On February 11th, World of Warcraft will be two years old in Europe! To celebrate the occasion, we are giving out some great loot to the winners of our Two Year Anniversary Contests! The first contest we are hosting is the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Lore Contest. Five winners for this contest will receive Alienware Gaming PCs! The second contest is the World of Warcraft Wallpaper Contest. Five first place winners for this contest will receive Alienware Gaming PCs and ten second place winners will receive Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics cards!

To learn more about these contests, please check out our Two Year Anniversary Contests page and read the Terms and Conditions. Good luck!

Lore contest: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/contests/twoyear/index.html#lore
Wallpaper contest: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/contests/twoyear/index.html#wallpaper
Terms and Conditions: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/legal/contests/twoyear-contests-07.html

---

Once again, the forum guidelines:
Forums Code of Conduct

Greetings,

To celebrate the second year anniversary of World of Warcraft in Europe, we are hosting two contests. The first is a Lore Contest and the second is a Wallpaper contest. Some of you may be wondering why your country is excluded from the Lore Contest. The reason for that is due to the nature of laws regarding and regulating lottery-style competitions across Europe. Very few countries have laws in place that make it easy for us to run such competitions in them. However, to allow as many people to participate in our Two Year Anniversary Contests and get a chance to win some cool prizes, we are also running a Wallpaper Contest. The Wallpaper Contest is open to all of the countries that normally participate in our skill-based competitions.

If your country is not eligible to participate in either contest, the reason is due to your country’s laws regarding how competitions must be run. Various examples of laws that prevent us from running competitions in some countries are:

• Terms must be translated in that country’s official language (we can only translate into Spanish, French, German, and English)
• Limits on the monetary value of the prize offered (some countries require fees or taxes to be paid if the prize is worth more than a certain amount)
• Requirements that there be a corporate presence inside that country’s borders for contests to be run there

Good luck to all of you who participate!

---

Once again, the forum guidelines:
Forums Code of Conduct

---

Q u o t e:
true and it can't be due to the prizes being to expencieve because they are mostly the same.

---

True. The main reason for so few countries being included is that the winners will be drawn randomly among those with the correct answers, hence this is defined as a lottery and falls under all rules that apply to those in each country. This is unfortunately often the biggest limiting factors in all contests.

[ Post edited by Thundgot ]

---

Once again, the forum guidelines:
Forums Code of Conduct

---

Q u o t e:
I can take these rules to the translation agency and get all nessecary documents that translation is correct with all stamps and the sort. It'll cost me not much more than my three month of subscribtion since there is really small ammount of simple text.

---

I'm no legal counsel myself, but I suspect some (many?) countries might also require participants to be able to submit their entry in the country's language, which might not be equally easy to solve.

I very much understand how frustrating this can be, but I do trust our legal department to do their very best on this matter. It's not like somebody wants to exclude anyone.

---

Once again, the forum guidelines:
Forums Code of Conduct

---

Q u o t e:
Thundgot, can you please forward our grieves to the legal department? I know it's probably not likely they'll change anything about this competition, but I'd very much appreciate that in future competitions more countries are found elegible for entry.

---

We work with contest eligibility all the time, as there's almost always some contest in preparation. All these concerns have been brought up several times, and we'll continue to bring them up and see whether we we can tweak things to fit more countries' laws and regulations with each contest. As said earlier, I trust our legal department to do this properly. If anybody posting their concerns here have factual information concerning involving their country in contests, please feel free to contact our legal department about it. "I know it would be allowed" won't cut it though.

And no, I won't post contact information for them here, as I doubt only those with factual and constructive input would use it. I'm sure those who have appropriate legal knowledge will also be very capable of finding the correct channels. ;)

---

Q u o t e:
Ask Aeus for that matter. He's from the Netherlands, and I'm also convinced that there's no law in Holland preventing this competition.

---

While an excellent community manager, Aeus is not a lawyer or legal counsel. I trust him to have about as much factual knowledge on Dutch lottery and competition laws as he does about chemical reactions involved in the making of white paint.

On a general note I'd like to ask people to stick to facts and realism on this topic. While it's unfortunate that some are unable to participate, claiming 70% of the players are excluded is an exaggeration. And while opening an office in each of the ~50 countries of Europe is probably possible I doubt those suggesting it are aware of the logistics and costs involved. Once again; I understand the frustration, but please don't let it get the better of you.

[ Post edited by Thundgot ]

---

Once again, the forum guidelines:
Forums Code of Conduct