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My battle with Square Enix customer service!Follow

#1 Apr 26 2013 at 1:58 AM Rating: Decent
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Hi all,

I thought I'd share my current experience with SE and their customer service department. Last week I decided to return to the game and play. I went to reactivate my account and use my debit card to pay the fee. I was then surprised to learn that my Visa debit card got declined knowing that I had the funds to pay the fee to play. So I tried to enter my card details again and found the payment had got declined. I was now a bit confused and then decided to try my Visa credit card. This also got declined. Error 601 and 401 was shown on the screen when trying to register both cards.

I checked with the banks that issue the cards and both confirm no blocks had been placed on the cards and had no idea why the payments were being declined. However, both banks did state that a £1 fee had been placed on the cards even though they had been declined. I thought this might have been some kind of security check?

So, I now decided to contact SE and find out what was going on. I spoke to someone at SE using the live chat service, who told me that a block might have been placed on the cards due to the payment being declined. They wouldn't tell me why the payment got declined in the first place though! I told them about the error 601/401 but they didn't seem to have much knowledge about this and told me to clear the browser cookies and cache. This of course didn't help at all.

After a few days have gone past I've received a couple of emails from SE stating that the cards had been blocked for 24 hours and that I should try one of them again. I did this and it got declined again and with another £1 "fee" taken from the card. However, I did notice that the first lot of £1 fees did reappear back on my card after a few days.

I've since managed to pay FFXI by purchasing crysta with lucky enough worked! The strange thing is though, I managed to purchase Seekers of Adoulin with the same card that got declined without any issues at all!

So, my reason for sharing this experience is to ask if anyone else here has ever had these issues with SE and did you ever manage to get it sorted? Because even now I cannot register or use either card to purchase anything within my SE account and I still have no idea why.

#2 Apr 26 2013 at 2:07 PM Rating: Default
Nothing changes, no matter how long I leave this company.
#3 Apr 26 2013 at 2:30 PM Rating: Good
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darrenuk wrote:
I did this and it got declined again and with another £1 "fee" taken from the card. However, I did notice that the first lot of £1 fees did reappear back on my card after a few days.


These £1 charges are temporary. They are used by companies to test you actually have money on your card. The £1 is never actually taken and is returned to your card after a while.

There is no reason to take as much as £1. Most decent companies only take pennies, even 1p to test, but this is SE we are talking about...
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#4 Apr 26 2013 at 2:40 PM Rating: Decent
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jtftaru wrote:
darrenuk wrote:
I did this and it got declined again and with another £1 "fee" taken from the card. However, I did notice that the first lot of £1 fees did reappear back on my card after a few days.


These £1 charges are temporary. They are used by companies to test you actually have money on your card. The £1 is never actually taken and is returned to your card after a while.

There is no reason to take as much as £1. Most decent companies only take pennies, even 1p to test, but this is SE we are talking about...


Hi,

I agree that £1 did appear to be quite high and have noticed that the amount has started to reappear back after a few days.

The whole issue left me feeling a bit confused as I've never had any real problems with SE and their billing until now.

Since posting, the customer support have now asked me me to wait a full 30 days before trying to register and pay using a card again.


Edited, Apr 26th 2013 8:46pm by darrenuk
#5 Apr 26 2013 at 3:36 PM Rating: Good
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they really do make it hard to get going.
on the other hand I paid for an EU version of SoA (download) last week from the SE store and found out today I was charged twice for it.
£50 for SoA is a pretty hefty price to pay for a 2nd account for my niece.
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#6 Apr 27 2013 at 2:09 AM Rating: Good
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darrenuk wrote:
So, my reason for sharing this experience is to ask if anyone else here has ever had these issues with SE and did you ever manage to get it sorted? Because even now I cannot register or use either card to purchase anything within my SE account and I still have no idea why.

I've never had that exact issue, but I know how you feel, SE's customer service is just beyond awful, I really doubt they anything at all about how their systems actually work.

Several years back, my character got stuck between zones. Was warping back from a Campaign battle, and I was stuck on the "Downloading Data" screen for several minutes. Eventually I disconnected, and when trying to log back on, I was met by this screen.

A google search of "FFXI-3202" at the time yielded a extremely low amount of results, and the error had very little information about it, and as far as I could tell , no one had ever even recovered from it... I ran a file check, and even completely re-installed to no avail. Eventually, I contacted SE about it, after waiting on hold for somewhere between 2-3 hours. I got the normal spiel, wait an hour and retry, reset your internet connection, do a file check, etc, etc... All the stuff I had already done, and they basically say "Um, we don't know... lol..." and they say they'll start an "investigation" towards it.

Now, this happened at the end of a month, and they had absolutely no clue how long the "investigation" would take. This is more-or-less the conversation that I had regarding my monthly payments:

Me: Is there an ETA on how long until my character will be recovered?
SE: I'm sorry, we don't know how long it will take.
Me: If it takes the entire month, will I still be charged the 12.95?
SE: Yes, because the character ID is still active.
Me: So, should I cancel my character for the month, so I'm not charged while I'm unable to play?
SE: No, your ID has to remain active or we cannot investigate it.
Me: So basically... I have to continue paying for a game that I can't play, for an undetermined amount of time that could extend into months, because if I don't, it can't be recovered at all?
SE: Yes.

