All accounts upgrading to Square enix accounts

[Raxiaz]

If I recall correctly, I heard from somewhere that doing away with PlayOnline would be too much hassle for SE. There's a certain integration between FINAL FANTASY XI and PlayOnline that the friend list system uses. The handling of "Handle IDs" (your identity on PlayOnline, and FFXI) is done by PlayOnline, and doing away with PoL will render Handle IDs useless.

Would be great if it just made the PlayOnline Viewer an optional program we can access alongside FFXI, while FFXI can be gotten to straight from an .exe on my desktop.

[Atomic_Skull]

How will this affect people who got their first and last name reversed in POL by someone at SE somewhere in 2004-2005?

[Alhanelem]

How will this affect people who got their first and last name reversed in POL by someone at SE somewhere in 2004-2005?

I can't imagine how it would affect anyone.

[Atomic_Skull]

Y

To me it sounds like the first step in completely removing playOnline, which I think everyone should be jubulant about.

There's a flipside to that. With POL you could exit the game while staying logged in, change your graphics settings and then restart FFXI without having to log out. One of my annoyances with FFXIV was that you had to completely log out and shut down the game to make any changes to graphics settings.

Also, will I have to memorize all of my account info for all four of my accounts? I like that POL has an account list and remembers my password and login ID for each so that I only need to provide the same SE account password and one time password from my token to log in to all of them.

[Alhanelem]

There's a certain integration between FINAL FANTASY XI and PlayOnline that the friend list system uses.

Before they got shut down, I'm pretty sure the custom server project had found a way to isolate the game from playOnline (Naturally, this meant you didn't need to have a paying account to play the game, which hastened its shutdown). I think all they had to do was dummy out all of the stuff that the client checks POL for (e.g. message system, friends). So they could eventually do away with playOnline entirely, but that probably won't happen.

I'm sure that POL will eventually be reduced to nothing more than a game launcher and that some of the nonsense will eventually be cut out of it to make it faster.

[Atomic_Skull]

I can't imagine how it would affect anyone.

"We're sorry but the name on the POL account "Smith John" does not match the SE account for John Smith and cannot be added, please select a POL account with a matching name"

[Atomic_Skull]

If I recall correctly, I heard from somewhere that doing away with PlayOnline would be too much hassle for SE.

Just like adding DirectX 9 support would be too hard and they were talking to someone as Sony about a PS3 native version but that person quit and they just never bothered to talk to anyone else at Sony.

[Twille]

If this is the first step in eliminating PoL from the picture, I fully support it.

[Atomic_Skull]

will people that inherited friends/relatives accounts still be able to carry on playing the accounts they got long ago?

You realize that this is actually against the TOS right?

[Alhanelem]

"We're sorry but the name on the POL account "Smith John" does not match the SE account for John Smith and cannot be added, please select a POL account with a matching name"

I doubt that the names on the POL and SE accounts have to be the same.

And can't you try calling support to fix your name? How did you enter it backwards in the first place? Shouldnt you be double checking before submitting important personal information?