Thank You SE and Good-bye

[Octaviane]

I would like to say that the OP here did a great job of posting his goodbye. Nicely done and I wish you all the best.

[RAIST]

Dude you're a noob, the new system works fine and it does have a direct withdrawal option from your bank account with no shady extra fees, as long as u aren't messing around with additional services like mules constantly. It's the same exact price it was before and what's nice is that they don't take the money till around the 3rd or 5th day of the month. So u have a lil more time to have money in ur account. just join the new system and quit your belly aching, seriously everyone complains but if they'd actually attempt the transfer they would realize that "hey it's not any more expensive and I can still do direct payment, why was i complaining before."

Join Date:Jul 2011
Posts:5

Guess you haven't seen just what has been going on with the change.

SE has arbitrarily decided to only save CC information and process payments in-house for the JP region players--and claimed it was for increasing security. This is totally bogus--the servers are no less secure for NA users then they are for the JP users--that is a technology issue, not a regional one.

Everyone else is being shuffled off to a third party system of payment. In some cases--this has opened others up to higher security risk (C&B has asked some to EMAIL copies of confidential documents commonly used for identity theft just to verify accounts so they can pay, and some are directly paying per purchase--meaning they enter their CC info everytime they buy crysta, and some may be on a system that is not fully secured as it is open to malware infections, keyloggers, etc.). In some cases, some have not been able to use C&B because they don't offer the service in their region. For some, their banks reject C&B transactions. In some areas--that is a common policy, and to get around it you have to hunt for a CC issuer that will work and apply for another credit card. In short, it is just too much a hassle in some areas to set up. And Crysta? SE is not offereing it to some regions because of potential legal issues (Virtual Property rights and such). This ultimately has resulted in some players not having ANY option to pay SE now. For some, C&B is not offered, and Crysta is not offered--but they've been using their CC to pay through SE for years with no problem.

Also, there is the issue of added cost. Some are having to pay a worse penalty due to a change in the currency being used. C&B is billing in a different currency, so some are getting hit by a worse exchange rate (up to 43% more in some cases), or they are being charged fees by their financial institutions. Yes, that is not a fee from C&B--but it is incurred BECAUSE they are being FORCED to use C&B if they want to set up automatic payments with their CC. That is a principle issue--because you are forcing specifically non-JP players to do this, you are causing many to pay more for the service.

Then there is the whole crysta debate: $12.95USD every 30 days, can only buy crysta in multiples of $5USD--that takes 100 billing cycles for $1295USD billable fees to match evenly with the crysta you pre-purchase to cover the account. So, a single character account is essentially paying more than contractually obligated to pay--for over 8 years. Again...it may seem trivial to quibble over a few dollars here and there--it is the PRINCIPLE of the matter. ONLY NON-JP PLAYERS ARE BEING FORCED TO PAY MORE TO PLAY. If you are in JP, you can use your CC as always, or you can use the alternatives like webmoney and other Crysta acquisition methods (which have been shown to get around the over-buying issue).

Again--it all boils down to the simple fact they have singled out the same payment method to just the JP region in ADDITION to extending their options (Crysta), and forced others into potentially more unstable/costly methods of payment--requiring more effort for many to simply pay them, and injecting more points of failure into the system. If a billing error comes up, who do the turn to now? SE? C&B/PayPal/PlaySpan? The CC processor for that third party? The bank? Before, it was just SE, their CC processor, or your bank. This is a potential Customer Service nightmare in the making. We've already seen the decline in QOS because of the communication barriers put up now. And the sh!t hasn't even hit the fan yet--when everyone who is currently not up to speed with what all this entails suddenly gets bumped after the full changeover, it may get prettty ugly.

All of this drama can be dealt with very simply. Replicate the JP CC payment scripts from thier web pages to the NA/EU region pages, altering the script to use the CC processors SE already has agreements with for processing the EU/NA cards.

