It continues - A Square Enix Account is required (LM-24)Follow

A quick nod to Fynlar and his thread: http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=133332852596212218

I ran into a different, but possibly related problem. When I got home and attempted to log in this evening, I found the following message:

And by "please", they meant "transfer your account or GTFO."

So, it looks like they're taking another step to force people to transfer. Fortunately, I didn't run into any snags.

I don't know why you're surprised by this, they said they were going to do it:


The bolded bit seems pretty clear.

Edited, Apr 3rd 2012 2:51am by Kragorn

Actually, I made a small mistake in that bolding, I meant to include the last few words of the preceding sentence .. " exclusively for billing going forward", which I took to mean 'from now' when I read it a couple of days ago, especially as they posted that at month-end which of course would have been just before POL's next billing cycle had there been one.

I agree, they've been saying this sort of thing for a long time and typically of SE they've been vague about just when, that that post on 28th seemed to me they finally were doing it.

I don't think anyone is surprised or angry that they finally required the switch-over, we all knew it was coming eventually, but that they decided to drop the axe immediately before a ~24-hour maintenance on the billing servers so that you couldn't transfer your account over. I had plans to do several events on that day, but couldn't log on at all.

They said the maintenance would be over at 13:00 PST, but it was down until at least 21:00 when I went to sleep.

Edited, Apr 3rd 2012 8:24am by Pergatory

To say its their fault isn't very accurate. When they did the change over a while back they forced people to use a third party for billing..... remember hearing about Click N Buy..... who has been less than stellar. It wasn't until a lot of noise made by everyone that they ended up changing on how you could pay for services... via either directly or buying crysta in the exact amount you need like the Japanese players had the luxury of doing.

It's not their fault when they don't trust their only option on how to pay for service back when they said you needed to transfer. If you feel that isn't the case, give me your credit card info and I will make your payments for you...... That's what I thought. The path they choose was for a good reason.

For the vast majority of "this whole time", all of the "other options" were utterly and completely unacceptable to a large number of us. And by that, I mean that we would have stopped playing.

For a whole whopping two months now, they've had direct billing again. This had nothing to do with laziness, and everything to do with waiting to make sure SE didn't screw things up. I said as much then, and even suggested that "a couple months" would be the minimum time I would wait to see if things were working out with the new system.

Well, we've had a couple months, and I had no reservations about finally switching. But a little bit more notice, and a "we really mean it this time" would have been nice.


Edited, Apr 3rd 2012 12:48pm by VxSote

Ultimate card is unacceptable? You can buy 5 and be setup for months. Paypal? OH WAIT, YOU MUST BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE. Stop making excuses. We've had direct billing for 2 months. Get over it.

I know what you were trying to say by quoting me, but what I really meant was that we had that message for so long upon logging in that we didn't have a reason to believe that the most recent message they put out meant that they were serious about cutting us off at the end of March since they never explicitly stated that they would.

I wonder how many others are in the same boat as me. I've been playing less and less lately, sometimes not even logging on for weeks. I hadn't decided to cancel my account yet, but now I'm going to seriously take some time and think about if I want to set up new payment for it.

Actually, I hadn't done it in a while because I refused to go through with their ClickNSteal or crysta bullsh*t, and when they finally got the continuous pay w/ credit card thing going I was having trouble getting it to work.

Not to jump on either side of this, but I had been using my SE Account and had setup the Click-n-Rob to pay on a continuous basis. Actually ever since FF14's release since I was one of "those" people that were giving it a chance. Anyway, I still logged in to FFXI only to get the "You don't have any content IDs assigned" message. WTF? So I logged into my account page only to see all my IDs were cancelled. Guess SE had an issue with Click-n-Rob and they didn't get paid.

Was a quick fix to add my CC for direct billing, was nice no more Verisign for my VISA since mine is through a Japanese bank (I live there). I never switched or updated my CC info back when SE added the credit card verification crap on the NA accounts, so I never had to fight with that back then.

On a side note, I picked up the JP disk for my PS3 to play on and decided to create a new account to play around with. I've been jumping through hoops just getting that setup. Oddly enough, the JP SE Account page has all 3 CC options use secure verification; Verisign for Visa, MasterCards thing, and JBC's. None of my 3 CCs issued by local banks use those services. I tried to purchase Crysta via CC but SE uses the same deal like if you were going to direct pay with a CC. My only option was to use WebMoney which you can purchase at any local convienance store (7-11, FamilyMart, etc). Those are the only 3 methods of payment for JP players. 2 of which are basically the same deal.

Because SE dropped the account management from POL, you have to set that up on the SE Account Management page; i.e. register your code to get your POL ID, etc. That made things frustrating going back and forth between the 2. Seeing as I hadn't done that bit since 2003 when I first started playing.

It was kind of werid setting the game up on my PS3. Felt like I just bought the game and was going to play for the first time. Seeing all the setup steps for the PlayStation BB unit threw me for a loop at first til I realized I just need to enter CATV for my cable internet and let it skip the rest. It was initially asking for ISP account and password information (this was something you needed back in the day as they had special setup steps on their end to let you connect).

^^ this happened to me last week as well. I have been transferred over and using Click~N~Buy since August of last year. All of a sudden I have no content IDs and an email saying my account has been suspended for lack of payment. Not sure what happened, but I just transferred my payment method over to the new direct bill and was back on within 5 minutes. This was my only issue in the past 9 months with Click~N~Buy.

Is this how it ends? Seriously, 2 hours tonight trying to figure out the web of account information to get this sh*t transferred and no luck. I even created a mind map and lined up as much of the related information as I could and could not figure it out. I told it to send my account information to my email...except evidently my email is my POL email that I can't access right now since I can't log into POL. I also tried to contact using email except that account must be my POL as well. Chat and phone support available only while I'm at work and not at my computer. Hmmmm, I suppose I should just save my $34 a month (my account/wife's account with mules) and be done with this game I've been playing since April '04? I've always detested the POL/account management SE has concocted. If they wanted to consolidate systems, why not do it automatically? Where I work that's requirement number 1 on data migration--no customer intervention unless absolutely necessary.

Sure, I could go into super try hard mode, spend more hours, take a day off work and call in/chat...or I could just say screw you SE and wash my hands of it. I'll give it another week and see, but I'm not screwing with this sh*t any more this week.