Important Annoucement from Square-Enix

[xua]

I find it rather humorous how many of you are falling for this so-called added security. "It's a cool security feature but sucks it's mandatory." LOL

This has nothing to do with your security and everything to do with SE's wallet. Adding VbV or SecureCode does nothing for you but add another layer of inconvenience. You think account hackers bother changing your billing info? Why would they; the only thing better than stealing someone's shit is stealing it on their dime.

This is a security measure for SE. It essentially makes it much more difficult for mainly RMTs to issue charge backs and utilize other credit card fraud during their activities. That is all it is. Any RMT organization probably has hundreds of different accounts across all servers, or more, depending on the various activities they are engaged in. You think they actually pay for these?

What's really petty is that on top of their inability to cease RMT operations, they've essentially made it so they at least get their monthly payments for these activities. All the while cock-blocking a large portion of their legitimate member base. I find it really insulting they don't even apologize for the inconvenience and play this off as security for the player instead of what it really is. Then again, judging by how many of you suckers are swallowing their bullshit, I guess there's no real need to admit to or apologize for anything if you can get away with it.

And for those of you who are crying "NA Onry", sorry, but this is actually the second of a foreseeable multi-wave attack against credit card fraud by RMTs. JP accounts were hit as early as a year ago with the inability to register or change to any credit card issued outside of Japan; what's worse is SE to this day refuses to acknowledge any such limitation has been implemented. At least they let you guys know instead of springing this on you and then denying it even exists...

Also this FF14 beta notion,... please. SE is just protecting their number one interest: money. I implore anyone calling into SE support center to demand them to publicly 1) apologize for the inconvenience this causes, 2) apologize for misrepresenting this "security feature" as anything other than protection for SE against credit card fraud. I'd really like to see them come clean about this, though I doubt it will happen.

[Vyrr]

Huge cock-block of text.

Does this come with a tl;dr version?

Edit: Serious question, too, before somebody gets butthurt about it.

[Aksannyi]

Didn't take that long to read! Jeez.

And their whole fight against credit card fraud, if that's what it is, is completely pointless because they can't tell the fucking difference anyway. That's all there is to it.

[Vyrr]

Didn't take that long to read! Jeez.

Severe ADD = <3

[Unspeakable]

Can vouch for above my prepaid card worked fine when i put it on PS2! wow hope SE never catches this one >.<

[Yugl]

Didn't take that long to read! Jeez.

This indeed. People need to stop bitching and whining about "TLDR" (Whatever that means) versions of text that exceed one paragraph. If it's that much of a problem, you have other issues to worry about other than what that person posted.

[Fridell]

(everyone pardon the swedish for a moment here)

Swebank och har haft lite prassel med Kronolle och en personlig konkurs för ett par år sedan när företaget mitt gick omkull så lite halvjobbigt att få krediter (fick t.o.m bråka med min bankman om att ens få ha VISA utan kredit).

Dock har jag snackat lite med min bank nu och ska kunna få aktivera VfV trots allt, dock suckade min bankman en hel del när dom skulle lösa det då det inte var standard eller kutym att göra på det sättet med deras bankkort.

Om du har Internetbank via Swedbank kan du bara ta kortöversikt > ditt VISA > och gå till verifering där, smidigt & enkelt.

[Liquidedust]

Om du har Internetbank via Swedbank kan du bara ta kortöversikt > ditt VISA > och gå till verifering där, smidigt & enkelt.

Problemet var att det inte gällde på mitt kort av någon anledning och får massa felmeddelanden när jag försöker göra det. Detta var anledningen till att jag rignde och bråkade med min bankman.

[Jaunty]

"TLDR" (Whatever that means)

TLDR

1) (Internet) too long; didn't read
2) (Internet) used to indicate a summary for those who don't want to read the whole thing.

If you were being sarcastic I apologise

[LM17]

I wonder if I can get banned for the third time in 4 months for credit card issues? (Fortunately unbanned each time).
I missed out on the gardening fiasco..

