Terrible Payment System

[KaiKatzchen]

I was thinking about this yesterday...

I remember back when FFXI came out on 360, one of the reasons I heard it took so long was because SE didn't want M$ charging it's players for gold service... so in essence paying twice for the game to be able to play it.

I know SE is also having problems with M$ at this time, last I heard it had to do with M$ wanting 360 servers to be separate from everyone else. If they were universal, then they wanted people to pay for 360 service to access the game.

I don't know if this is 100% correct... but I do remember SE saying they didn't want people to pay more for FF than their month fee.

Now we have their own hired "billing company" wanting to charge a 5.9% processing fee every time they pull money out of our account (if you don't use Euro or GB Pound) every month. I know it's not a lot of money (even though it's obvious the company has issues due to stories here) but still... it seems kinda odd that SE would go from 'no our fans won't be charged anything more than OUR fee' to letting their own billing company that they hired charge their fans.

Yeah even if the game is 15.00 a month, at 5.9% that's only .89 cent's a person per month... less that 12.00 a year in fees.

But... if we have (and lets make it a realistic number) 200k people playing.

.89 x 200k = 178,000.00 in charges per month that this company is taking for people to play the game.

178,000.00 x 12 = 2,136,000.00 a year in fees so FFXIV players can play this game.



Seems like a lot of money that SE is allowing their fan base to pay extra to play FFXIV... and that's just at 200k. What if the game got up to the roughly 500k FFXI got to at one point.

.89 x 500k = 445,000,00 a month.

445,000.00 x 12 = 5,340,000.00 a year.


So while it seems a small about per player... when looking at the over all picture, that is a lot of money to be taking from a fan base per year just because people want to play and pay their monthly fee. Especially since in some countries C&B is their only option, so they have no choice BUT to pay these fees if they want to play.

I know SE said on the FFXI forums they know people are frustrated and they are looking into more options. I am very excited for them to actually do this and see what other payment options they can come up with.

Personally I'd love to see (and these are just alternate ideas)::

FFXIV Gaming Cards that you can buy at game stores.
FFXIV Game Cards you can order online at the SE store that can be used in any country.
Direct pay to SE themselves using our CC/Debit Cards.
I know some want Paypal and while I don't use it, others would like this.

...and I am sure others have ideas. I guess I'm just frustrated because it just seems like more and more fees to play this game. At last we heard this is what the set up is (unless they are gonna change it)

Price per month
+
Price per Character (which I don't think any MMO does anymore. I'd rather they just cap us at 2-3 characters per player for those who like multi-characters and let us just have them and RAISE the month fee from 9.99 to like 14.99)
+
Price per retainer (last I heard them say only the first retainer was free... maybe now it's the first two?)
+
Now if you have to use C&B there is a 5.9% fee to process the payment.

I can't WAIT to see what other payment options they come up with... and please help the people who have only C&B or no payment options at all!