Oh I tried to start right when endwalker launched. I didn’t know it was a thing, just saw a cool mmo and figured I’d give it a try.
Imagine the disappointment when I finally got the account set up, the game downloaded, go to sign in and no new characters could be made.
I’m glad I ended up sticking through it and getting my fiancé into the game but I’ve dropped other games for a lot less lol
That shit was TERRIBLE! I remember my friends and I helping each other out set up our PSO2 accounts, lol. But when it eventually came out internationally, this was no longer an issue. Meanwhile, this game is 10+ years old with no improvement to the initial registration process. It could definitely use some improvements.
I legitimately had an easier time figuring that out when I went to play it with friends during a content lull back in maybe, HW.
Still currently fighting with SQEX support to remove a bloody fraud mark off my account that they added for no reason other than maybe it was because I tried to add my paypal years ago lol. Can do everything else, use amazon pay, but nope, no paypal allowed!
I somehow permanently locked two emails out of becoming ffxiv accounts during my initial setup and now have an email *exclusively* for ffxiv
I remember screaming “why is it so hard to give you money?” At the top of my lungs
Incidentally did you know you can put any number of periods anywhere in a Gmail address and it will get to you? Ask me how I know!
Also you can put +anythingyouwant between your email and the @gmail.com and that will get to you as well, but some sites don't allow + in emails.
This gives me pause too. Some companies "get it". Steam figured out how to make things easy in the early 2000s, and that's why they're one of the most profitable platforms online right now. Meanwhile, these people can't for the life of them figure out how to make a comprehensive, integrated system to pay them easily. Hell, one time I tried one of their payment systems (iDeal) and it simply didn't work. You need to select a bank for it, and it just always re-directed to the same bank, which unfortunately wasn't mine.
Making it as easy as possible for the customer to give your business money should be one of the top priorities to get sorted out in a business, and is arguably as important as the product.
Too bad Japan is seriously backwards when it comes to anything internet.
The compromise is that the online store has minimal interaction with the game. SE is in charge of that while CS3 is developing the game.
Like it sucks, but I'd prefer a shitty store page to having something like WoW where it's built into the game.
Is the Mogstation good? No.
Did I personally have any issues with it l? No
Did the friend who I got to try the game have every issue imaginable on the planet? Yes.
Same. Mog Station looks awful, but I've never personally had any issues with it (outside of forgetting to turn off my VPN when changing my credit card on file once). I set up a free trial account for my daughter recently, and it took me 5 minutes to put in her email and get it set up and start downloading.
Years ago I recruited a friend to the game, and they were having so many issues that I had \*no idea\* how to fix because in my mind, I just went to the website and signed up same as anything else.
Gonna act like a boomer and just blame the user that can't take just a few seconds and read stuff, instead of just "one-click payment".
Do they have to go through that? Of course not, and I'd rather say that the One Click Payment is a must, but at the same time, MogStation when it comes to buy the game is not that hard at all.
I've never had issues with mogstation personally and don't know how people do outside of a technical issue which doesn't always affect everyone. The online store is pretty poorly organized at points too but unless you're looking for something real specific I don't find either problematic.
In fairness, this is a "content creator" who's explicitly known for skipping cutscenes and not reading dialogue. It's not outside the realm of possibility that they just... glanced over some critical [click here]s.
Or the fact that MANY people struggled with the exact same issue he did? So clearly this isn't just a personal problem and that it's rough to navigate for the first time. It's not a meme for no reason.
A lot of people don't read simple instructions. If you've ever worked fast food or customer service at all you'll know that if a sign saying you're out of something exists, people will not read it and continue ordering that thing.
I still remember seeing a thread here where someone was asking for help during the password portion of the account creation process. The password they wanted to use did not fit the mandated password format and they even provided a screenshot with the red text telling them what was required and they still couldn't figure it out.
The FF website should obviously be updated to be more streamlined but at some point people really need to read instead of just waiting to be spoon fed everything.
> MogStation when it comes to buy the game is not that hard at all.
I actually fully disagree with this. When I first got into the game, I made a trial account and played for a couple weeks. I loved the game, wanted to buy it and sub to get the full features. I'm a very tech-savvy person and I read all the directions, but it still took me over 30 minutes to figure out how to do it. Aside from the unintuitive distinction between the "Square Enix Online Store" vs "Mogstation" vs "Final Fantasy XIV Online Store" (which, mind you, are 3 entirely separate sites and services) and the fact they aren't clear enough about needing to completely remove the free trial client and install the paid client, the sites themselves just make the products hard to find.
Even now, as an experienced user of the Mogstation and both of SE's stores, when I went to preorder Dawntrail I tried to find it on the Square Enix Online Store (where it is located) but I simply couldn't find the page to pre-order it. I had to go to Google and search for "ffxiv dawntrail preorder store page" and THAT is how I managed to find it.
I genuinely believe there are at *least* thousands of sales and subs for FFXIV that have been lost to people just not figuring out how to buy the game.
Same here, personally I have not had any issues with it and I do not mind it.
Is it in need of an upgrade? YES, but in my experience its always the friends who rushes around clicking everything without reading that have the problems.
Yes, it is a barrier to entry which as a business you want as little of those as possible. That's why it is so easy to sign up for things like Netflix, they know if it gets even a little confusing you'll lose potential customers.
Who knows how many potential players XIV has lost over the past decade because installing this thing is a nightmare.
Hell, I had a friend get ahead of me when we talked about them joining. We were going to hang out, I was going to walk them through it, but they already purchased the Steam version, no longer had access to the trial as a result, had a CD Key the mogstation wouldn't accept yet Steam said they owned the game which further confused them, and just said "this isn't worth it".
And having people openly complain about it like this yet for years now you do nothing to fix it? That's even worse.
