Final Fantasy XIV adds direct subscription options

@Massively, ok you win Massively blanking out people's honest opinions is one step too far. Bye bye all the best and farewell. Abandon blog until you restore free speech.

@Viiral
As a long-time FFXI player, I can assure you that this was a mind-blowingly speedy response to player requests by SE's standards. Usually it takes them at least one year of pretending there's no issue, six months of promising to look into it, two updates worth of fixes that miss the point entirely and occasionally make things worse, six more months of dead silence, and then a spontaneous announcement that they've discovered the issue all by themselves and are planning to implement a solution as soon as possible. SE apologizes for the inconvenience.

@Irem

Only six months? I call that optimistic. *wink*

Seriously though, this is the answer that all of us in countries unsupported by ClickandBuy who were locked out of playing FF14 (because of no available payment options, including Paypal) were hoping for. If you lived in Southeast Asia, you were basically out of luck.

I just hope they haven't alienated their entire customer base. I know I was pretty irate about the lack of communication on the issue.

@JohnD212 One character can be level 50 at every class and every trade skill in the game. The ONLY reason to have two characters in XIV is because someone is so ADD that they need to have two different characters to stare at. Seriously, that's the ONLY reason to have two characters.

That said, the subscription with a character right now is $10. When it goes full price it will be $13. Greed? That's less than I pay for any other mmo. If for some reason you're in that tiny percent of people that MUST have a human and a cat girl to look at you'll be charged $16. One extra dollar for your strange eccentricity. Sure doesn't sound like greed to me.

@JohnD212. "Too many choices and too many quality games that listen to their customers. "

Most of those games turn into horrible abominations after the companies start listening to their customers. WoW is a perfect example of a great MMO turned to crap from this, especially in Cata with the core game and WPVP ruined because they listened.

"There is ZERO excuse for them to implement this most basic feature this late in the game."

We've only had to start paying for a month, there was no need for them to bother with it for the last year and no way to know they needed to change the payment method until we started paying and having trouble with their methods. They changed it right away, the first month isn't even up yet.

You complain about something you're completely ignorant of, next time stay quiet. :)

@Monkey D Luffy

"We've only had to start paying for a month, there was no need for them to bother with it for the last year and no way to know they needed to change the payment method until we started paying and having trouble with their methods. They changed it right away, the first month isn't even up yet."

I disagree. Everyone is complaining about the payment system since release (and they did plan to charge us originally, remember?). Even all this time, people still often made threads asking for them to change the payment system BEFORE charging began.

So, yeah, while they didn't "need" to change it, they already knew they had to and they still waited till after subs kicked in, something that likely made them LOSE a few subs.

@Deliverator
In fairness to the companies, it also allows them to price microtransactions a little lower, from what I understand, due to not having to deal with credit card charges for each individual item shop purchase.

@(Unverified)

Unfortunately, it's well-known for all the WRONG reasons, and not even very good at being well-known outside of the online casino field.

@Maseno There are less people of course, but there are more people left than I thought there would be. The game is getting better and better every week. I can't wait for 2.0 to launch so we can get a decent population in this game again. I'm very excited.

The people claiming they should just scrap this game have not logged in recently to see how things have changed. They don't (and probably won't) know how much work has gone into it. Most of them don't care, they just want something to rant and rave about. Can't do much about those types of people sadly. It's a completely different game though. I couldn't play at launch very long because of how bad this game was. Now? I'm having quite a bit of fun actually. The new dev team has shown that they really know what they're doing. I couldn't be more excited for the eventual 2.0 relaunch of this game.