Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
Right. The Chinese language version is actually run by a third-party company licensed by Square Enix however, and it's servers are completely independent of the 'normal' version available in the rest of the world (the same goes for South Korea which has their own version with their own independent servers as well). This is due to internet accessibility laws in those countries.
I wanna say with Korea, it's due to internet cafes being so popular that require a different payment format. With korean cafes, it's like you pay by the hour, but that doesn't work with the standard monthly subscription that XIV has on it's normal servers. So the Korean servers fit that format for payment.