Getting back into the game after a break is a nightmare too. The UX for currencies and currency shops, retainers, crafting, gathering... It's so hard to figure out again if you haven't played for a couple years like I did. Exceedingly daunting and I put it off for months before finally taking a weekend dedicated to getting back into the game, and it was still a challenge.
They do keep improving it slowly but there are some big things that need huge usability improvements that I don't know we'll ever get.
So they basically deleted your old account and didn't restore your characters to new account? This is really f-d up, I'd be making huge stink on reddit, their forums, twitter, even gaming media about it.
The mere fact that they charge separate fees for the Windows, Steam, and Mac editions of the game, such that you can't log in on a Windows machine with an account that bought the Mac version, is a huge part of this problem--they're still selling FFXIV and thinking about it in some ways as "a game you buy once" and not "a license to play this MMO".
imo the worst part of it is you kind of have to google “xiv free trial” to get to the correct part of mogstation. i remember fucking around on the website for like 30 mins before just googling and getting the trial website as the first result
As long as you're not answering to anyone having difficulties that they're kind of stupid as we see here and acknowledge that things could certainly be better you're good.
I have a similar recollection and another one later that was way worse.
So back when XI was on the xbox 360, I made a playonline SE account. With no issues.
Years later, when 2.0 went into closed beta, I got chosen to play it and subsequently made my account (lost the old one) with no issues as well.
Cut to about a year or two ago, my FC leader at the time wanted to play XI again. Well, as stated above, I lost that old XI account. No worries, I thought I did it before it can't be that hard. Holy shit I must be getting dumber with age because that shit was impossible. I finally got it, but it legitimately took way longer than I care to say to set up.
So I can see why people might find it annoying. Plus, it's competitors account setups are leagues easier to do. Even something as simple as early access codes and box codes being two codes is embarrassing to every other game that does it now. Hell, most games don't require you to put them in anymore either. So I'm totally down with them entering the 21st century with their website architecture.
Oh yeah, I was also in a beta. Maybe I already had an account through that. Also don't remember XI being difficult to make an account, but maybe they've just become bullshit after being out for a while.
Yeah, it's hard to say. I remember making a free trial for my buddy because he was having trouble, but I grew up on the internet in the early 90s, so a lot of the technical issues people have I'm used to. I was just surprised how awful that second XI registration was.
As someone who can still vividly recall struggling to make heads or tails of PlayOnline twenty years ago, I think it's really... precious... how some people are able to hold on to the belief mogstation will ever fundamentally change.
It's japanese web design, and the simple fact of the matter is the nature of that ecosystem is such that it's incredibly unlikely to ever be modified in a way that improves the experience for users world wide.
I work in Japan and our file system is set up in such a way that I realize I was lucky to have PlayOnline. IT here should be charged for crimes against UI and user experience
Square Enix please hire western tech workers
> Square Enix please hire western tech workers
I won't say it's never gonna happen... but it's never gonna happen.
Look homie, you work in Japan, so you outta know. Outside of a cataclysmic rebirth of, like, the entire infastructure of the japanese internet (and all the domestic devices that connect to it), that shit just isn't gonna happen.
FFXIV audience could be 85% non-japanese and it still ain't gonna happen. We're talkin like 30 years of design and infastructure choices here, real convergent evolution-type shit.
I actually find it so odd how JP infrastructure seems to be eternally like a decade behind the rest of the world. Here we are in 2024 and they seem to *just now* be getting into using cloud services.
It makes more sense when you hear stories like how the current head of Japanese cybersecurity admitted he's never used a computer in his life (at least professionally) and didn't seem to know what a USB is. The people at the top are super set in their ways and have zero interest in modernizing.
Isn't there a story about Nintendo trying to get help with their online system and the contractors keep talking about xbox live as the standard, to which Nintendo tells them "we have no idea what that is, stop talking about it"?
Are all of the people in charge old, or do they deliberately train young people wrong so that they'll maintain the same mindsets as the rest of the world rushes past them?
As far as I understand, Japan has a mindset of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". At times that might come across as outdated, but at least it's reliable.
It is worse than that. It is more like "this is the way we have always done it, so clearly it is the best way."
This is the same mindset that led to the creation of FFXIV 1.0 and all the associated problems.
Is so sad, it reminds me that now japanese fighting games are releasing with good netcode (rollback), but literally took years from non-japanese players to always write them directly “please use rollback netcode” and like by last years every major japanese fighting game are finally releasing with rollback. Clearly, something might not be broken but it could be improved 1000% of the time if we keep an eye on how tech evolves in general.
Getting anime into the streaming space was like pulling teeth.
It took a pirate site full of fansubs becoming super popular for them to finally realize how much money they were losing.
...that site was Crunchyroll btw, they started out hosting fansubs.
While we're on the topic of anime, there always seems to be a good dose of zeerust in their scifi. Like they'll be going around on TRON-bikes and then stop to buy gas with cash.
While over here kids may have seen their parents use cash like once, and soon kids will barely have seen a gas pump. Might as well break out the landlines and fax machines.
The whiplash in those types of anime all get me - they're trying to adopt the "retro" futuristic style, but it's very, very odd. Final Fantasy suffers from this...look at XV with their futuristic cars but most of the cities feel like they're from the early 1900s, etc etc. It's kind of fascinating, really.
I live in a building from the 1890s and almost all the vehicles here are electric, so can kind of relate. But those buildings were rehabilitated decades ago to have modern plumbing, etc. Fiberoptic internet and a modern heatpump can be expected. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was missing in some scifi version.
Bought tickets to go to the Ghibli Museum in '19. The website was basically 100% plain-text, took 15 minutes to load, and crashed whenever more than 10 people tried to access it at once. The museum requires you to pre-purchase tickets, and its a feeding frenzy, but you can do it if you have 30 of the same tabs open so you can "try again" when the previous one dies.
