Quote Originally Posted by Romikemi View Post
SQEX made the mistake in the recent past of allowing people to unknowingly create accounts in systems designed for a region other than where the account holder lives. They're paying dearly for that in bad publicity because they've hit a subscription billing mega problem.

They're looking ahead to the monthly billing systems going live, and they've got EU-based players who have inadvertently created NA-based accounts that cannot be billed from Square Enix America systems, and vice versa, without causing a major finance and accounting tangle. So they have to come up with a way to get all the accounts migrated to the right regional systems and operating companies.

The complexity SQEX faces in their systems and why they can't issue out of region codes is because this is a P2P transaction problem that they have one day to sort out or face a wall of noise much bigger than 30 page threads.
The problem stems from the fact that companies need to segregate the playerbase on region because of funding for the support centers and also because of an inequity in fees charged between regions (US prices and subs are usually among the cheapest, and in a true free market everyone would be buying from US).

This debacle has been compounded by their website redirection problems, and lack of tools for support staff to actually do any region changes, even when it's clear there is a problem. Not to mention they must be hiring all of 2 people to man the phones and chat support, as the 5 hour long queues can attest...

This is still a Japanese company though... customers are probably a lot more tolerant over there, and HQ is probably most concerned about pleasing the homeland playerbase first before attending to any other problems.