Billing system and support needs overhaul. Why is it difficult to pay for this game?
It seems like your company doesn't want us to be able to easily pay you. Those of us that have changed countries of residence (because of work, school, or military) can't change the region of our POL account, and must talk to the call center in the region of origin for the account. This leads to problems, such as Japanese accounts only being able to be helped by Japanese customer service, even if we don't live there anymore and don't speak the language well enough. Do you really expect someone to not have moved in the 9 years this game has been running?
Japanese accounts stopped being able to validate American VISA/MasterCard cards at the end of 2008, apparently as an anti-RMT measure, which is now moot. WebMoney is the only remaining option for people with a Japanese account that are currently outside of Japan. That has to be imported, and there only seems to be about two online shops selling it to foreigners, both marking up the price by a significant percentage. (WebMoney won't take non-Japanese credit cards to charge a balance to your account). If we aren't on WebMoney, and our billing errors, we can't just add a card back to our account, we have to wait for a paper bill to be sent to our address on our POL account (which we can't punch in a non-Japanese address if we have left the country, so it may be fake or invalid now), and pay that bill in person in Japan to get our account active again. This leads many players with Japanese accounts to quit if they run into a billing problem, since their years of character progress are lost, with almost no option of ever getting the account back, rather than continuing to be a paying customer generating profit for your company. Goodness knows that FFXIV isn't making you guys any money right now... Don't you want money from as many FFXI players as you can get? Why are you driving them off by making it hard to pay?
American accounts are 3D Secured-only now, and Canadian banks don't often offer that option. If you've moved outside North America, many banks in other countries don't support this option yet. Console versions of FFXI to manage an account are uncommon outside of Japan and North America, and still require an American console to modify billing information of an American account. Bypassing this verification on a PC is difficult, and international calls are required for customer service to handle the issue.
So far, only European accounts seem to have the fewest issues, as they even take debit from European banks, and there's no crazy security settings on the VISA and MasterCards keeping them from being usable.
Your current payment system is like bad DRM on a PC game, it makes it hard for your customers to actually access the service to pay your monthly fee, and thus keeps them from playing.
Your company needs to make addresses from any country able to be entered on any PlayOnline account, and customer service needs to be able to help with billing issues regardless of region. We can play an account from any region on any client from any other region, but we can't help ourselves when it comes to billing trouble, and local support cannot help us.
Otherwise, would you like it to become known that your company is unfriendly to military and government employees that get relocated around the world regularly? What about foreign exchange students? You made a global product, and then made support for it not be global.
This game is your current best cash cow, and you are holding it back. Lots of importers joined at JP launch. Europeans had non-European accounts for years before the game was released there. You're driving away your longest supporters by making it so hard to add/update a payment method, or solve billing issues.
