It shouldn't be this difficult to get the game working

[NautiaHadas]

Hi, I've been playing this game for nearly 3 years and I love it. That being said, if my only experience of this game would have been the trouble I had getting my account to work I would probably hate it. Registering for this game had me deal with errors, customer support, reddit threads. I had to complete my registration on my cellphone because of the error I received using my PC. Now, this is all behind me and I nearly forgot how horrible the experience of setting up my account had been... until this last Sunday.

I tried to get my brother to play the game. He wasn't so sure it was his kind of game but my passion for the game seemed to have won him over, at least to the point where he would at least try it. So I suggested to him that he should try the free trial. I'd make a new character for myself and we'd play together... Unfortunately it never went that far. He couldn't complete the registration of his account on Sunday, getting error message i2501. The resources on the internet that spoke about this error were unhelpful, apparently it can show up for a bunch of different reasons. More than that, it forced him to wait a full 24 hours in order to try anything again. He contacted support, but they were not helpful either, telling him to do things we had already found by looking up the error ourselves, things that didn't work. My brother had to download another client, try a bunch of things. All of which didn't work. Of course, after 2 days of trying to get the game to work, he gave up. Deciding that, anyway, it didn't look like his kind of game.

Now maybe it wasn't his kind of game, or maybe my brother would have played and thought differently. We will never know because getting the game to work is too much of a hassle. In contrast, I got him to play Path of Exile last month. This is another game he thought wasn't his cup of tea. And yet we've played it once a week and we're nearly finished with it. Setting up an account for that game wasn't difficult and it was quick. There was no nonsense and it is seamlessly integrated with our steam accounts (we don't even need to log in another time to get to play).

This whole experience brings me back to my initial thoughts about the game when I started playing myself. Just how many people get frustrated by these inconveniences and end up never giving the game a chance? Last summer, the community welcomed amongst its members a non insignificant quantity of ex-World of Warcraft content creators. Captain Grimm, Rich Campbell, Preach, Pyromancer and a lot more. More popular amongst them was Asmongold. I remember following their streams with interest, wondering what those other MMO players thought of this new game which I had grown to love. And although each of the content creator I listed ended up loving the game, each of them listed at one point how clunky and annoying the website was, how "purchasing the game" was the hardest part of the game.

[NautiaHadas]

The catalyst for me writing this is essentially that my brother is one of those person who gave up on an excellent game because getting it to work was too much of a hassle. Before anyone judge my brother on his abilities, a couple of years ago, he had some issue with his old laptop where his OS was essentially corrupted and broken beyond salvaging by a computer virus. Since he needed a laptop to work and had lost his Window license, I suggested to him that he could try installing a Linux OS on his computer. I gave him basic instructions on how to do it, and he completed the installation of Mint to the end. So his technical abilities aren't exactly lacking.

I doubt that many people who give up on the game like that ends up writing about their dissatisfaction anywhere, my brother has moved on, like many others I suspect. But it pains me to see this unreasonably difficult and fickle barrier placed in front of potential new players. Fickle in the way that these problems just seem to be of different gravity for each person. For some, the process of registering just work and is relatively easy. For others, like my brother, it's incomprehensibly difficult.

I'm making this post in the feedback section in the hopes that somebody with the power to review and change the process of setting up a player's account to play the game may read it. Frankly, with the amount of games I've played through my childhood, teenage years and my life now as an adult... I can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of games that gave me a headache getting them to run. I'd like Final Fantasy XIV to not being one of those fingers.