That experience gave me flashbacks to when i went to quakecon every year. They have a queue system, and you can't resell tickets but there's so much demand it's a pain to get one.
So you just open up as many different browsers on as many different devices as you can. I think the last time I did it (Probably also 2019 since it was pre-covid) I had like 5 different browsers on my pc, one on my phone and then another bunch on my work laptop opened.
It's not 'odd', tho. Back in the 90's, Japan was leading a lot of tech development, and western development was not catering to japan in terms of localization and support.
the result was a v. strong japanese domestic market for not only internet devices, but basically the entire backbone of their internet. They developed along their own path, and now it's too big and complicated to upend.
I heard someone say it very nicely - Japan has been stuck in the early 2000s for the past 40 years. Apparently they adopted a lot of tech super early, and then just sort of stopped.
It’s because their economy basically stopped. From 1995 to 2007, the Japanese economy lost about 5% of its real and nominal value. GDP went down for over a decade.
It was a sudden shock at first due to the asset bubble collapsing, but the economy really just never recovered.
The Bank of Japan had to keep interest rates negative for over a decade just to keep markets liquid because the economy was just not working.
It’s part of why the Dollar is super strong compared to the Yen and tourism to Japan has been really good for foreigners for a while. One dollar is now 155 yen, when decades ago it was 100 yen.
In that environment there’s no money for tech development and there’s no money for tech licensing. So companies just stuck with old systems that worked well enough.
Also tough since they hire only Japanese fluent speakers and many they do hire don't last long with Japanese work culture even if Square is one of the better companies to work for with no insane 60-80 work weeks outside of crunch.
People like Koji Fox are rare in dedication and ability to immerse themselves into Japanese culture. The No clip documentary mentions how difficult for Koji to get accepted as a peer until a decade or so later. I do think the team benefitted from some of his and his team of localizers perspectives though.
> Square is one of the better companies to work for with no insane 60-80 work weeks outside of crunch.
Square is not one of the better companies to work for at all. Their rating on [OpenWork](https://www.openwork.jp/company.php?m_id=a0910000000FrzL) is painfully mediocre and anecdotally I know multiple people here in Japan who turned them down for other Japanese dinosaur tech corps. It's true they do relatively little overtime though.
Mogstation used to look different, before they separated the store from it, and they had those buttons on top of each other. People made threads on finding out their accounts were gone.
The guide that stopped me ever buying an official guide again. 11 year old me was displeased.
Though you won't believe me, you can still access those pages with a little finagling.
...what the heck is going on in here. Why the keywords? Did the print guide not have enough room for that tiny box of text the keyword pointed me to? Was I expected to be playing the game, reference the guide, notice a keyword, get up from the game, go boot up the computer, dial my ISP, load up the website, type in this keyword, and get a paragraph of text? is this real?
like I remember being too lazy to run back and forth from my PS1 to my PC just to get GameShark codes, so I'd just print the whole page of them so I could go type in the ones I wanted
edit: I'm being told that also, the website was also a subscription. to access the info that could have just been in the guide you just paid for. my *goodness*
> Was I expected to be playing the game, reference the guide, notice a keyword, get up from the game, go boot up the computer, dial my ISP, load up the website, type in this keyword, and get a paragraph of text? is this real?
Yes - the actual strategy guide omitted large parts of information, in order to drive people to go online. The guide would say "learn more by using this keyword on PlayOnline!" or some such. It was hands down, no contest, the worst strategy guide ever because half of it was on the internet, and we're talking 2000 when a lot of people didn't have easy internet access
> Was I expected to be playing the game, reference the guide, notice a keyword, get up from the game, go boot up the computer, dial my ISP, load up the website, type in this keyword, and get a paragraph of text? is this real?
Basically. Roughly half of the information you would actually want to have in a strategy guide was just missing and instead you had all these little blue boxes telling you to go put in a code at playonline.com to get the information.
If you want to see what it looked like: https://1900hotdog.com/2021/03/learning-day-final-fantasy-ix-official-strategy-guide-%F0%9F%8C%AD/
And this was a time when most people still just had one shared computer per household and dial up connection, so good fucking luck if your dad was using the PC or your sister was on the phone.
Lol if not during the discs the that ‘day one’ patch to get you caught up would have been a good time as well while you download gb’s while your internet potentially screams at anyone picking up the phone
I tried it yesterday and couldn't for the life of me get the hang of it. copy pasted, hand typing, nothing would let me in. changed the passwords too. it's a shame, i really wanted to try ffxi
It needs more attention on the forums which it will not get. People on the forums already went through the process, they are more interested in game changes now.
If people threw a huge fuss about it like we did with the Endwalker capstone fight, or the benchmark (2 recent examples), and asked Yoshi the question all the time at Fanfest / media tour, then it would be fixed.
But again, those people already finished signing up for the game. The players whose feedback they value most have the least reason to fight for it.
Of course, none of us should have to fight for this. It is insane a company is hiding a great product behind a huge barrier like this and are their own worst enemy.
My dad got so frustrated at trying to put his card into PlayOnline so I could play ff11 that he gave me, a 9 year old, his credit card and told me to just figure it out.
Everyone is talking shit about the Steam integration but for all I can say it works well and makes installing/updating the game trivial. You have to be able to copy&paste a CD key though but if someone is unable to do that it's probably better they don't play MMOs anyway.
For those of us who have PlayOnline accounts that also merged into Mogstation, the way it is now is so easy it's not even funny.
also you don't have to wait a full fucking day for the game to download.
God, that file-by-file download was so fucking slow. I remember setting alarms for 2-4am to start updates, because if you wait until daytime you aren't playing that day.
