What is the deal with 30 day game time actually being 29 days? How is this legal?

[Nadie]

edit: Original title is based on incorrect information given by chat support. Subs are apparently 30 calendar days, though that's not stated anywhere.
It's still makes no sense that subscription period information is so obfuscated.

Subbed on 4/11 1:27 AM EST, it says it expires 5/10 and I got billed 5/10 3:50.
There's 720 hours in a month. 5/10 3:50 is 698.3833 hours from that time, not 720.

I contacted Chat Support and they've done nothing but gaslight me. They keep saying "it starts from the day from, not day after". I know that and hadn't said otherwise. They keep saying that 30=29 in so many words.

So okay, you think, they just ran the credit card early but surely they gave me 30 additional days, right?
Account page says 6/8 and Support says it will expire at 6/8 0:00. Approximately 700 hours, not 720. So it seems to say I'm given 29 days.

I've heard people say it goes daily reset time so if you purchase 5 minutes before reset you're getting 29 days and 5 minutes, but if that were the case it shouldn't continue to give you nearly a day less every single time it renews which is the big issue that CSR kept telling me. CSR says it ends at at 6/8 00:00:00, but otherwise that would make sense.
Edit: phone support says it ends at 23:59:99 which would mean there's not actually an issue.

This makes perfect sense to everyone else right?
But then support agent thinks that in a 30 day month a 30 day sub should end on the day of the month prior to the previous month, but then on a 31 day month it should end 2 days prior as they're telling me my renewal ends after 7th.
CSR closed the chat without resolving the issue on the prior ticket and I opened a new one.

Like I said, I assumed that okay maybe my first "day" was just an hour and a half, but this isn't how it should work on renewal so I confirmed when my renewal would end and they kept saying it'd be 00:00 June 8th which is 1 less day. They kept saying this was 30 days, when it's 29. Another way they put it, as they put it here, is that the subscription would last until that day rather than through that day.
They kept saying things like this that don't make sense and contradict themselves. Like on one hand they're implying when it ended on May 9th I got that whole day, and renewed on the 10th, but then on the 8th they kept telling me it ends before that day and would renew on that day. They tell me to count without using a computer as if that somehow helps with them stating things incorrectly.

I got off the phone with Phone Support and, assuming they are correct, what they said makes sense and they said that chat support was incorrect. I added that in a reply below.

In retrospect, I should have just closed chat with them earlier when they couldn't understand how they must be stating things incorrectly. It doesn't help that when you search online and look on the site and user agreement that you can't clearly find this information.
Still, this would be a lot less confusing if Square used a reasonable billing system that every other online service uses.

[Caitlinzulu]

You dont get billed like the second your subscription expires, what happens is that 30 days is added to your expiration date. Would need to check if its a hard 30 days or 1 month is counted as 30 days.
I certainly never noticed some creeping billing time due to not getting a full month.

[Caitlinzulu]

And please for heavens sake dont take anything a chatbot says for gospel. All too often they base themselves on false info

[Nadie]

So it turns out Emely was wrong, unless Phone support was wrong.
But Emely's didn't make sense and Phone support did.

Phone support says it actually ends at 23:59:99 on 6/8, not 00:00:00 so I am getting 30 days from this renewal which was the really nonsense part where Emely was saying I'd only get 29 days from this renewal as well. Phone support said I would get billed again on 6/9 for a new 30 days starting that day, which makes sense as May is a 31 day month.
Since that makes sense, it also makes sense that when I subbed at 10:27 PST, the first day was only 1 hour 33 minutes and not a day, which Phone support explained. No where is it advertised that subscriptions are by calendar day PST. But that's not as bad as Emely was saying it was which made no sense.

It doesn't seem right for Square Enix to obfuscate their subscription terms so heavily and how they go by calendar day ending and starting at Midnight PST.

[Yukimin]

I just wish they would refund time lost because this game surely has a *lot* of maintenance.

[Kelerick]

I just wish they would refund time lost because this game surely has a *lot* of maintenance.

Refund the time lost OR add more days, but it's asking the impossible unfortunately.

[caffe_macchiato]

Uh, hello Square? You know this is grounds for a class-action lawsuit, right? Just read these forums. Your fans are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore.

[worldofneil]

edit: Original title is based on incorrect information given by chat support. Subs are apparently 30 calendar days, though that's not stated anywhere.
It's still makes no sense that subscription period information is so obfuscated.

