PlayOnline: UCS 60257 error

[oliveira]

I'm a old time customer which had the luck of sneaking in a updated credit card on the account one month before they implemented changes on the billing server. I'm user of a Japanese account. Now the said card expired and I am locked out of the game.

The issue is:

When they instated the 14 day trial system in 2008 (which is the REASON AND SOURCE OF ALL THE PROBLEMS WE HAVE CURRENTLY WITH THE BILLING SYSTEM) RMT trash started to exploit it to obtain fresh accounts for their sordid gil making purposes.

The whole problem arises from the fact that the RMT trash were using STOLEN credit cards to activate the trial accounts. And when the accounts got their bill for the first time the credit card owners requested refund for fraud. Resulting into actions by Square Enix on the line of shielding itself against such fraud.

The results are:

International customers using Japanese accounts are obligated to migrate to Webmoney.jp service to fund their accounts as the billing service has been reworked to artificially fail on the use of non Japanese issued bank/credit cards (the point of this fix is understandable but they could instead remove the 14 day trial or use another method for distributing the 14 day trial accounts instead of using their game website).

For US and European service they deemed that such solution would have a wide impact the user population so they instead of fully block international purchases they used the Verified By Visa (VBV) system and completely removed the 14 days trial offer from the USA and European FFXI game sites. For US/EURO they now use STEAM (Valve Software online retail service to distribute the game and trial accounts).

This is a real source of problem to a minority of the players of the game. I nearly lost my hopes of playing Final Fantasy XI again with my almost nine years old account.

And no, if there's something I won't do is start over.

I feel being treated like trash. Besides this issue and the lack of contact with the company (now this forum serves to at least alleviate that issue) I had a very good business relation with Square Enix (until 2008) and I do not put the blame completely on Square Enix co.

I just am a bit sad for suffering damage on my game from their way of dealing with the RMT trash.

Honestly I'm not too eager to procure webmoney.jp credits to fund my account at almost 25% higher price than paying directly with credit card.

I can suck it up and leave the game if I can't get it fixed.

[NightDagger]

My brother has almost the same issue, we fixed this with 2 methods. i used my verified by Visa credit card to activate his account. he called them & then got it switched to his non verified Credit Card.

the other option is the pre-paid Visa's. they allow you to create a Verified account & then can just reload it every month ^^.

[Zenoxio]

Hi all & Nadeu,

I've fixed the UCS 60257 error. I called my bank and they told me they weren't blocking anything.

I remembered POL was really strict about billing address, so I verified it with the bank. It turns out my address with my bank had a space in it, and I wasn't typing in that space.

[Aphugel]

OOOKAY,,, finally found an SE agent who knew what he was doing. Agent Paul actually was able to update the expiration date on my visa-card. I had been up to a next lvl agent before who plain refused to help me.
So, my thanks to Agent Paul, u are a corker, mate.
And thanks to Diamoness who suggested a working solution.