To my favorite maker of games: SquareEnixFollow

I was 10 years old when my older brother bought Final Fantasy, for the NES. Since that day I was hooked. There hasn't been a RPG made by Squaresoft or SquareEnix that has came out for NES, SNES, PS1, PS2, PS3 or Xbox 360 that I have not bought.

You have made some of the best games I have ever played and you have always been the company I held the standard as to what to expect from a good RPG game.

As I lack a better venue to get this message to you and be assured that it will not instantly get deleted or end up in your waste basket, I have written this for you here on alla.com which has always served all of my FFXI needs.

For comming up on two decades it has been an easy choice to give you my money for your services, lately however the choice has become more and more difficult. As a very loyal fan, I am sad to say that due to your recent choices on how you treat your consumers I am henceforth going to stop purchasing your titles. I can not in good conscience, support you as you are now.

Some out there feel as I, but for different reasons. Some you have harmed directly, others like me self have only suffered indirectly. We all are waiting for the same thing though. I will be waiting in the wings for you to recognize that your decision to treat your fans the way you have has been a poor one and I hope that you choose to confront this issue head on. When you do I will with open arms embrace the general high quality of your titles.

Waiting with high hopes,
Jacob W.
Oregon, USA


Edited, Jul 29th 2009 10:43am by spcwill

Signed.

Also, I'm going play WoW. Just so you know where your money ends up.

You should realize this is about more than this isolated issue. Pretending it isnt is very fanboyish, sorry.

If you can defend SE's reputation as a glowing bastion of consumer satisfaction go ahead. But you know there is overwhelming history of them repeatedly pissing off the player base and recently almost monthly.

Bye now.


Edited, Jul 29th 2009 1:49pm by RattyBatty

You shouldn't be forced to create a separate bank account just to pay for a god damn video game. That's the dumbest sh*t I've ever heard.



I'm quitting because of the giant mound of ********* these guys are shoveling on their playerbase, and I'm fed up with all the nonsense. This isn't really the only reason, but I'm tired of jumping through hoops to play a video game.

Edited, Jul 29th 2009 12:53pm by Chocoblo

Glad I'm not the only one who thought that seemed ******* crazy.

YOU DONT HAVE TO GET A SEPERATE BANK ACCOUNT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!

You can call SE and get it set up if you wish. I jsut chose to take 30 min of my day and get a new account because im unsatisfied with my current bank anyway.

The Credit Card change is simply the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Its the fact that I was double charged last month, and I WAS SCARED TO FIX IT FOR FEAR OF BEING BANNED. Its the fact that I can no longer garden for fear of being banned. Its the fact that THEY broke younin and I get banned for using it. Its the fact that they have the autoban program STILL running. Its the fact that those wrongly banned cannot get their accounts back. Its the fact that I can't even change my credit card info on 2 accounts (I moved recently) without getting banned. Its the fact that SE refuses to even acknowledge a problem. They are silent on all these issues and it pisses me off. I have had it. I'm sick of their shit. I am going home and deleting all my content ID's (2 accounts and 17 id's). If they charge me on the first of this month, I'll sic my bank on them.

No my quitting will not fix SE, but I can spend my $40 a month somewhere else.


P.S. and no you can't have my stuff

I use a verified credit card, but to me this latest shenanigan can only be justified if it deals a killing blow to RMT. I mean 99.9% removal. Otherwise it makes no sense.

As much as I want to write this off as overreacting, I don't think I can. A couple months ago when I had to change my credit card and their system would not let me, dealing with the SE customer service was the worst experience I have ever had with a company. It was almost laughable, but I was too angry to laugh. They didn't seem to have the motivation to even ACT like they cared about my problem, much less help me. It is a very helpless feeling not having anyone at the company to talk to.

That being said, I just don't have enough anger to boycot them myself. I realize, with a company like this, there is no other way to get the point across, but I simply don't have it in me to give up on the Final Fantasy series, even when treated horribly by the company that owns them. They are really the only games I play anymore and have been a fan since the very first one on the NES. If everyone put their money where their mouth was like the OP, they would be forced to change. If just I along with a small percentage of others do, we lose out on all the good SE titles and nothing else really changes. I just don't have it in me to make that sacrifice, but comend those who do.

Edited, Jul 29th 2009 1:38pm by VawnLakshmi

I agree completely with this.


Also, I think some of the currant problems are just in peoples heads. For example, I really don't believe that they ever actually intended to ban anyone over the Yonin issue. People here just have too active an imagination.

