Terrible User Experience for Returning Players

[OmNommy]

Considering it's in SE's best interest to actually get us to play the game, I think "terrible" is pretty adequate.
I had to reinstall at some point because I got a new PC, and after searching around for quite a while I just gave up and downloaded from an inofficial source because the official one was pretty much impossible to find.
Nearly all online games have a big "PLAY NOW" button at the top of the page that will take you directly to the download page with several options on how/where to download.
FFXIV is like "Nope, we don't want any of that sweet player money, first you have to prove yourself by finding a way to actually play the game because we ain't gonna provide one easily!".
How does that make ANY sense to you?

This is exactly how I feel too. For example you can download the battle.net launcher in less than a minute from Blizzard's site even if it is your first time visiting the site. No need to traverse an obsene amount of clicks and links.

[Orlen]

I went theough something similar in technical difficulties as a 'new player'- through the squareenix store!
It turned out the provided downlad link was of a version that had a bug that did not prompt a patch update (Mac version March2016)- instead of replacing their store-bought link with the proper version. I had to run through hoops to get customer service to provide me one.
To my knowledge this was NEVER fixed and the same patch-bug version is still the official download. My complaint did nothing to change this.

[Sunspawn]

Wow, this seems pretty horrible. Makes me happy I use Steam, despite the implications of not owning your games.

[ManuelBravo]

I just recently bought a new computer and wanted to download FFXIV to it. Turns out this is not a simple process... It's really impossible to find it through any official website and you have to really google for the download page.

You had problems from the SE Store? wow how odd everything is there and even leads you to loadstone for direct links. I've yet to have any issues. Maybe settings and user error?