Minecraft (Windows) Realms Plus says Expired, but it is set to auto-renew and I have paid...

Hi Sheri! My name is Darhyl and I’d be more than happy to help you with your query.

I'm sorry you are experiencing this with your unauthorized renewals.

It's important to note that this is a public user-to-user community forum, and none of us here work for Microsoft.

Based on your description, it is possible that these charges came from a different Microsoft account.

Kindly check your other Xbox email accounts on account.microsoft.com > Payment and Billing > Order History > Select the date of range when you received the charges.

You may check if the subscription is active as well by signing your account on account.microsoft.com > then services and subscription.

Also, check the accounts' Order History of your family members or friends who might have been using your Xbox console or Windows PC frequently at your home. It might be possible that your payment card is linked to their accounts.

If the charges can't be found, I highly suggest you reach out to your financial institution/bank to file a dispute as this will be considered fraudulent charges. They should be able to process the refund right away so that the money will be refunded back to your payment card.

Thank you for your kindness and understanding! Please feel free to let me know if you need anything else.

Best Regards,
Darhyl

Hi Darhyl... it is the correct account... I've paid it for years. Had this happen once before and I had to cancel and restart it!

HOW do I contact someone at Microsoft? I sign into my Microsoft account and I'm completely frustrated trying to find how to contact someone about the Minecraft Realm.

-Sheri

I ended up cancelling auto-renew entirely and temporarily deactivating my realm completely so I could set it up to be charged at times more convenient for my fixed income. Currently, I manually renew my 2-person realm every month now via my Nintendo Switch (on which I have the Switch version of Minecraft Bedrock), but I wouldn't call that a solution or even a workaround, because the problem is that auto-renew on Microsoft is correctly taking payments but not actually resulting in renewing a 2-friend realm.

Renewing manually every month on a completely different non-Microsoft game console that I also have Minecraft for is not a viable workaround for autorenewing a realm for someone who only has Minecraft Bedrock on PC.

There must be something buggy in the communication between a Microsoft server saying "the subscription has been paid this month" and the Mojang server that's supposed to answer "okay, we confirm that the existing realm is successfully renewed for the next 30 days" (or, what I think we'd all appreciate at the very least: "there was a problem renewing the existing realm, refund the customer their payment and tell them there was a problem").

(I haven't tried auto-renewing via Nintendo but problems with that method wouldn't belong here anyway.)

Yes I have a Minecraft Realms subscription that was set to auto-renew, but my realm was showing as expired.

When I signed up for the realm, I believe I set up the automatic renewal in-game (Minecraft for Windows on my pc).

Yes, I contacted Mojang through the submit a request. This was the confirmation number for my submission: 3348478.

I actually followed up with Mojang and they were able to apply 30 days to my realm, thus making it active again. This is what they said:

"Thanks for reaching back out with that information. I have located your account and applied 30 days to your Realm [Moderator removed to protect personal information] based on your purchase. If the added days are not reflected in game, you may need to log out and log back in again to refresh the connection with our servers.

Unfortunately, manually adding days to a Realm prevents any auto renewals from occurring. Because of this, your subscription is no longer connected to this realm, and we recommend canceling your subscription within 30 days to avoid any additional charges. That said, please keep in mind that extending your realm will end up failing.

Any additional days you try to add will no longer apply and you would still be charged. Other than that, you should have no problem extending a new Realm whenever you’re ready to do so."

I paid for the realm 3 days before it randomly became expired. Basically I renewed it, played on it, and 3 days later it expired.