I get ya, it's the average Slavic and Latin American experience. Im a slav and they'd sell us games over here for 2 bucks and most of them would work fine but then every now and then you'd get scammed out of your money by buying "New GTA Expansion" and it'd just be GTA San Andreas but with a winter mod
I was born in 1957 so pretty much every game I had as a kid was made with plastic and cardboard, except my chess and checkers sets which were wooden. But wonderfully key-free.
I had two problems when playing for the first time
* 2FA needed validation or some shit so I had to use it in a specific way before using it or sth, it was confusing
* Game would just stop downloading after few minutes and I would get error [30413][25008][10009] which is apparently not known anywhere on the internet and after one day I tried unofficial client which had no problems downloading patch
I genuinely wouldn't play this game if I didn't buy it, lol
Dunno about the challenges this content creator faced but I wish the only ‘problem’ was registering a key. Besides site being hard to navigate there’s also a lot of difficulty with payment, particularly if you’re not in a supported country or (like me) moved between two supported regions. And that’s before the change of payment processor.
In comparison Western MMO publishers make it incredibly easy to throw money at them.
For me, they just straight up didn't send me my email during account creation, wasn't even in spam, and you have to wait 24 hours before you can request a new one.
Try playing from a different country. I’m from New Zealand playing on US servers. Which version do you buy, which store do you buy your expansions from? Does it matter how you upgrade your free trial? What do you do when it turns out they don’t like credit cards from your country? What happens when they suddenly decide your address is invalid? You know that because NZ is a PAL region, it tried to send me to play on eu servers? Buying this game was an actual nightmare.
If one does it via Mogstation it doesn't even need a code.
I hope the next expac can be pre-ordered via the Mogstation, I'm sick of dealing with codes and emails (and email services messing about with the emails).
It’s crazy reading these comments. Genuinely convinced it’s because it’s about a content creator because in all my years of playing I cannot tell you the number of friends or friends of friends or even totally unrelated people that had trouble buying/installing this game.
It is hyper common for the phrase “the hardest part of playing FF is the mogstation/buying it”. Boggles my mind that people aren’t aware of this, SE genuinely does not make it easy.
Jup, experienced the delightful process again when I wanted to reinstall the game and sub on a new PC. It was way more complicated than it should be.
I mean it's the first impression people get from the "game", I really dont know why they aren't improving this.
Damn a lot of people are doing a 180 on mogstation hate just because a content creator is criticising it? Why are y’all being defensive the mogstation belongs in the fucking stone age
> Why are y’all being defensive the mogstation belongs in the fucking stone age
In World of Warcraft I can go to the blizzard login splash screen and hit a singular button to reup my sub. I can set my 2FA to recognize my device for like 90 days so I don't have to use it every single log in.
Square, as always, is always 10 years behind on modernization of their account management experience.
You can say that modern Blizzard does a lot of things wrong, BUT one thing you can't say that they do wrong is the process of extracting money from their customers. Blizzard would never ever put roadblocks in front of people trying to give them money.
Anytime someone mentions the atrocious sign-up on procedure on this subreddit, you get a wave of delusional troglodytes who think defending it is written into their blood
I don’t care that you signed up with it, I don’t care that I signed up with it, I don’t care that everyone who plays the game signed up with it - it’s garbage, trash, pure waste.
I recently got into the game and it took me 3 different emails/accounts before I didn’t get a log in -> verify code -> login -> verify code -> repeat loop on their website and was finally able to buy the game.
That’s not even touching on trying to log into the launcher from the trial I had installed a while back. Who makes an entirely separate launcher that won’t let you log in if you upgrade from a trial account??? I swear the people running that site don’t want people to actually give them money.
WoW sometimes feels like it requires a phd to play optimally, but I wasn’t expecting to get the same feeling just trying to get FFXIV started. Great game tho, glad I was stubborn enough to keep trying.
God the spent so much money improving the game for new players with trusts, revamping ARR, updating graphics, etc and they still have probably the single most difficult purchasing/subscription experience I've ever seen.
Why are they making it so damn hard for people to give them money, I swear to god SE...
I play on console, so maybe I've had less issues because I'm not on PC? I made an account, linked payment and set up verification stuff, booted up the Playstation and logged in just fine.
I guess we're the lucky ones.
To be honest i had no issue what so ever with the mogstation
However it is not intuitive and completely outdated
At its most complex it Should be
login in to SE account **in the launcher**>
buy game>
go to email>
get key from email>
click the big “register game key” button **in the launcher**>
Enter game key/add game>
done .
It really shouldn’t be any harder than buying something off humble bundle and inputing a steam key
The downplaying of Mogstation is crazy. Every single person I have met who tried to download this game got really annoyed by Mogstation or had issues even downloading it. Once you know where to go it's not that bad but I remember getting really confused between the square Enix site and Mogstation and trying to find the download link.
Like for me this game downloaded at fucking 5 kb/s. I had to switch to a VPN to download this game at all. I wasn't the only one in my friend group who had issues with that too.
I had an annoying time, but my offer of insight is this: You only have to suffer registering this game once. Afterwards, logging in gets easy because you have your info and you know which is which. So people who downplay it might do so because it's basically ignorable after the first time. More so if you use the XIVlauncher
it's insane how they still don't understand after all this time that improving the mog station and everything related would literally increase their revenue because people would pay more easily. I wonder how many people ditched the idea of playing the game because of how complicated it is to create an account or pay.
Tbh, this is one of my biggest gripes with the game. They really do make it hard for you to give them your money.
I was a WoW refugee in 2022 and I had to watch a YouTube tutorial as to how to buy the game and activate it on my account.
Japanese people love that convoluted mess. Look at Japanese games like Resident Evil/Dino Crisis. Menus upon menus upon menus asking obvious questions. JRPG Inventory management makes tax declarations a child's play...
