Warning of Square Enix Payment Options

[Kyri]

Hello community!
I have posted this forum after years of pulling my hair trying to pay both for FFXI and FFXIV. It is my hope that SOMEONE from SE will finally realize they should be looking into this stuff!

How to start let's see.

Back in my xi days paying wasn't much of a issue until SE demanded payments had secured by visa and master card secure, however they demanded this when a very large amount of SS company's didn't even know what it meant. I spent half a year trying to get one of my cc company's to look into it but they weren't interested. This was a very aggravating time where I had to ask myself "Does SE not want my money? Perhaps this has a reason to do with why they can't compete against blizzard for subs.." I know for a fact 7 of my closest friends also had issues with this and various posts from upset players via forums like Zam, FFXIAH so on. The thing is though the complaints where there anyone who phoned got a completely out of the loop SE rep who not only had no idea nor cared but refuse to really help with anything at all. They just point the finger back to your CC your mom your very existence but it's obviously NOT on their end...

Down the road

I started my XIV career as soon as the game was out of beta. My husband and I went and bought 2 great pc's to handle the game and two copies. Alas I was scared but here I am trying to tell SE to take my money again. How frustrating! There is a option to have payments come out of your account but everyone I talk to has the same issue I do. A "error code" pops up after your finally done verifying your information and every time you try to add after that your hit with the same error code again. On call to SE support(again..) they tell me nope! no problems! but you cant try to put a cc through again until 24 hrs are up(apparently the error code locks you out for "safety" for 24 hrs, haha!" So I wait try again and get the same error code. wait another 24 hrs try a different card with no luck. Eventually I even got viasa and mastercard gift cards to try and still the same error. What does SE support say about this? "Its your CC company not us!" 5 calls to various CC and gift CC companies(on various days) and all of them say the same thing. "No SE did not try to charge anything to your account nor did we block any dollar transaction. They didn't even try, we would see it" I call back SE and tell that to them and everytime I still get the same response "No not us! have a great day! no we cant take your cc info and put it in for you, maybe buy crysta?"But the thing is even buying crysta with my cc has this same effect. Please remember this was tested with multiple CC and CC gift cards to solve this issue on my end.

So the last resorts.. JP pay client and click and buy. I tried the JP payment option when I first started but became alarmed when I found transactions happening 1-2 times more a month then should have and canceled that cc and refused to touch the JP payment option again. So now im left with no choice but Click and buy at this time. Recently looking back to my CC purchases from click and buy im finding almost every charge from SE is for a different amount. it changes between 2-5 dollars every time they pull money out and that makes no sense. In fact this is wrong. If Se is charging me 19.85 and 17.85 for the two accounts THOSE are the numbers I should be seeing not 22.95 23.75 20.85's all across every payment option right?

Things look shady again and these are the only options I have to pay!

over the last 6 months I have tried to do things like call click and buy for support and here's whats funny. This company Se would rather go through rather then say ones like pay pal doesn't have any phone number! in fact if you navigate through their site for a while you'll see it redirects you when it shouldn't and doesn't tell you squat. here's is the "Contact us" page
http://www.clickandbuy.com/WW_en/service/complaints.html

Im finding various shady googled posts about click and buy and even SE themselves can't give me a number to call this company to find out why my charges are so different. On top of that I got charged another 22 dollars from SE click and buy at the end of this month. Yes, this magical month were not even paying for.
In fact, not only are we not paying for it(but i got charged by click and buy) but they take out all my payments at the beginning of the month. This was on the 25'th they took this amount out, wayyy off from SE payment days as well as the -normal- payments at the beginning of that month. Of course as mentioned above all these amounts are different on every single statement, and I am given no way to contact these people.

Why SE why, are we forced to do business with these company's with hundreds of shady forum posts about the, why does automatic payments to SE have to be so damned impossible in a age when any mmo I play it's simple and done in minutes. I can pay and log onto wow(though i hate that game..), tera, diablo III, GW and even the F2p cash shop mmos like perfect world without a single hiccup but trying to pay SE has been a stressful terribly annoying option that hasnt gotten any better since i picked up XI in 04.. Please Yoshi, hear these words and make this less stressful? <3

Your slightly annoyed but forever a Final Fantasy girl, Kyri

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P.S for other FF fans who may doubt my claims or want to have a bit more information I have gathered a few forums about these problems to make you more aware.

http://www.asecurelife.com/clickandb...dit-card-fraud
http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews239738.html
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1159767
http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/19011...y/page__st__20
http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/19011-click-and-buy/
http://www.darkandlight.com/forum/sh...ad.php?t=69526
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archiv.../t-744590.html