Words can't even describe how I felt at that moment in time...

So yeah, Square's customer service is notoriously terrible, I have never heard a single good thing about them, and I have yet to see any proof that they have the slightest idea on how their own game and payment system even works. I do wish you luck on trying to get your card to work though.


Edited, Apr 27th 2013 3:12am by KodoReturns
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#7 Apr 27 2013 at 6:46 AM Rating: Good
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same thing happens if your character is stolen.
They lock your account so you can't use it, investigate the issue and then they tell you if they can roll it back or not,
The whole time you got to keep paying for something you cannot effectively use.
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#8 Apr 27 2013 at 7:34 AM Rating: Good
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Janeash wrote:
same thing happens if your character is stolen.
They lock your account so you can't use it, investigate the issue and then they tell you if they can roll it back or not,
The whole time you got to keep paying for something you cannot effectively use.


Yes. That happened to me a few years ago. After 3 weeks I canceled the recovery just so I could play again. I bought a security token right away @.@
#9 Apr 29 2013 at 2:09 PM Rating: Good
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Yeah that happened with my brother too.
He had his account locked for 3 weeks before finding out they couldn't roll it back because we bought the game via US import and we were from the UK.

Anyway much time wasted, my brothers account got hacked and dumped on Remora from Valefor.
He was charged for the server hop, stripped of everything gear wise and was told he had to wait a futher 3 more months before he could come back to Valefor which would cost him more money to do so.
This was all after not having his account rolled back and being allowed to play again with a keymashed name for his main character.
He was furious to say the least.
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Lu Shangs Fishing Rod obtained: Feb 2005
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Ebisu Fishing Rod Obtained: Sunday 8th August 2010
#10REDACTED, Posted: Apr 29 2013 at 2:37 PM, Rating: Sub-Default, (Expand Post) This is why you don't go on dodgy sites and watch **** on the same pc/laptop or give any sort of details out to anyone, in and outside of game.
#11 Apr 29 2013 at 3:38 PM Rating: Good
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Asliyn wrote:
if you think ff11 is the only bad costumer service for a mmo, you're wrong, rift and Wow are just as bad, at times worse!


As someone who lost their ffxi & wow accounts in the same 12hour period. Blizzard changed my password and started the account recovery process while I was still asleep. Had my stuff back a few days later. While SE froze my account the next day after I called them. But it was frozen for a year because I didn't have the address from 2004. All the while I've used the same 8 character, all lowercase password for paypal for a decade.


As much as I love my security token getting my accounts stolen was the first sign that my computer wasn't safe. Where now the first sign is getting my credit card or identity stolen.

Edited, Apr 29th 2013 4:44pm by Telaki
#12 Apr 29 2013 at 4:16 PM Rating: Decent
Telaki wrote:
Asliyn wrote:
if you think ff11 is the only bad costumer service for a mmo, you're wrong, rift and Wow are just as bad, at times worse!


As someone who lost their ffxi & wow accounts in the same 12hour period. Blizzard changed my password and started the account recovery process while I was still asleep. Had my stuff back a few days later. While SE froze my account the next day after I called them. But it was frozen for a year because I didn't have the address from 2004. All the while I've used the same 8 character, all lowercase password for paypal for a decade.


As much as I love my security token getting my accounts stolen was the first sign that my computer wasn't safe. Where now the first sign is getting my credit card or identity stolen.

Edited, Apr 29th 2013 4:44pm by Telaki


I agree.
With my World of Warcraft account, the one time I needed a multiple character restoration after my account was compromised, it took about a week for me to get my items back. I could still play on my account and my characters, and didn't lose any progress when I received my items after the week.

Another incident when I tried the mobile app, it locked my account for some reason. I contacted the support service and within half an hour, I had sent verification that it was my account and had the account unlocked.

Personally, I have never dealt with SE's support but from what I have read it sounds pretty bad compared to World of Warcrafts.
#13 Apr 29 2013 at 7:37 PM Rating: Decent
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To say that SE's experience is common. My girl had an issue with WoW, it was fixed within the week.

I have seen story after story like this. As for myself, I had an issue where I applied my serial number wrong. Because of the changes to how you get your expansion, and the fact that I bought the entire game so that I could now have a download location for it (plus the hat and shirt :D), it created a second POL account under mine.

Now, I provided them my name, current email address, my credit card info, my physical address, my token serial number and ALL my original serials for POL, FFXI, and Zilart. And yet they wanted the original email address I signed up with. 9 years ago. I had to CALL them in the end after contacting support twice via chat and even STILL they said they weren't sure what they could do.

In the end, it wound up being dealt with quickly, but I can imagine that they can get beyond ridiculous for an account recovery when all I was asking was to change where my serial was applied...
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