Recruit-A-Friend should be retroactive

Hi. My names Marshall, I\\'m a player extreme cases of social anxiety and depression issues, this makes it very VERY difficult to make a lot of friends. The few I do I love and we all actually play this game together! I even netted myself a boyfriend and recruited him to play the game! Literally everyone I personally know is playing FFXIV!

But I have a problem, my boyfriend who I talked into playing the game bought the game and time way back in 2.1, he doesn\\'t play often but I loves the game as much as I do, and we were excited for this new initiative... Until we saw he couldn\\'t register my code. Him and I are now both stuck, without friends to invite to the game, and unable to redeem the recruit-a-friend bonuses. I think this is a tad unfair to players who have recruited others in the past, and would like to get help from a dev on this matter. So if anyone else out there agrees or is dealing with this same issue, please add to those discussion!

I agree, I have the same problem. I added all my friends a while ago....seems unfair that we dont get anything. I am also on excalibur which is a closed server....how do we benefit...?

Yup, SE's way of implementing this friend referral system screws over any long time players who recruited their friends long ago.

The thing is, the recruitment is for now and not then. Even I'm pretty frustrated since I literally got recruited into this game by my friend just a month ago, but it is what it is. It's something to promote getting new friends/players into the game.

I finally got my husband to start playing about 3 weeks ago but too late, too late :'(

I've been looking for a thread like this... I recently reconnected with a friend and invited him to play only to find out that he used to play, but he got tired of it, but I pestered him and now he's seriously considering rejoining because I'll be here with him... However, I beg the question is all my hard work worthless to get the referral incentives because he already played at one point? I don't have many friends either and even less that would be able to be convinced to play this game with me :( I mean my friend played for a couple months at launch of ARR, but stopped, if there could be a 6 month or more gap between last subscription renewal and new subscription renewal I think it would be worth considering that someone was re-recruited to the game, yes?

I am frustrated too, I got my brother into playing this, none of my irl friends want to play it, and I really love chocobos. It hurts to know there is a chocobo I cannot get.

While I completely agree with the aspect of making the it retroactive, it wouldn't make much sense to do that anytime soon. SE is trying to get more people to pay and play this game, and aside from the actual gameplay with friends, there's no real initiative to do so. SO, in the aspect of making money, SE wants to throw in some really stellar rewards. If you gave them to people already playing, then there's nothing from stopping you from getting someone in the game to register the code and walk away with all these awesome rewards, you could even ask a stranger to do it. That doesn't increase the player base at all and now the exclusive rewards are all over the place and everyone has it. The fact that you want it is what SE is hoping you'll go into the real world and find someone to throw their money at SE for some more shinies.

I feel you on wanting the rewards, I thought of throwing extra money at SE to make it happen myself, which is also what SE wants. My wife got me to play, i got my best friend to play, and he got his friends to play, ect. so I feel I should get the rewards too, but that's not good business.