PETITION: Regarding FINAL FANTASY XIV Steam Version (Mar. 8)

[Wanzzo]

About what MrKusakabe answered me (I wont quote 'cause can only use 3000 characters in this forum on each post)

1- Yes, at least for now, we brazilians pay less for the subs. Dunno if this is reason to be happy, though, but definitly it's reason for another brazilians try sub this game! And that is why we brazilians sugest this option for new players around our country (and that is why many of them subs here through steam wallet).
2 and 4 - Well, if you followed this thread, you saw a lot of people with problems to run this game through the steam launcher. They rather launch it directly so far and that's why they came here to complain about the change. So, some of them had problems. I don't need to pass through some issue first in order to see that issue exists. It's a little logical... '-'
3 - The fact someone bought something cheaper is another reason to try it out. Again, don't know if it's reason to be happy, but some people enjoy discounts everywhere, right?
The question was: "why people buy something throught steam?" I was just answering based on this thread so far.
5 - the most numerous complaint on this thread was about the changing in the quality through time for users of the steam version. Based on them, the changes SE is doing will force them to use a less quality service (that progressively got worse through time) and they feel harmed by that. So, it's only natural they complain since they have reasons and laws to protect them, right? '-'

I am a steam user as well. Like I told in a post here before, I never had encountered any problem so far using steam launcher and this thread took me by surprise. Although, I feel for those who was less fortunate than myself. And I see their reasons to complain. Maybe someday I'll be part of them. That's why I'm supportive to their cause here.

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About what Nora_of_Mira said:

At least for now it's kinda cheaper.

subs in regular version bought in SE site: 58 reais.
Subs in Steam version through Steam wallet payment: 32 reais.

We brazilians have less motives to play this game than other games around us here: high ping, not translated dialogues, a country without too many FF franchise lovers (when compared to others) and a bunch of new MMOs very more accessible to our market, like Icarus, ESO and others. So, one of the things that keep brazilians playing this game is this reduced subs price through steam wallet for sure.

I am here because I love FF franchise and this is why I try to keep playing this game when I can and no other. If the price of the subs on steam version becomes equal to the subs on the regular version of this game, then I'll keep playing it through steam since I never had problems with it. But even so, I know that some of the players have issues and maybe someday I'll add to their numbers (forcing me to create a new account in a regular service or leaving this game for good).

[Drayos]

You are aware steam would have to also agree to this right?

They can’t just move your clients and data off of steam on their own choices, steam runs as steam does because steam demands it, a company cannot make these kind of alterations.

They’d likely be taken to court for making this

Platforms are there to compete with one another and generally will not work together for the sake of a player.

[Nikolas_Wolfe]

Square Enix apparently has no knowledge of how poor the Steam client is.

The majority of your users avoid the client because of this.

By making the change announced today, you are sentencing your entire userbase of gamers who are forced to remain on Steam into a nightmare of performance problems and issues. The Steam overlay built into the client alone has caused massive issues with many users.

As a result of this change, I hereby demand we be given a one-time ability to trade in our Steam keys for Square Enix direct Windows platform keys on our accounts.

I use the steam version and so do a large number of my friends and we have never noticed any sort of issue whatsoever? No performance issues, nothing. Runs perfectly lol

[Avidria]

While it's a good explanation, it's also ludicrous and riddled with entitlement. No one, and I mean no one, should be bailed out of a purchasing decision because they are no longer happy with an agreement that they consented to. It's so ridiculous.


So many of these complainers need to be adults and accept the consequences of their purchasing decisions.

There shouldn't even *be* consequences. This game has the most bizarre licensing system I have ever seen in an MMO, and the fact that choosing to buy through steam gives you an entirely different type of license that comes with an *increasing number of restrictions* beyond what other users have to deal with is completely absurd.

Yeah, I really wish I didn't buy this game through Steam. That's not a choice I can go back in time to undo. But that doesn't make this entire situation any less ridiculous than it is, whether this new change turns out to actually cause any problems or not. It's just... silly. This whole set up is silly.

