In regards to Square Enix Customer Support & Data Centers

Hey guys

Back in May, I logged into FFXIV after two years. My character did not show up, so I asked support for help. Sent all of my character information. It was 100% accurate. Was told they couldn’t help me. Decided not to make an issue and played with a new character.

Today I was checking around other data centers and found my old character. Had no idea switching data centers changed what characters you saw.

I can only assume your support guys didn’t know Saronia had been combined with another world, so they weren’t able to find her.

My suggestions:

• Allow all existing characters to display no matter what data center you are connected to.
• Properly educate your support team.

I would appreciate some way to merge the two characters, but I sincerely doubt that is a practical course of action, so I will settle for seething for about a week.

P.S. 1000 characters really short, forced compression of thought make look dumb pls fix

The trouble is, there was a number of changes made to the servers in both the period of version 1.0's service and following ARR's launch - the original FFXIV 1.0 servers (like Saronia) were all merged into new servers during 2012 due to declining populations. These 'new' servers became known as 'Legacy' servers when they transferred into ARR service, and it is these servers that your 1.0 character data would be on. This information is now old info and hence it's little wonder the SE Support Centre were not aware of it, as it was involving 1.0 which is now shut down.

Additionally, at the start of ARR service, the character selection screen indeed showed all servers at once, but due to a combination of lag and new servers being constantly added, the list became so long that SE decided that to make it easier to read for clarity's sake, the servers were grouped into 'data center' groupings, which is actually a misnomer - they're just groups of lists on the selection screen and are not physically separate from each other, other than being in two physical data centers (Japan and Canada). This change happened in December last year as part of the 2.1 patch.

So yes, you select a data centre now on the title screen and it will list the severs connected to it. Unfortunately though this doesn't help a person like you from 1.0 who is coming into the game late and cannot remember what server their character was on anymore. I agree there needs to be some way of telling what server group a character is on at a glance, to avoid this problem.

As for the 1000 character limit, that is a restriction that SE implemented due to the Beta forums degenerating into trolling - you can easily get around the problem by simply typing a few sentences and posting that, then going back and editing the post - it's allowed by SE and isn't too difficult using copy and paste.

Helpful information. The community degenerating into trolling and constant complaining was one of the reasons I left and didn't look back.

I guess at this point it's unlikely there will be too many other people like me, but yeah, this situation could have been avoided.