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What's worse than having a service provider slap a fat charge on your credit card that's not supposed to be there? It's having it happen a second time, after they've assured you that your credit-card details have been expunged from their records.

News agency Thomson Reuters employee, Evan Maloney, is in just that position in his evocatively titled email to the public regapi list "Linden can't be trusted with your credit card information". Maloney's been slapped with the US$500 fee for the Reuters Second Life surname not once, but twice. Last time it took many weeks to sort out -- Maloney isn't eligible for customer support, not being a premium account -- so trying to reach someone at Linden Lab via the mailing list seems to be his primary support option for getting things fixed.

Some of you may have noticed that your billing for Second Life is no longer being done out of the United Kingdom but is now being done from the USA. Since there was no announcement of a change, we asked Linden Lab about that, back in the first week of January -- especially as it seemed that some users were still being billed from the UK, and others from the USA (and a few users with multiple accounts, from both countries). There seemed to be little consistency.

Within a week, we had a basic answer. Linden Lab's John Zdanowksi (Zee Linden) responded, "There was shift in billing, though the change only happened for new customers or existing customers who re-entered their billing information, so that there would be no chance of disruption."

There's no reason stated, but NCSoft are changing their entire billing department's time zone from Eastern Standard Time (EST, -5 hours GMT) to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, = GMT) starting tomorrow, a difference of about five hours.

As it's just a time zone swap, nobody will lose or gain any hours they've already paid for, but depending on when you opened your NCSoft account you may be billed a day later in future. It's very important that you don't think about why they'd make this change, how you can go five hours into the future and not gain any extra time, or why the acronym doesn't match the full phrase. Trust me.

Just a warning to those of you with an active Hellgate: London subscription, or those considering getting one. The moment you unsubscribe to the service, all subscription benefits are terminated instantly -- regardless of how long your subscription was due to last.

The cancellation page warns you this will happen immediately, but it's still annoying those who have encountered it.

As one of our tipsters put it: "so in reality you aren't paying for one month of subscription time, you can't cancel and still play out the month you PAID for, they cut you out at the instant you unsubscribe". That means it's entirely possible to start a monthly subscription one day, unsubscribe the next, 27 days deleted from your account. Is this "fair game" to you, and just count the days manually before you cancel? Or more than a little discourteous? To me, if you pay for a month, you should get a month -- no exceptions.

On the back of the recent billing problems, this doesn't make HG:L the most user-friendly of launches. Or the smoothest.

Has this affected any Massively.com readers?

[Thanks, RandomEngine & Anonymous!]

Hellgate: London subscribers are reporting that they're being double billed for subscriptions to the online game, says Shacknews. Apparently not everyone has been double-billed, but some subscribers report that even after being charged the subscription doesn't show up in their account. It's not clear just how many users have been affected by either issue.

The support forum thread has grown - err - massively (so to speak) though you have to log in to see it. Memory leaks, subscription problems, regional management issues and so forth - Is this just all part and parcel of getting rid of the new-car smell on an MMO, or do you personally think developers should be trying harder?