Allow expansions to be sold to any region or allow us to change our account regions.

[Pixela]

A lot of players imported FFXI either from Japan or America (depending on region they live in) due to the long delay between launches.

A few years back Square changed their policy to do everything in their power to stop players from other regions buying these expansions, no matter they have been long term players and subscribers. For instance an EU player that has played for many years cannot buy any other region of expansion other than EU and as such, if they imported they can't get the expansions. This means you either lose a player or they have to do some kind of swap with a player in whatever region.

There is simply no way that Square benefits from this, in-fact they lose because players simply cannot buy new expansions and as such may not want to play anymore.

Any chance this silly rule is every going to be changed? Players that can't buy new content are not going to keep playing, they aren't going to start a brand new character either.

It's one thing to stop players buying games from different regions, it's another to block long time customers continuing to give you money.

[bungiefanNA]

They do allow a region change on accounts, once in the lifetime of the account. EU and NA users logging into SquareEnix Accounts for the first time (if they existed before the accounts) are given a one-time option to change region. Japanese accounts are stuck as they were never offered the option, but if you put up enough of a fuss on customer support, they will do it once. I know from firsthand experience, and an 8-month email chain trying to retain my character when Abyssea was fresh. The problem is that the customer service centers don't talk to each other, and their tools are region-locked, so JP support can't work on NA accounts and vice versa. I had to use a lot of Google Translate and include the original English in my emails, while dealing with JP support, because NA support said they could do nothing with the account.

I also lost my old forum account when I did the change, leading to me posting on this one.

[Pixela]

They do allow a region change on accounts, once in the lifetime of the account. EU and NA users logging into SquareEnix Accounts for the first time (if they existed before the accounts) are given a one-time option to change region. Japanese accounts are stuck as they were never offered the option, but if you put up enough of a fuss on customer support, they will do it once. I know from firsthand experience, and an 8-month email chain trying to retain my character when Abyssea was fresh. The problem is that the customer service centers don't talk to each other, and their tools are region-locked, so JP support can't work on NA accounts and vice versa. I had to use a lot of Google Translate and include the original English in my emails, while dealing with JP support, because NA support said they could do nothing with the account.

I also lost my old forum account when I did the change, leading to me posting on this one.

That was back when there was no reason to actually change the accounts region and when they added the tokens, so many players changed their account over without changing region. Now they are actively blocking players getting expansions, which leads to people stopping playing.

The point is to not lose subscribers over a sily issue because they can't get expansions.

If they are going to block players buying expansions they should make sure they have a way to keep playing.

[Olor]

I really don't see the point of the region locking right now.

[bungiefanNA]

Oh, also the region change was only for my SquareEnix Account. It still lists as a JP POL Account, and so I still have to buy expansions from Japan. Digital downloads require me to have a JP billing address and IP address, so I have to buy physical discs, which for Adoulin left me with tracking down a PS2 disc in December of 2013. The code worked, but I ended up spending about $45 for a single expansion.

[Pixela]

They don't allow you to change the region of your account and when you try to download an out of region expansion from anywhere they block the sale, when you try to buy a boxed version...again they block the sale. You can sometimes get around it but it takes a lot of effort and money.

I can understand them wanting to protect their regions but when someone has already bought the game and them being not able to buy an expansion has nothing but negative impacts for everyone it just makes no sense. Them blocking a player getting a US or JP expansion isn't going to make them buy the EU expansion because it won't work. So it means no sale at all and possibly a lost subscriber.

Crazy, short sighted company.

Either remove the block on out of region sales or remove the region locks from expansions and make them universal. I know Square is made up of SE NA, SE EU and SE JP but surely they can work together to fix this issue in the future.