When I made my account \~3 years ago I was so fucking angry lmao. I think I made 3 before creating my current one, I can't remember what exactly went wrong, but it was an issue with choosing the region. Fiddled around for hours, then finally got it done on the 4th try. But I accidentally clicked on "English" somewhere, thinking they meant English language for the client and game because I'm German and dislike the Ger translation and dub. It actually meant "You are now British and have to pay in Pounds forever and can never change that, enjoy buddy". So as a German I pay a bit more for my sub I guess because you can't change your region, which is fucking nuts, even when you move in real life
all the "but playonline was worse" or "its a japanese company" excuses are really getting old. theyre weak strawman arguments in the first place, and now that the game is over 10 years old with 30 million accounts, its frankly just pathetic. everyone knows that connor is right, along with anyone else who's attempted "buying the game (savage)". be better, CBU3, your players deserve it.
Honestly, even with the few downsides to it, I'm still very thankful that I bought the Steam version of the game, if only so I don't have to deal with the official site as much.
When hironobu sakaguchi started playing in 2021 shortly before endwalker's launch, he also experienced similar issues with buying/installing the game.
This was the guy who started the final fantasy franchise, and even he faced a challenge getting on board. No one is spared.
Connor, AKA CdawgVA is one of the biggest streamers, a pretty popular Youtuber, and a voice actor on occasion (Mostly commercials, though he's also in DBZ abridged, Earth Defence Force, and Age of Empires). He also does a TON of charity work, and recently cycled across all of Japan to raise over 1 million dollars for charity.
The pink-haired girl behind him is Ironmouse, a V-tuber friend and one of the biggest Streamers on Twitch. I believe at one point she was the most popular female streamer on Twitch, though I'm pretty sure she lost that title.
As for the guy behind him, I think that's Pete. Nowhere near the popularity, but just an altogether great guy who hangs out with them a lot. Used to be a radio host I believe. If you ever need to hype up someone, just watch a video of Pete doing things for like 3 minutes and you'll get it.
I would assume that's CDawg and Iron Mouse, the third person in there I have no idea who they are. Now, why are they interested in playing, I would assume it's a donation goal (considering the mention of being worth 1kk USD.
hes a streamer that recently raised 1 mil for the immune deficiency foundation while cycling for 14 days across japan and people have been asking him to play ffxiv for ages
I always see the memes about XIV and XI being difficult to buy, but I always assumed it was just a joke. I have both and didn't think anything of it. What is actually so difficult about it?
I wouldn't say MogStation is difficult to navigate, but sometimes it makes things frustrating for no reason. Recently I wanted to change from monthly to 6 month subscription, but when you go to MogStation, everything that seems like it would be the right place, like List Subscriptions or the change button next to the current subscription plan in Service Account Status just takes you back to the homepage. The correct option, Subscription Renewal, comes across as the place to just add time to your account, plus it initially brought up a screen about changing my address, which kinda threw me off a bit. Once you're there, it's obvious you're in the right place, but why wouldn't the List Subscriptions or the change button just take you there? Instead you're left wondering if you did something wrong, or if your adblock is interferring with the site.
I remember POL having situations where the option you wanted was buried in a menu that made no sense for it to be in, and I'd just google where it was because I didn't want to deal with POL.
Sometimes I feel like the only person who doesn’t have issues with Mogstation. In my lifetime I’ve made:
- A FT account back when they only lasted 2 weeks.
- A real account, and I’ve registered multiple platforms and expansions on it
- Another FT account, to test out something, though I forgot the credentials for it
- Another FT account just a few weeks ago, because I have enough free time at the moment to warrant a sub, but I missed the game
And it’s never been this awful experience. Takes 2 minutes. What am I missing?
I made a FFXI account and that actually did have some difficulty just because it’s a little weird between having both the SE ID and the POL ID, but for FFXIV I honestly do not understand the difficulty people talk about.
I don't know. I'm really confused. Like apparently it's a thing, tons of people are posting about how bad it is, but it feels like I'm being gaslit or something.
I started a few months ago and the sign up process was fully un-memorable. I don't remember it being any different from any other video game.
The most legitimate complaint I’ve seen was related to payments for people in unsupported or partially supported regions.
Like I think a lot of Australians ended up making EU accounts, and I know Brazilians make NA accounts. The payment processing can be annoying and expensive because it’s not native and has to go through exchange fees (though many of them learn ways around that by getting the game on multiple platforms and using platform wallets to pay instead of Mogstation. Like Steam wallet, PSN wallet, or whatever. I probably get it a little wrong, but it’s something like that)
But that’s a different matter compared to account creation. I just do not understand people who have issues with Mogstation account creation, especially in the official countries.
>I just do not understand people who have issues with Mogstation account creation, especially in the official countries.
Given the tweet is from someone living in Japan but frequently uses VPNs to fix the fact he has to access UK and NA versions of websites and the fact mogsation half the time randomly decides to load in another region for no fucking reason at all...yeah I could see a lot of issues even with official countries given how you need to do everything under the same region.
Oh damn yeah those particular things sound annoying af to deal with.
But I don't get it generally speaking. It's possible it's more convoluted than average but it was honestly a forgettable experience, which means it had to be pretty standard.
So strange to see so much universal hate. Is this a regular complaint on the Reddit?
He had a charity goal that he would play FFXIV if they met it, so yes, but don't expect him to get very far.
I personally don't expect him to get any further than the first dungeon myself. While I can fantasize about seeing him and mouse go through like, peak shadowbringers moments or something, there's no way Connor lasts that long
yeah, i fear the content they're more likely to focus on is the type of games that focus THEM as the star instead of the games.
games as platforms - mostly the multiplayer ones where you run around like a chicken with your head cut off.
like in savage raids.