[Klaatu]

Apparently the PS2 work around works just fine. Thank god I kept my HD. Ate up my CC like a champ and I'm back in the game. Wooo


P.S. Stupid SE

[Yugl]

TLDR

1) (Internet) too long; didn't read
2) (Internet) used to indicate a summary for those who don't want to read the whole thing.

If you were being sarcastic I apologise

Cool, I'm still trying to figure out most of these (So far I've guessed POIDH and TLDR correctly) acronyms.

[Mistress Stowastiq]

Does this come with a tl;dr version?

Edit: Serious question, too, before somebody gets butthurt about it.

Something about how SE is only concerned with making money when they implemented the recent security features. Also, I think something about how combating RMT with VBV does not help anyone but SE's wallet and is being falsely presented as a customer benefit.

I might have misinterpreted some of it though in my utter shock that someone would actually accuse SE of being concerned with profit when implementing credit card policy.

[bungiefan]

Me: which i'm talkin right now on MSN, he asks me, he lives in Italy, but he got an US account - what to do in that case?
Me: He probably got ffxi when there was only the us version, not sure
SEL Agent Marion: There's nothing he can do, the only 'problem' for him is that when he requires help with his account he will have to contact the US info centre
Me: I'll let him know then
Me: Thanks for the answers
SEL Agent Marion: You're welcome, that's what we're for :D


tl;dr: Europe does not get hit by this, and i tried to ask info about the US accounts, but he just told me to contact the US chat.

If they're going to do this and screw over importers (like they started to do with the JP accounts not accepting non-JP cards since November), they need to implement a way to change the region of an account. The game has has very spread out release dates, and a lot of people imported. Those customers are going to be lost if they keep fucking with billing like this and getting in the way of the legitimate importers playing. I'd convert my JP account to an NA one if they'd actually let me. I just didn't know there'd ever be an NA release in 2002 when I imported, especially on PS2, and I was a Mac-only user at the time so I wasn't interested in a PC version.

why does this only affect NA players..... not fair, same game , same user agreement, should be the same rules no?

The user agreement isn't the same across regions. Japan has a different agreement than NA and EU. One such thing is that you have to be 20 to make a JP account, or have a guardian that is 20 or older make one for you. There's different laws and legal speak for what they can and can't do in different countries. Also, there's different things the users will tolerate in different regions.

Japan gets to use a form of prepaid payment that nobody else does, WebMoney. Europe gets to use non-credit debit cards, other than just VISA and MasterCard debit cards.

[Khajit]

I remember that when tau came out only the EU version was available via torrent(people wanted it for their pc versions when they paid for the ps2 or 360 versions in RL) "we" tricked pol/ffxi into thinking it was European to allow for installation.
Would the same trick work in theory?(simply tricking pol into thinking it's British and whatnot when you update CC info)

[Thorny]

I remember that when tau came out only the EU version was available via torrent(people wanted it for their pc versions when they paid for the ps2 or 360 versions in RL) "we" tricked pol/ffxi into thinking it was European to allow for installation.
Would the same trick work in theory?(simply tricking pol into thinking it's British and whatnot when you update CC info)

i could be wrong, but pretty sure the reason you need to update with the proper region's pol is because each region is stored on a seperate server and as such it'd be pretty much impossible to bypass that way

[bungiefan]

I remember that when tau came out only the EU version was available via torrent(people wanted it for their pc versions when they paid for the ps2 or 360 versions in RL) "we" tricked pol/ffxi into thinking it was European to allow for installation.
Would the same trick work in theory?(simply tricking pol into thinking it's British and whatnot when you update CC info)

FFXI has the same files for all regions. POL doesn't. You can log in to any account on any version, but you can only edit account information with a client that matches the region of the account that the server is indicating. Your account information is stored on the server, and the server says if your account in Japanese, America, or European. You can't change this, SquareEnix has to, and they offer no method of doing so. Thus that leads to things like importers with JP accounts living outside of Japan having to use fake Japanese addresses, preventing account recovery or use of notarized forms, since we can't prove that information to be true, since it isn't. Also, if someone moves across regions, as is not uncommon in 7 years of time, we still have to deal with the branch in our original region. People that moved out of Japan are out of luck just as badly. It can get expensive or impossible to recover an account from the ban shenanigans they've been doing lately when combined with having an account that is foreign to where you are now living.

