Metaboli's Gameplanet.com forced Suspensions
On Thursday 18th of March, my partners POL service got suspended without much of notice or indication as to why. Naturally, we contacted Square-Enix to find out what happen and all we got from them was “you need to contact the company to whom you bought SoA from to fix the issue.” In our case that would be Metaboli’s Gameplanet.com. So far, we haven’t got so much of any form of useful help from them, just vague answers and your standard companies’ “beat around the bush” crap. So I personally start to look around their FAQs and Q&As, as well as forums to whom this problem has happened to, and all I can sum it up to is their faulty Anti-Fraud Security System. Now the reason I call it faulty, is because of the things that has happen to not just ourselves, but also to most of players who has bought their copy of FFXI:SoA from Gameplanet.com.
Before anyone can download the software from gameplanet.com, one must 1st have an account with them to do anything. If you don’t have an account with them, you end up making one anyways on the time you 1st place an order through their site. For what I’ve seen, you then have a 3 day grace time to confirm/verified your new account with them, by clicking the verification link on an email they send you. Now, I’ve seen some cases where- No one knew about it cause they never got the verification email at all from them, due to either the email going straight to the “Junk” folder or it just simply not showing at all in one’s “Inbox”;
- It wasn’t clear at all from gameplanet that one needed to verify anything at all which caused most to be ignorant of the fact;
- The link on the verification email, to those who did get it, didn’t work at all (reasons to which vary from anti-pop-up plug-ins down to problems with their email services).
As you can see, there seems to be a lot of issues around Metaboli’s Gameplanet.com so far and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There were few people, however, who did manage to verify their new account with gameplanet, which was the case with my partners, only to run into another problem, their anti-fraud system.
Regardless of whether you manage to verify your account or not, this faulty system can still “blacklist” you for what it seems to be “random” reasons. Once the system deems your details as fraud, the system refunds your money back (and making us look like we didn’t pay) and cancels you order with gameplanet, rendering your activation code “void”. Now, I know there are people out there that will do things illegally and hence why there’s this anti-fraud system exists, but not everyone does and certainly not us. Gameplante’s solution to this blacklist problem is to have us give our address, phone, name and last name, etc. so that they can add you to their “Whitelist”, where the anti-fraud system can’t add you to the blacklist in the future, when you buy any new product from them again (and trust me, after this is over, there won’t be a next time with us). Needless to say, we have done this and there haven’t been any results at all, my partner’s service is still suspended and we haven’t heard anything from gameplanet.com at all.
On other accounts, some people did manage to get a hold with gameplanet.com in regards to this big issue and they were told that they would have to buy, yet another copy of the game, which comes with new codes, form them. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it is my understanding that once you have registered a code with SE, that’s it. You can’t change it; remove it or anything at all. It is there for life. So how the hell are you supposed to use the new codes at all? And more to the point, with the suspension still going on, even if you could change codes, how can one input them at all? After all, with no service there would be no place to register the code at.
I propose Square-Enix to eliminate the middle man here. Gameplanet is clearly the root of it all. Because their anti-fraud system returned all of our money back, I have no issues what-so-ever in paying Square-Enix instead for SoA in return of lifting the suspension on the account. I understand that there are contracts made between Square-Enix and Metaboli, but it is clear that Metaboli haven’t kept up with their side of it.
Please, help us out here. We all have spent many years working on the character(s), characters to which, (as crazy as it may sound) we hold dear to us, only to have some company with total lack of professionalism have them taken them away from us. My partner has told me that if she can’t have her character back then she has no other option then to quit FFXI. She will not start from scratch and spend all the time leveling everything again on a new account. And if she can’t log back, I can’t myself. So that would be two paying customers that will be gone. And I can’t be sure of others, but there will be others who feels the same way if this issue with Metaboli’s Gameplanet.com is not sorted and the uncalled for suspensions lifted.