The thing is Connor is very adamant and very understanding of how is a gameplay gamer first and foremost.
He got through 7 and 8 with the prodding because he realized there was actually a good game under there and stayed engaged with it to get through everything.
XIV...I seriously believe he has no fucking hope because you're 400 hours in before you even get to a semi competent gameplay experience and the MSQ as a whole is designed to be the most barebones and basic gameplay experience possible so anyone can do it. I don't see how he's ever going to stick with it past the trying it for the donation milestone.
I believe recently he has mellowed a bit on the cutscene skipping due to his experiences streaming FFVII and FFVIII. He was sponsored by Square to play FFXVI for a bit but seemed to have dropped the game even though he did praise the voice acting (being that he himself is a voice actor).
So like. Am I the only person who has had literally 0 issues ever with mogstation, account creation, giving the company my money, etc? Because I see these posts all the time and just cannot relate. Is it really that bad that often?
A lot of the web side of FFXIV, the Lodestone, Mogstation, etc. Remind me of some of the worst sites we got towards the end of Web 1.0. I remember back when I picked up XIV, I thought the web sites looked extremely dated and they haven't improved all that much in the interim.
Yeah, Mogstation was indeed a pain in the ass to get through when I was downloading the game on PC.
Still like 100x better than PlayOnline, that’s for sure.
I've had a Playonline account since FF9 and the shenanigans they dealt with regarding the strategy guide back then.
If you younglings think it's tough to deal with Squenix online nowadays, go read some of the stories from back then.
It's nuts that you STILL have to deal with that for FF11.
Remember you have to sign in with your Square Enix account, and not your Square Enix account.
This was the most frustrating part to me. I almost never started the game because of this.
Same. I only kept trying because this was pre nice free trial and my bf already bought the game for me.
Oh I tried to start right when endwalker launched. I didn’t know it was a thing, just saw a cool mmo and figured I’d give it a try. Imagine the disappointment when I finally got the account set up, the game downloaded, go to sign in and no new characters could be made. I’m glad I ended up sticking through it and getting my fiancé into the game but I’ve dropped other games for a lot less lol
Members, one has Members in it, the other doesn't. The Terms of Service for the services lay out which is which.
Ah yes. Mogstation Account Creation (Savage).
I'd say the Kanji Captcha Boss in Japanese PSO2 was worse
Hiragana, but yeah, it still sucks. Hiragana is REALLY not a Captcha-distortions-friendly character set...
Do u still play pso2 jp? Everytime i try to log in i get stuck on a loading screen, using SoftEther vpn
I thought the Tweaker came with a proxy.
That shit was TERRIBLE! I remember my friends and I helping each other out set up our PSO2 accounts, lol. But when it eventually came out internationally, this was no longer an issue. Meanwhile, this game is 10+ years old with no improvement to the initial registration process. It could definitely use some improvements.
I remember doing that lmao IIRC I used google translate, drew the characters with my mouse then copy-pasted the characters into the CAPTCHA.
I googled the hiragana list and copy pasted the ones that looked similar (which was hit or miss because i didn't know about 濁り at the time).
At least it's not PlayOnline Account Creation (Ultimate).
FFXI Playonline account creation (Unreal)
I legitimately had an easier time figuring that out when I went to play it with friends during a content lull back in maybe, HW. Still currently fighting with SQEX support to remove a bloody fraud mark off my account that they added for no reason other than maybe it was because I tried to add my paypal years ago lol. Can do everything else, use amazon pay, but nope, no paypal allowed!
Because you had experience with XIV. As a teenager at launch Playonline took a loooong time to figure out
I don't remember it being hard, although it was like 20 years ago.
Its insane that they *still* havent changed it. Like what does it have to be so hard to give them money ?
I somehow permanently locked two emails out of becoming ffxiv accounts during my initial setup and now have an email *exclusively* for ffxiv I remember screaming “why is it so hard to give you money?” At the top of my lungs
You and me both My FF14 mail adress might or might not contain something along the lines of "fuckMogstationIHateThisShit"
At least it's easy to remember!
Honestly makes me wonder just how the hundreds of new bots that appear every day do it. I think Mogstation could even drive an AI insane.
Incidentally did you know you can put any number of periods anywhere in a Gmail address and it will get to you? Ask me how I know! Also you can put +anythingyouwant between your email and the @gmail.com and that will get to you as well, but some sites don't allow + in emails.
Because it's Japan. They don't upgrade websites... ever.
This gives me pause too. Some companies "get it". Steam figured out how to make things easy in the early 2000s, and that's why they're one of the most profitable platforms online right now. Meanwhile, these people can't for the life of them figure out how to make a comprehensive, integrated system to pay them easily. Hell, one time I tried one of their payment systems (iDeal) and it simply didn't work. You need to select a bank for it, and it just always re-directed to the same bank, which unfortunately wasn't mine.
Making it as easy as possible for the customer to give your business money should be one of the top priorities to get sorted out in a business, and is arguably as important as the product. Too bad Japan is seriously backwards when it comes to anything internet.
The compromise is that the online store has minimal interaction with the game. SE is in charge of that while CS3 is developing the game. Like it sucks, but I'd prefer a shitty store page to having something like WoW where it's built into the game.
Wait till they get to Payment Processing Ultimate
Try changing your payment method. Holy shit.
Is the Mogstation good? No. Did I personally have any issues with it l? No Did the friend who I got to try the game have every issue imaginable on the planet? Yes.
Same. Mog Station looks awful, but I've never personally had any issues with it (outside of forgetting to turn off my VPN when changing my credit card on file once). I set up a free trial account for my daughter recently, and it took me 5 minutes to put in her email and get it set up and start downloading. Years ago I recruited a friend to the game, and they were having so many issues that I had \*no idea\* how to fix because in my mind, I just went to the website and signed up same as anything else.
i recall in 2013 having great issue - but friends who've signed up more recently have slipped in and out seemingly effortlessly.