There's literally nothing wrong here, just your understanding of how the subscription works. Yes your first subscription will likely be short, because it's 30 calendar days, but how much so depending on what time in the day you started. However, subsequent subscriptions (assuming you don't have a subscription break) are always exactly 30 days. I've been subscribed non-stop for nearly 10 years now, they've always given me exactly what I paid for.

Also your chat support ticket, you say about May 9th being day 29, but it's not. You can literally write it out:

Day 1: April 10
Day 2: April 11
Day 3: April 12
Day 4: April 13
Day 5: April 14
Day 6: April 15
Day 7: April 16
Day 8: April 17
Day 9: April 18
Day 10: April 19
Day 11: April 20
Day 12: April 21
Day 13: April 22
Day 14: April 23
Day 15: April 24
Day 16: April 25
Day 17: April 26
Day 18: April 27
Day 19: April 28
Day 20: April 29
Day 21: April 30
Day 22: May 1
Day 23: May 2
Day 24: May 3
Day 25: May 4
Day 26: May 5
Day 27: May 6
Day 28: May 7
Day 29: May 8
Day 30: May 9

The same can be done for what chat support said about the next 30 days being 10th May to 8th June.

I just wish they would refund time lost because this game surely has a *lot* of maintenance.

Sarcasm...? This game only has a few hours planned maintenance every 4 months...

[Nadie]

There's literally nothing wrong here, just your understanding of how the subscription works. Yes your first subscription will likely be short, because it's 30 calendar days, but how much so depending on what time in the day you started. However, subsequent subscriptions (assuming you don't have a subscription break) are always exactly 30 days. I've been subscribed non-stop for nearly 10 years now, they've always given me exactly what I paid for.

Also your chat support ticket, you say about May 9th being day 29, but it's not. You can literally write it out:

The same can be done for what chat support said about the next 30 days being 10th May to 8th June.

To say there's literally nothing wrong, you've either misread or you're not counting correctly by not taking into account that you're supposed to count starting at the start of the day through the end of that day for a day.
Count again until 00:00 June 8th instead of through June 8th until 23:59:59 and you'll see they were saying it's 29 instead of 30 days by your count. You'll see how CSR was saying that final day is at most one second long, thus one less day than advertised. I'm assuming they're incorrect and that Phone Support is right.

CSR would never clarify it goes by calendar days and not actually 720 hours and it doesn't say that anywhere despite me pointing out that going by hours it doesn't work like that. In WoW, 60 days ends in 1440 hours not 60 calendar days which could be 1426 hours and 1 second instead if you activate it at the "wrong" time.

It's weird to have a system like this that seems designed to cheat people out of time they pay for that no other online game subscription uses, but that isn't the biggest point.

The big issue is where they kept saying was that the automatic renewal that happened would be 29 days instead of 30 which further confuses things since I could understand how the first day was only an hour and a half (even though the CSR wouldn't say that and kept gaslighting instead), but not how the renewal could be 29.
It being calendar days, which is how you're counting correctly there if you are getting the whole 24 hours of that last day you count, you're missing that they however kept saying it's until that day rather than through that day. They said it ends at 00:00 which is the start of a day. This was the big issue. They kept saying it's 29 days, and that that's somehow 30, telling me I'm being scammed and that there's nothing I can do about it and that I'm wrong. I tried so many ways to explain to them that that's 29 days if what they're saying is true and they refused to understand how they must be stating that incorrectly.
Through June 8th 23:59 is correct, which is what Phone Support said. Until June 8th 00:00 is incorrect and missing an entire day. More specifically, the way Phone Support stated it is technically it ends at 00:00 the following day that the website states and that is the day that renewal would be billed which makes perfect sense.
The CSR didn't seem to understand that 00:00 is the start of a day and not the end of it, which makes all of the difference, despite me pointing it out to them repeatedly many different ways.

In other words, to be completely clear: if you stop counting at the start of that day instead of through the end of that day, that's one less day which is how the CSR was counting but insisting it's not.

Sarcasm...? This game only has a few hours planned maintenance every 4 months...

And what about unplanned maintenance? That happens a lot.
Crystal just had another 8 hours of that which can be an entire day most people would play. I know there was maintenance in Feb, April, and May, plus some other emergency ones if I'm not mistaken. That's not every 4 months.
Lots of games compensate for that. Oddly enough, it's mainly f2p games which compensate for standard maintenance.

[Commander_Justitia]

From my experience, this game gives you often more than 720hrs.

They don't refund maintenance hours, as you agree in with the ToS. They sometimes still do refund days, if it is a bigger issue on their side, but that has become very rare.