[Komarimono]

Ok, took a while to read the thread. And it seems the main arguments is the performance impact of Steam(1) And if Steam authentication servers go down(2) And finally if Steam ever closes(3)

I've the 14 year Steam Badge, we'll get that out of the way.
I've very rarely if ever seen Steam conflict with a games performance unless you were running on an Intel Celeron with only 2GB of Memory(RAM) and this was over a decade ago.
Steams performance impact is negligible. If it impacts performance there is something wrong with your system, Hardware or Software wise.


If Steam authentication goes down, you can still launch Steam in offline mode, and still play any game that requires online Authentication. Those who use Steam should have been aware of this, if not now you do know. You've 168 hours free, no authentication needed, of time before Steam needs to verify. That's 7 Days.

If Steam ever closes down, there's contingency plans in place for this, where all DRM is removed from said games, and companies would be given a massive notice ahead of time that Steam would no longer be running. So that fear is a bit weird too.

Going back to the performance people claim Steam does to the game, I am willing to say, in my opinion, that if there is a performance hit, that's your system and has nothing to do with Steam or the Game. Steam uses barely a percentage of my systems resources on my Laptop and my PC.

[Ayuhra]

A lot of concern also comes from ESO going through this same thing and having a lot of problems. Different game from this one of course, but people were (and sometimes still are) unable to log in to ESO due to Steam issues.

In ESO, however, I've heard of people being able to convert over to Windows and get off Steam with help from customer service. Can't do that here.

[Komarimono]

A lot of concern also comes from ESO going through this same thing and having a lot of problems. Different game from this one of course, but people were (and sometimes still are) unable to log in to ESO due to Steam issues.

In ESO, however, I've heard of people being able to convert over to Windows and get off Steam with help from customer service. Can't do that here.

That would be because ZOS used a separate launcher for the Steam version for some reason. And they themselves screwed up and didn't update said launcher properly which led to a massive amount of authentication errors.

This was oddly fixed by closing Steam, renaming the program data folder in ESO and running and updating the launcher, showing it was a ZOS issue. Also showed the incompetence and negligence of the company since the Steam servers were relaying the proper information but ZOS/Bethesda are kinda derpy. Fallout 76 anyone?

From what I can tell, the hash is the same, for now, with the FFXIV launcher between Steam and Non-Steam. We'll see how much the launcher changes, but people fear mongering should wait and see if there are issues before complaining about them.

[Eli85]

Being locked into steam was not a forseeable consequence for people thet bought FF-XIV during ARR times.


To me, steam is merely a game store. Yes most games run their DRM through steam but it makes 0 sense for a subscription MMO to do so because the sub check is it's own DRM you cannot bypass anyway. As such it is highly illogical that SE chains you to steam.

Just because you see Steam "merely as a game store," doesn't change the fact that's it more than that: a launcher too. Which, if you read the Terms of Service (ToS), you will realize that they are 100% within their rights to do this (and, by extension, S-E), and you, the player, consented to this when you bought off their platform.


If you didn't have the foresight to a) read the Terms of Service before purchase, and b) not realize that purchases on Steam would have to be played through Steam, then that's on you.

I would agree with you completely, except that we haven't consented to this.

5 years ago we weren't told that 1 year later (and going forward) all expansions to the game would also have to be purchased through Steam.
5 years ago we weren't told that 5 years later we would be forced to run through Steam (even right now it doesn't say that on the Store page and Steam's own ToS says it's not required).

What if tomorrow SE said for your non-Steam account "Hey for all future expansions you can only buy them through us directly. You can't use any other store/outlet". Or if they said "We've released a new SE shop app, you have to download this and you can only run the existing launcher via this". Would you be happy with those scenarios? Because that's exactly what has happened here.

But you did agree to it when you purchased the game on Steam. This entire thread is proof enough that players really do not understand how restrictive the Terms of Service is for the paying customer.



To answer your question: I may not be happy with the scenario, but I wouldn't complain about it, because S-E is 100% within their rights to do just that.

Nobody agreed to it, the decision was forced on people who purchased the Steam version if they wanted to keep playing on the HW expansion with their current character. If you're not a Steam client user you also should probably just sit down as this doesn't impact you at all. Square should absolutely at the very least let people buy Non-Steam licenses and apply them to our accounts. Having to create a new account and abandon our 5 year old characters is an outrageous solution and I guarantee if that becomes the only option many people will just quit outright if this change impacts their ability to play the game negatively.