And I don't think that GMs are necessarily a completely reliable source of information. They, like much of customer support around the world, often don't know wtf they're talking about.

Also, I don't think that anyone has been banned just for gardening in any particular way. Most of the cases I've seen here are a combination of several things that must have set off a red flag. ie, a combination of gardening and npcing while also storing their money in particular ways across mules, AND connecting from several different ip addresses and types of internet connections, AND switching around different methods of payment. Or at least a few of these things.

My point, of course, is not that any of these people deserved to get banned. SE should have some ethical principle of innocence until proven guilty, and not guilty by association. The fact that they can't get this straight and competently do their jobs of finding out who actually is and isn't rmt is pretty embarrassing.

What my point is, is that the people getting in a craze and saying "I'm afraid to even do some gardening b/c SE will ban me!!" are being really ####ing stupid. Sorry for caps, but SE WON'T BAN YOU FOR GARDENING, and SE WON'T BAN YOU FOR USING YONIN!! Of course yonin has been fixed now, but my point remains the same.


Another thing I think needs to be said is that there were three main issues with rmt that were the reason players hated them and wanted them gone. First, many of their methods of making money involved harassing the player base (ie claims and other things). Second, many of the ways that they produced gil and sold it to players had an inverse effect on the dynamics of the game and it's economy. And of course, seeing people in game that are there just to turn a dollar, and not to enjoy themselves with other players can sully the experience for some.

I'm getting the feeling, though, that SE is losing sight of this in showing disapproval of, and/or removing many methods of play that are not related to the issues I mentioned above. They are, in effect, performing chemotherapy on their own game.

I think any method of making gil that;
a) is performed by legitimate players,
b) does not involve harassment of any kind, and
c) Is not considered a serious threat to the games economy,
should not be intervened with from SE. An important benchmark of any good MMO is that there are a variety of methods with which to make money.

I guess it's hard to discern what SE considers "a serious threat to the games economy" nowadays, as there just seems to be a lot of forward momentum on SEs part from everything involving RMT.



[ btw, what ever happened to all those DDOS attacks? Did they just stop? Did they get caught? or did SE pay them off? ]


...

Cold fries, and a 5 peice chicken nuggets instead of the 10 peice I ordered is not enough to get me to stop going to that eatery. I can simply walk back up to the counter tell them what happened and not only do I get my situation fixed, but odds are I get a free meal out of it.

Now if when I went back to the counter and told them my order was wrong and the manager took my cold fries and put them under his armpit to rewarm them then took the box that held my 5 chicken nuggets and took a dump in it while telling me he just ate a 5 peice box of chicken nuggets and I could have what was left of his...then no, I would never return to another Mcdonalds for the rest of my life.



FF11, FF12 and The Last Remnant are all games from SE that had/have some real issues. None of the offline game issues are real bad, but you can't judge how a company like SE feels about it's consumers with an offline game...it's nearly impossible. With a game like FFXI, an online MMO, it is fairly easy to see how they feel about it's playerbase. What I have seen lately, just makes me want to move to other pastures.

I don't hold a real grudge with SE, I rather enjoy most of thier work personally. I just don't want to be involved with a game where just logging in comes with a certain level of unneeded stress.

Also, what is the point of judging ones character if we omit thier flaws? What I said basically equates to "SE you have been a good friend, but I don't agree with the choices you are making now. Until you start to make better choices, I can't hang around you anymore."



I really don't expect them to hit everything out of the park. But if they wish for my continued support and my money I do expect them to own up to thier own mistakes and do thier best to fix them in a timely manner.

In all honesty, I don't expect this to do much of anything. SE can continue down this path and still have plenty of people support them. I am but a small cog in the machine that is SE, and one small cog can't break the whole machine. My real hope in this is to let them see that if they walk a better path, a lot more people will choose to support them.

I will probably get a bunch of people pissy and even get rated through the floor on this, but just try this little experiment. Get your account hacked on FFXI and then go get your account hacked on WoW.

The very day it occurs and you call Blizzard, you will have your WoW account back and it will be restored and backed up within the last 2 weeks.

For FFXI, you'll be lucky if you get it back in 2 weeks and you might end up restored to your account from 2 years ago (extreme example, but I saw it here and it made me think "wtf" http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/?topic_id=4228)

Customer service goes a long way, but I don't think SE will ever get that message.