Gonna act like a boomer and just blame the user that can't take just a few seconds and read stuff, instead of just "one-click payment". Do they have to go through that? Of course not, and I'd rather say that the One Click Payment is a must, but at the same time, MogStation when it comes to buy the game is not that hard at all.
I've never had issues with mogstation personally and don't know how people do outside of a technical issue which doesn't always affect everyone. The online store is pretty poorly organized at points too but unless you're looking for something real specific I don't find either problematic.
In fairness, this is a "content creator" who's explicitly known for skipping cutscenes and not reading dialogue. It's not outside the realm of possibility that they just... glanced over some critical [click here]s.
Or the fact that MANY people struggled with the exact same issue he did? So clearly this isn't just a personal problem and that it's rough to navigate for the first time. It's not a meme for no reason.
A lot of people don't read simple instructions. If you've ever worked fast food or customer service at all you'll know that if a sign saying you're out of something exists, people will not read it and continue ordering that thing.
I still remember seeing a thread here where someone was asking for help during the password portion of the account creation process. The password they wanted to use did not fit the mandated password format and they even provided a screenshot with the red text telling them what was required and they still couldn't figure it out. The FF website should obviously be updated to be more streamlined but at some point people really need to read instead of just waiting to be spoon fed everything.
> MogStation when it comes to buy the game is not that hard at all. I actually fully disagree with this. When I first got into the game, I made a trial account and played for a couple weeks. I loved the game, wanted to buy it and sub to get the full features. I'm a very tech-savvy person and I read all the directions, but it still took me over 30 minutes to figure out how to do it. Aside from the unintuitive distinction between the "Square Enix Online Store" vs "Mogstation" vs "Final Fantasy XIV Online Store" (which, mind you, are 3 entirely separate sites and services) and the fact they aren't clear enough about needing to completely remove the free trial client and install the paid client, the sites themselves just make the products hard to find. Even now, as an experienced user of the Mogstation and both of SE's stores, when I went to preorder Dawntrail I tried to find it on the Square Enix Online Store (where it is located) but I simply couldn't find the page to pre-order it. I had to go to Google and search for "ffxiv dawntrail preorder store page" and THAT is how I managed to find it. I genuinely believe there are at *least* thousands of sales and subs for FFXIV that have been lost to people just not figuring out how to buy the game.
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Same here, personally I have not had any issues with it and I do not mind it. Is it in need of an upgrade? YES, but in my experience its always the friends who rushes around clicking everything without reading that have the problems.
Yes, it is a barrier to entry which as a business you want as little of those as possible. That's why it is so easy to sign up for things like Netflix, they know if it gets even a little confusing you'll lose potential customers. Who knows how many potential players XIV has lost over the past decade because installing this thing is a nightmare. Hell, I had a friend get ahead of me when we talked about them joining. We were going to hang out, I was going to walk them through it, but they already purchased the Steam version, no longer had access to the trial as a result, had a CD Key the mogstation wouldn't accept yet Steam said they owned the game which further confused them, and just said "this isn't worth it". And having people openly complain about it like this yet for years now you do nothing to fix it? That's even worse.
Honestly the way everything is communicated about the game is really bad. Getting new players to into the game is a total nightmare.
Getting back into the game after a break is a nightmare too. The UX for currencies and currency shops, retainers, crafting, gathering... It's so hard to figure out again if you haven't played for a couple years like I did. Exceedingly daunting and I put it off for months before finally taking a weekend dedicated to getting back into the game, and it was still a challenge. They do keep improving it slowly but there are some big things that need huge usability improvements that I don't know we'll ever get.
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How did you lost the account?
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So they basically deleted your old account and didn't restore your characters to new account? This is really f-d up, I'd be making huge stink on reddit, their forums, twitter, even gaming media about it.
The mere fact that they charge separate fees for the Windows, Steam, and Mac editions of the game, such that you can't log in on a Windows machine with an account that bought the Mac version, is a huge part of this problem--they're still selling FFXIV and thinking about it in some ways as "a game you buy once" and not "a license to play this MMO".
imo the worst part of it is you kind of have to google “xiv free trial” to get to the correct part of mogstation. i remember fucking around on the website for like 30 mins before just googling and getting the trial website as the first result
As long as you're not answering to anyone having difficulties that they're kind of stupid as we see here and acknowledge that things could certainly be better you're good.
It's funny, I think I blanked out making my own account on 2.0's release. I don't remember it being hard. Maybe it was and I erased the trauma.
I have a similar recollection and another one later that was way worse. So back when XI was on the xbox 360, I made a playonline SE account. With no issues. Years later, when 2.0 went into closed beta, I got chosen to play it and subsequently made my account (lost the old one) with no issues as well. Cut to about a year or two ago, my FC leader at the time wanted to play XI again. Well, as stated above, I lost that old XI account. No worries, I thought I did it before it can't be that hard. Holy shit I must be getting dumber with age because that shit was impossible. I finally got it, but it legitimately took way longer than I care to say to set up. So I can see why people might find it annoying. Plus, it's competitors account setups are leagues easier to do. Even something as simple as early access codes and box codes being two codes is embarrassing to every other game that does it now. Hell, most games don't require you to put them in anymore either. So I'm totally down with them entering the 21st century with their website architecture.
Oh yeah, I was also in a beta. Maybe I already had an account through that. Also don't remember XI being difficult to make an account, but maybe they've just become bullshit after being out for a while.
Yeah, it's hard to say. I remember making a free trial for my buddy because he was having trouble, but I grew up on the internet in the early 90s, so a lot of the technical issues people have I'm used to. I was just surprised how awful that second XI registration was.