You really need to read Steam's (and S-E's) Terms of Service. When you purchased the game on Steam you agreed to their Terms of Service that allows either Steam or S-E to implement this change. And a whole host of other things too. Don't like it? You shouldn't have agreed to the Steam ToS and purchased the game through their store and platform.


I'm not a Steam user, but it really gets irritating how players want to shift blame from themselves, when it's their own poor purchasing decisions that leads to this predicament. If you don't want to get locked into a platform, don't purchase from a platform. It's real simple.

There shouldn't even *be* consequences. This game has the most bizarre licensing system I have ever seen in an MMO, and the fact that choosing to buy through steam gives you an entirely different type of license that comes with an *increasing number of restrictions* beyond what other users have to deal with is completely absurd.

Yeah, I really wish I didn't buy this game through Steam. That's not a choice I can go back in time to undo. But that doesn't make this entire situation any less ridiculous than it is, whether this new change turns out to actually cause any problems or not. It's just... silly. This whole set up is silly.

Sure there should be. And there are. With every game. You may not like the Blizzard Launcher, for example, but if you want to play World of WarCraft you must use it. If you buy a PS4 game, but decide you want to play it on Xbox, Sony isn't going to let you play it off their platform. Steam is a platform in the same way that a console is a platform. You bought a license for the Steam platform. Don't want to deal with that nonsense? Stop buying games on platforms.


Sorry, but I don't think people should get a get out of jail free card because they made a poor purchasing decision.

[BloodRubyXII]

Why a Steam version exists I have no idea, did we really need the extra platform exposure that badly? I can understand due to licensing why Steam users cannot transfer away from it; I just want to know the reasoning behind why anyone thought this was ever a good idea. And no "so I can have it with the rest of the games I play, all of which are on Steam" isn't a valid argument when you can add non-steam games to make them executable from Steam.

For the record I bought the game on PC, up until mid-HW I didn't even know there was a steam version.

[Avidria]

*snip*

Alright look, I'm gonna be straight here and say I seriously do not understand where you're coming from here at all. How is voicing concerns over a change people are unhappy with asking for a get out of jail free card? Is your whole argument seriously "well you agreed to the ToS, and that was stupid of you, so you should shut up and deal with it"? Is that what you're saying?

Why? Who does that benefit? I can see now that buying through Steam was apparently the wrong choice. Hind sight is always 20/20. Pointing out that it was a bad choice to buy through Steam helps absolutely no one. By rights, SE and Steam can do whatever the freak they want within their ToS, but that does not make it a good or smart choice. It does not make it a choice that people have to sit down and be okay with.

I bought the game on Steam because I had zero reasons not to, zero reasons to believe SE would change how the dynamic with Steam worked four years in the future in a way that's inconvenient to me. Frankly I've never had any problems with Steam (barring some performance issues with my old laptop, but it had other problems...) and the only mild inconvenience of having the Steam version up through now is some weirdness with payment options when I buy things on the Mog Station. It's the fact that SE is making yet another change to how that dynamic works, and haven't said a word on how it will actually work and whether it will have any gameplay impacts that has me concerned. If this is literally as simple as needing to launch through Steam, and then I can shut Steam off entirely after, then alright, whatever, that's not a big deal. I just don't like how this is being handled.

I am not asking for a "get out of jail free" card. I'm asking for confirmation that this will not negatively impact my ability to play the game, and if it does, I'm asking for SE to do everything in their power to fix that. I'm asking them to make sure that people who bought the game through Steam do not have a worse playing experience because they made a bad choice in where to purchase their game.

And I stand by saying that it shouldn't be an objectively worse choice to buy through Steam. The Blizzard launcher, needing to have a PS4 to play PS4 games... those are not consequences. Those are logical and expected requirements. Those systems are made by the same people that make those games. Steam does not own or manage FFXIV. It's an entirely separate company. Until now, the requirement to play FFXIV through Steam did not exist. It was not expected. And if it's going to be expected, then I'd like to be sure that it won't won't leave Steam licenses in a position of being objectively inferior to every other version of the game.