Other FFXIV players quotes to the current payment issues:

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Click and Buy is broken, and their CS reps are utterly non-responsive. Ultimate Pay would only let me buy Crysta using certain payment methods linked to my PayPal account (i.e. Ultimate Pay would NOT accept payment directly from my checking account which is linked to my PayPal account, rather they needed a credit / debit card).Yeah....what a train wreck this is. Not quite as bad as PlayOnline, but pretty god damn bad. For those of you who don't know, PlayOnline was the front-end interface / account management software you had to use to log-in and play FFXI. It required you to navigate through a series of vague and ambiguous menus before you could actually get into and play the game. It was excruciating and confusing.
I just hope that this isn't a deterrent to subs...
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The Entire ClickAndBuy Process took me about 20 minutes. Verification took about 2 hours to show up on my Credit Card's online statement.
I thought the entire process is rather painless... though why didn't SE just go with Paypal is beyond me.[Edit]I should clarify my statement I mean I have no idea why SE didn't just go with Paypal subscription/re-occuring pay.
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Well I can't use Click and Buy and Crysta wants to charge me more then I want so I am screwed either way. Great job SE.
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The process is a little confusing without much feedback about what's going on based on what you're doing. It'd be so much simpler if they had just done something like with POL or anything else on SE's side, take our info, run it through whatever processor they want, and let us manage it through a "real" SE page rather than being on a third-party site.
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The reason SE have handed off all the payment stuff is because they don't want to get involved in PCI compliance (credit card regulatory requirements) - all a pita and if not fully compliant by the end of the year, potential fines of £250k+ per annum. Can't really blame them for that ...Why they picked non-entity payment transaction firms is another question of course - C&B doesn't even recognise my address, and my Crysta ordering via Ultimate / Paypal is failing with a useless error message. All as helpful as a chocolate teapot ...
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I tried to register my CC with C&B, but everytime i enter it, it takes me to the Verified by Visa form and it wont accept my info even though it's valid... AAARRGGHH
I cant skip it or it says that my card isnt verified...
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So because I'm an incredibly obsessive individual, I've gone ahead and used Excel to tell me how long it would finally take to zero out a Crysta balance by paying 1299 per month and buying Crysta intelligently (only paying 1500 when it's needed to reach 1299)
Ready?
500 Months... or 41 and 2/3 years
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Honestly, I'd probably go with Crysta over ClickAndBuy even KNOWING how the math works out just because I trust SE more than I trust random UK Company 67 that I've never heard of before now.
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They want a 3.9% service fee for paying with a credit card! Click and Buy account closed. Going with Crysta -> Ultimate Pay -> PayPal
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Has anyone actually been able to successfully add Crysta to their account yet? I've tried 2 methods and they are both failing for some reason:
1) I have a valid and funded Paypal account. When I try to pay with PayPal , the transactions get cancelled. Paypal is showing these payments as being rejected by the merchant for some reason.
2) I also have a ClickAndBuy account which has been verified with my credit card as well (already confirmed the 2 small charges that they do for verification). When I try to submit payment with this, I get this cryptic error message:
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An error has occurred.
Please confirm the status of any relevant options and then try again.
For details, please contact the Square Enix Support Center.
(Error code: 401)
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The only method I haven't tried yet is using an Ultimate Gamer Card...I have to agree with most opinions here - this is a ridiculous way to handle customer payments on SE's end.
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This annoying site set off fraud protection i didn't know i had.Two robot phone calls one live one and 5 emails to two accounts all for a $1.71 , $1.54 and $2.50.I checked online banking to get the numbers in the account holds section and it cleared at click and buy. I didn't read anything about a $2.50 charge but they have 3 of those on my account maybe it's a glitch. I spent $300 on Pay Pal today without a whimper but this site was insane.
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hile not difficult, it is jumping through more hoops than most every other MMO on the market.
The entire purpose of an MMO is to get a strong subscriber base going and live off the profits. If you make it unnecessarily hard for people to give you their money, you've missed a huge opportunity.-Ten
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I had 2 withdrawals from Click and Buy. but on my statement i see 2 other withdrawals from "ISA FEE LONDON GB" looks like I need to call by bank and have these credited back to my account.
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so far i have been on hold for 22 min
getting a 500 error (which after research informs me that its a browser issues )(ives used 3 differant ones)pretty much they should have tested this as well.
this @#%^ing sucks.
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I went with CaB through SE. They've taken payments from my account, but I received no email and when I tried to log into the CaB site, it said my email address wasn't recognized. Going to use crysta and tell my bank to block all CaB transactions.
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I have been trying the clickandbuy and I am not impressed. I get the regular edition of FFXIV next week, so I was testing the water, and getting lined out. They say it can take up to 3 business days for the transactions to show up on my credit card statement. Tomorrow is the last day. I authorized my credit card company for the transactions and clickandbuy has temp. banned my account since it set off my credit card's fraud system. On Friday I will delete my registration at clickandbuy if it is not resolved. It really shouldn't be this difficult. I really prefer a mmo to have auto-pay, and I have only had this kind of issue with PoL FFXI and clickandbuy FFXIV.
Now I have to dig out my old paypall account...where did I put that thing...
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On another sad note I was able to post all this find that info in a hour.. Im out of time but there are THOUSANDS more posts and comments from FF players to these issues, that's why I am bringing this up. I could be at this for hours more, list a heck of a lot more site talks and SE customer quotes, so if this doesn't say your fan base wants some changes SE, what will it take?