That's another fact some seem to forget. SE has NOT dropped their NA/EU CC processors. They are still using them for their online merchandise store. That's right.....they still have contracts with them, which means they stiill have to pay them their monthly fees. So all they are doing is not paying them their fee per transaction (on average for the market, @60 cents per$12.95, btw) and instead are paying a different fee to another group like C&B or PlaySpan.

Again... all they need to do to make this go away is (in addition to running the new options) implement the same payment option they've used for years--ESSENTIALLY DO LIKE THEY'VE DONE FOR ONLY THE JP REGION.

[Korpg]

Why can't you be a patient little boy and wait to see what the changes will be? And yes, you specifically stated you would be "inconvenienced" when they were made.

No you won't see me next month because I put my money where my mouth is troll.

I asked for more information, nothing wrong with that.

But if you were really going to quit over this, you would have quit before you got billed in August....instead, you stay here complaining that you are going to "quit" when you had the perfect chance to "put your money where your mouth is."

The most "vocal" quitters have already, you know, quit. You didn't quit, because you are still on this forum.

So, see you next month. I know, you know, we all know you and a bunch of other complainers are not going to quit. You would have done so already.

[RAIST]

No... many are not quitting yet because they are still on the billing system that is still working for them. Quitting while an acceptable method of payment is still in effect does nothing to emphasize the point at the heart of the matter.

They are going to let it expire when that acceptable system gets completely cut off--that way SE has a definite point in time to reference. If/when they decide to look back on just WTF happened to FFXI subs, they will have a clearly defined event--a sudden spike in cancellations that coincides with when it became mandatory to switch over.

[Korpg]

Many people do not have a problem with a minor inconvenience. Many have already switched over. Only people who truly have a problem are those who are in a country that Click and Buy doesn't support and don't have an international credit card.

But it is not SE's fault that those people don't do any little research or an online query.

Your problem, RAIST, seems to be from overcomplaining. How many different things do you dislike about this new system?

[Panthera]

I think this has more to do with ensuring that SE doesn't run into the legal nightmare Sony now has after their system was hacked and information was stolen. To me they are ensuring that no customer financial information is stored on their system by using only 3rd parties. Doesn't make *us* safer, just makes SE safer from a legal standpoint.

Interesting point, but if they were all that concerned with their own liability, why keep CC info of their JP customers?

[Korpg]

Interesting point, but if they were all that concerned with their own liability, why keep CC info of their JP customers?

Because they can pay in exact currency (yen) instead of having to pay in a foreign currency (anything else).

[oliveira]

Interesting point, but if they were all that concerned with their own liability, why keep CC info of their JP customers?

To not risk losing them.

[RAIST]

Many people do not have a problem with a minor inconvenience. Many have already switched over. Only people who truly have a problem are those who are in a country that Click and Buy doesn't support and don't have an international credit card.

But it is not SE's fault that those people don't do any little research or an online query.

Your problem, RAIST, seems to be from overcomplaining. How many different things do you dislike about this new system?

My main complaint has always been over the JP-only CC option discrimination--if you've actually been reading my posts, you should know that. That wall of text was a recap of the issues that have been presented in the threads--figured it was better to recap all of them in one post for that seemingly uninformed poster, rather than trying to redirect him/her to a mass of threads.

No matter how anyone tries to spin this situation, it always comes back to some very simple facts:

Thay have taken away an option that for many was simple and reliable, it could be have been fairly easy to implement, and extended it for just one region, and have mistakenly tried to say the choice was done to improve security. They have the technology, they have the knowhow--essentially, they have the means to do it, but are simply choosing not to do it.

[RAIST]

Because they can pay in exact currency (yen) instead of having to pay in a foreign currency (anything else).

That has nothing to do with security---that is a matter of cost management.

A server is open to the same threat of attack regardless of where it is physically located. The level of security is the same regardless of whose information is saved on it--it can be attacked just as easily from someone inside JP as any other region. Someone living in Japan has their information open to the same threats as someone living in Europe. The ONLY way it could be bound to a security issue is because it would cost more to implement stronger security to meet banking regulations enforced in another region. That makes it a COST issue, NOT a SECURITY issue--as in, they didn't want to pay for updated VPN cards for their firewalls or something.