I just went and set up the automatic payments using ClickandBuy.

It seems nothing has improved.

The whole process was beyond convoluted because of the number of fricken menus you had to click through. I was clicking all over the place looking for the "start my subscription again!" button, but the default login screen didn't make it obvious where that is. You'd kind of figure, that if Square wants your money for XIV, they'd make it damn easy to just one-click and enter your credit card info and get things going.

Nope - you get redirected to ClickandBuy where you have to register another account with them, just so you can set the thing up. After you register your payment method, it's not enough. You have to dig into the Services menu and go through 4 pages to tell Square that you want to reactivate your FFXIV automatic payments again.

I get the feeling whoever designed this convoluted payment system was at least partially responsible for the convoluted ingame FFXIV UI. There's just so many clicks to get the job done whereas in most other MMOs, the sub payment page has everything you need to get things started at the front page. This brings back REALLY bad memories of when FFXIV launched and having to register service accounts and putting in a gazillion codes and activating characters and whatnot just to get things started.

It doesn't look like this page changed in any other way, despite the numerous calls from users to make the payments easier to do and to allow us to directly charge to our account rather than using a third party. Also, what happened to the PayPal option?

Seriously - if this is the same thing that's going to be in XIV a year from now, you're going to have some players who start off with a bad first impression because of the horrible billing system design.

The billing system needs to:
* Have all of your billing info available on the main page.
* Have the ability to enable/disable services from the front page, or at worst, be an extra click away to a subpage where you do it.
* Allow us to use our credit cards to pay for our subscription directly with Square.
* Abolish the Crysta system. It's unneeded. Just use regular money native to the account holder's currency.
* Have a clearly obvious "Renew/Cancel subscription" button on the main page.
* Other functions should take no more than 2 clicks to get to, such as change of address, password, etc.

I got everything set up now, but I dread having to walk a friend who wants to try this game out through this crap again.