Around June of last year Albion Online came up on my radar again, and I thought it was looking very good. By July I decided to buy a Epic pack so that I could try the game out. A month later, after really enjoying the game, I upgraded to a Legendary pack. Then I decided to try and get some friends to play with me, and started talking to them about the game. One friend was interested, but lacked the funds to play at the moment. This struck me as an easily solved problem as I not only wanted my friend to play with me, but I really wanted the various rewards from the first tier of the referral rewards as well. I checked out the referral system, and looked at the questions on the page ( albiononline.com/en/faq/invite_friends ). I had my friend create an account from my referral link, and then mid August I gave him a gift copy of the game. I checked on the status of the referral for a while, but never saw anything pop up. Reading the forums it didn't seem like there was any cause for alarm, and I was content to wait. As such things go I moved on to other games while waiting for all the awesome work being done on the game.Yesterday I checked the site and saw the news about the next update and release date and was rather excited. I decided to go check the status of my referral to make sure that I would have my rewards in place when I logged into the game at release. Unfortunately there was no referral shown on the page. I checked about the site, and went back to ( albiononline.com/en/faq/invite_friends ). Now I notice that the page has been modified, and a question for "Does gifting a key give me a referral reward?", and the answer is that they do not give referral rewards.Google has a cached version of the page from as recently February 24, 2017 ( webcache.googleusercontent.com…&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us ) (screenshot attached) showing that this question was not always present on this page, and that there was no warning that gifting would not give you a referral. This is a relatively minor issue, as a person could simply use their own PayPal account, credit card, or any number of other means to pay for a copy of the game for somebody else and still get the referral rewards with great ease. This is what I would have done the poor design of the gift system been made apparent back in August.I contacted support about this issue (conversation screenshots attached), and initially got an amusing form letter response seeming from a parrot that repeated what I had said, without answering my request to give me the referral rewards. I pointed this out, and was then told that "Sadly, the referral system is an automated system." and that they could not apply a referral for a gifted purchase despite showing that I did get the referral. I replied and showed them the above information, including the screenshot, and they replied and said "This questions was clearly observed and explained on our FAQ page here: albiononline.com/en/faq/invite_friends ". As you will note, this the link that I had already referenced in my prior email, both the current page and the old version. Doesn't seem like they cared enough to even read the email.Why even have the gifting system present then? Just so that the employees of Sandbox can laugh at the stupidity of people as they use a suboptimal system to get their friends playing? So that Sandbox can squirm it's way out of paying out a few minor pixels to their loyal players, and what.. save some money because they generated less pixels..? In the hopes that idiots (like me) will purchase a copy of their game as gift to get rewards, not get the rewards, and then purchase yet another copy of the game to make sure they get the rewards, thus selling another copy of the game and lining Sandbox's pockets? I understand that the system is automated, and that they did not plan for this useage case, but that is utterly unacceptable.It may be that the system is fully automated, and that they failed to build support tools to rectify problems, but that's an extremely lame excuse and does not mean that Sandbox cannot fix the problem. At the very least they could take my referral link, create a new account, purchase the game with a company credit card (or personal, and get reimbursed from the company), and then have my account reflect the correct amount of referral rewards. Therefore the idea that nothing can be done is far from true.TLDRI liked Albion enough that I gifted it to a friend so that he could play, and Sandbox outright refuses give me referral rewards because I used their own system to gift their game. Indications are that they don't even read support emails. Save yourself, don't use the gifting system, it is a trap created by Sandbox Interactive.