[shaddix]

my mastercard doesn't support the securecode shit. I am one of the gardening guys who got banned for irregular activity.

I was hoping the securecode thing might prevent another ban. i think i'm screwed

[bungiefan]

So for some of the issues coming up from the LM-17 occurrences and the billing policy changes in Japan and North America, I went to POL chat. I got SEI POL Edgar A. Because of these changes, and the sheer number of importers of the JP and NA clients (JP for everyone before NA release, and NA for all the EU players before the EU release), they're making it hard for some of the owners of their longest-running accounts. Also, I asked him to relay up the chain that they seem to be expressing a bias against military personnel with not letting us change account region or letting us use any address when we have to move out of region for something, which is fairly likely in 7 years of time. He said he'd try, but the best bet on getting them to consider adding an option to change account region is to have multiple submissions from multiple people to the Comments and Suggestions form, linked below.

All you importers and military people here, please ask for the option, and say so if you are military and would have trouble if you get stationed out of country and they won't accept your current address. Why only have the BBB after them? Why not give them a reputation with military people that this company would be a bad choice to deal with if you get deployed overseas, because they won't help you much outside fo region, and won't let you deal with the local region? Japan is a society based on shame, not guilt, so shame them into changing something. Negative publicity can cause loss of face, see Pandemonium Warden.

https://secure.playonline.com/supportus/index.html

Spoiler: show

Area of Comment/Suggestion

Service & Support: Other: Region-locked Accounts

Details

Summary for what follows:

We need a means to change account region if we get moved out of the country due to government or military work, or you need to start letting us register addresses to our accounts that are foreign to the account region.

Also, consider how many loyal customers, some importers that were your very first customers of this service, are being impacted by your policy changes and are losing account access because of lack of the options asked for in the last paragraph.

Detailed version:

Your service has been running for over 7 years now. I noticed that you have no means of changing the region an account is locked to, and 7 years is a long time to expect someone to live in the same place, especially with people working for the military and government being part of your customer base. You also don't allow us to register foreign addresses outside the region to our accounts, which is especially a problem with Japanese accounts, since if billing fails, you can't just simply register a new payment method and try that. Instead you get a paper bill in the mail, sent to the address on your JP POL account (which will be fake if you have moved outside of Japan since, or imported before a local version was available), and cannot get the account reactivated until you pay that bill in person at a Japanese post office or convenience store. Now with billing policy changes, we are having trouble using cards from outside the region from banks that don't support the same features, as many European banks don't support Verified by VISA or MasterCard's equivalent.


Your people in charge of the account system should consider adding a means to change the region an account is set to, so that people don't have to import expansions and payment cards, if they either moved in the past 7 years, or imported before a local version of the game was available. It took your company 3 years or so to add a European version, so a lot of Europeans have NA accounts, and not a lot of European card issuers support the new billing requirements. There was also a significant number of importers of the JP version, considering that was all that was available for the first year and a half of the game. JP accounts had a billing policy update, though not advertised, that stops most non-Japanese cards from being accepted, requiring users of those accounts to import WebMoney cards to keep playing.

If you don't add a region change option, or be more careful with your policy updates, you will be pruning a lot of importers, military employees, and government employees from the game, with almost no option of account recovery. They likely won't be interested in services from your company in the future, especially Final Fantasy XIV, if they get negatively impacted by changes to this game.

As it stands now, you seem to expect that if someone moves to another region, they need to start the game over with a completely new character, which is very unappealing to someone with years of playtime and multiple max level jobs. Why would we want to start over an account with 1000+ hours of playtime just because we got deployed, or we were in another country on a student VISA which expired and we went back home?

[Zacas1]

Hmm... this is kind of weird. My Bank of America Debit card supports the Verified by Visa... but my Bank of America Credit Card does not... wtf?

Edit: And by contacting BoA... all I get out of them is that without a specific decline notice from Verified by Visa, they can't tell me why my Credit Card won't work for the service but my Debit Card does...

Brilliant.