Please remember this post was never meant as a "Flaming" of SE rather then a hopeful opportunity to fix payment options from the cries of many people like myself for a better payment system
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Kyri Kitty

[Rau]

have you tried paypal?

[Kyri]

as in going through JP ultimate to have to even get to paypal options? My point is about making the payment systems easier to use. This is like middle age payments for mmo's

[Nix]

I was about to say "Holy sh!t wall of text", but I kept reading anyway, I had some pretty horrible payment woes of my own... D:

During my time playing XI, I was living in England at the beginning but I had set up my account early enough so that I was able to pay in USD - this worked out really well for me.
A couple of years (maybe 2ish?) later, SE decided that all EU accounts can only pay in GBP or Euro but if you were already paying in dollars you could keep paying in USD - yay!...right?

Rewind to five years ago, I moved to the states and had to change my bank account to an American one since I was getting charged ridiculous fees to use my english one overseas.
After changing my payment info I thought everything was dandy, I could still pay in dollars... and then my monthly statement came @_@

I was being charged just under $30 per month for one account (one content ID, no mules) because after I changed my card info, they also changed my payment to euros even though I have a US bank account.

When I got in touch with the customer service I was told they couldn't change it, and when I asked for a reason I was told "Just because we can't"

...I gave up Q_Q; lol.

I know it is not the customer service reps fault so I do not hold it against them at all, I just wish it was a little more streamlined and easier for everyone. D:

Also... click and buy can burn in the hottest part of hell >< worst service I ever used lol ; ;

[Gao]

Ultimate game cards should be less of a headache then trying to do online transactions. Sure you'll have to keep going to the store and buy them but if you buy a $20 one you just have to go to walmart or something once ever 2 months for xiv lol if you have legacy account that is. Hope you find something that works for you =/

[Kyri]

Thank you for your post Nix, and Gao im sorry you too have had to go through these issues

[Shougun]

I havent had payment troubles before but can we also say what the hell were they thinking when you have to set up your account the first time. I think I went through 20 tabs and clicks and windows and similar looking buttons and filled the information in three times and then I finally had an SE account so I could make a FFXIV account and then link them somehow with my payment plan..

Wewh..

Yeah.. they need to update that sign up and pay site. What a nightmare.

[Donimo]

While FFXI and FFXIV once had terrible terrible payment methods, you can't be completely ignorant to the changes they've made. Since earlier this year, Square-Enix directly accepts credit card numbers without needing to go through a third-party company.

also, those are alot of words you typed up there

[Kyri]

While FFXI and FFXIV once had terrible terrible payment methods, you can't be completely ignorant to the changes they've made. Since earlier this year, Square-Enix directly accepts credit card numbers without needing to go through a third-party company.

also, those are alot of words you typed up there

Yes a lot of words, so sorry! I just wanted to make sure I felt I made my point however with your comment about the change in payment options this year I had mentioned above that every time I try to use it (and multiple others) while it goes smoothly for some every cc I have tried pulls up a error code at the end of the transaction that the se staff tells us you have to wait 24 hrs to try again the acc is locked. in 24 hrs you get the sammmeeee error code allover. Though many of you might think this is the 99c charge to see if the cc is legit every cc and gift cc I call says there was absolutely no attempt blocked or not blocked by SE.

[syntaxlies]

I havent had payment troubles before but can we also say what the hell were they thinking when you have to set up your account the first time. I think I went through 20 tabs and clicks and windows and similar looking buttons and filled the information in three times and then I finally had an SE account so I could make a FFXIV account and then link them somehow with my payment plan..

Wewh..

Yeah.. they need to update that sign up and pay site. What a nightmare.

At one point it asked for a drop of my blood, what was with that