG.com, TTH and other sites of  a similar nature to Curse.com offer the same sort of sweepstakes to those outside of the US and regularly award those outside of the US. From what I understand, Curse has a substantial userbase outside of the US.

Surely if other sites can do it, Curse can?

Unfortunatly, as flisher says, it is hard to allow everyone to particpate in all contests legally. Just look at Blizzard, they only allow certain countries to participate in all their contests. MMORPG.com and TTH may not be based in USA and that may explain why they are able to have such contests for everyone.