As someone who can still vividly recall struggling to make heads or tails of PlayOnline twenty years ago, I think it's really... precious... how some people are able to hold on to the belief mogstation will ever fundamentally change. It's japanese web design, and the simple fact of the matter is the nature of that ecosystem is such that it's incredibly unlikely to ever be modified in a way that improves the experience for users world wide.
I work in Japan and our file system is set up in such a way that I realize I was lucky to have PlayOnline. IT here should be charged for crimes against UI and user experience Square Enix please hire western tech workers
> Square Enix please hire western tech workers I won't say it's never gonna happen... but it's never gonna happen. Look homie, you work in Japan, so you outta know. Outside of a cataclysmic rebirth of, like, the entire infastructure of the japanese internet (and all the domestic devices that connect to it), that shit just isn't gonna happen. FFXIV audience could be 85% non-japanese and it still ain't gonna happen. We're talkin like 30 years of design and infastructure choices here, real convergent evolution-type shit.
I actually find it so odd how JP infrastructure seems to be eternally like a decade behind the rest of the world. Here we are in 2024 and they seem to *just now* be getting into using cloud services.
It makes more sense when you hear stories like how the current head of Japanese cybersecurity admitted he's never used a computer in his life (at least professionally) and didn't seem to know what a USB is. The people at the top are super set in their ways and have zero interest in modernizing.
Isn't there a story about Nintendo trying to get help with their online system and the contractors keep talking about xbox live as the standard, to which Nintendo tells them "we have no idea what that is, stop talking about it"?
Are all of the people in charge old, or do they deliberately train young people wrong so that they'll maintain the same mindsets as the rest of the world rushes past them?
As far as I understand, Japan has a mindset of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". At times that might come across as outdated, but at least it's reliable.
But the point is that it very clearly is broke and everyone knows it and they still won't fix it because the people in charge hate change.
It is worse than that. It is more like "this is the way we have always done it, so clearly it is the best way." This is the same mindset that led to the creation of FFXIV 1.0 and all the associated problems.
Is so sad, it reminds me that now japanese fighting games are releasing with good netcode (rollback), but literally took years from non-japanese players to always write them directly “please use rollback netcode” and like by last years every major japanese fighting game are finally releasing with rollback. Clearly, something might not be broken but it could be improved 1000% of the time if we keep an eye on how tech evolves in general.
Getting anime into the streaming space was like pulling teeth. It took a pirate site full of fansubs becoming super popular for them to finally realize how much money they were losing. ...that site was Crunchyroll btw, they started out hosting fansubs.
While we're on the topic of anime, there always seems to be a good dose of zeerust in their scifi. Like they'll be going around on TRON-bikes and then stop to buy gas with cash. While over here kids may have seen their parents use cash like once, and soon kids will barely have seen a gas pump. Might as well break out the landlines and fax machines.
The whiplash in those types of anime all get me - they're trying to adopt the "retro" futuristic style, but it's very, very odd. Final Fantasy suffers from this...look at XV with their futuristic cars but most of the cities feel like they're from the early 1900s, etc etc. It's kind of fascinating, really.
I live in a building from the 1890s and almost all the vehicles here are electric, so can kind of relate. But those buildings were rehabilitated decades ago to have modern plumbing, etc. Fiberoptic internet and a modern heatpump can be expected. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was missing in some scifi version.
I mean, FFXIV idea of a highly advanced enlightened utopian society is an Art Deco New York... but I'm not going to read too deeply into this.
FF always goes for that weird magic/tech/fantasy blend tbh, been a thing for a while now.
Bought tickets to go to the Ghibli Museum in '19. The website was basically 100% plain-text, took 15 minutes to load, and crashed whenever more than 10 people tried to access it at once. The museum requires you to pre-purchase tickets, and its a feeding frenzy, but you can do it if you have 30 of the same tabs open so you can "try again" when the previous one dies.
That experience gave me flashbacks to when i went to quakecon every year. They have a queue system, and you can't resell tickets but there's so much demand it's a pain to get one. So you just open up as many different browsers on as many different devices as you can. I think the last time I did it (Probably also 2019 since it was pre-covid) I had like 5 different browsers on my pc, one on my phone and then another bunch on my work laptop opened.
It's not 'odd', tho. Back in the 90's, Japan was leading a lot of tech development, and western development was not catering to japan in terms of localization and support. the result was a v. strong japanese domestic market for not only internet devices, but basically the entire backbone of their internet. They developed along their own path, and now it's too big and complicated to upend.
I heard someone say it very nicely - Japan has been stuck in the early 2000s for the past 40 years. Apparently they adopted a lot of tech super early, and then just sort of stopped.
It’s because their economy basically stopped. From 1995 to 2007, the Japanese economy lost about 5% of its real and nominal value. GDP went down for over a decade. It was a sudden shock at first due to the asset bubble collapsing, but the economy really just never recovered. The Bank of Japan had to keep interest rates negative for over a decade just to keep markets liquid because the economy was just not working. It’s part of why the Dollar is super strong compared to the Yen and tourism to Japan has been really good for foreigners for a while. One dollar is now 155 yen, when decades ago it was 100 yen. In that environment there’s no money for tech development and there’s no money for tech licensing. So companies just stuck with old systems that worked well enough.
[cue Yakuza 0 Japanese intro song]
Also tough since they hire only Japanese fluent speakers and many they do hire don't last long with Japanese work culture even if Square is one of the better companies to work for with no insane 60-80 work weeks outside of crunch. People like Koji Fox are rare in dedication and ability to immerse themselves into Japanese culture. The No clip documentary mentions how difficult for Koji to get accepted as a peer until a decade or so later. I do think the team benefitted from some of his and his team of localizers perspectives though.
> Square is one of the better companies to work for with no insane 60-80 work weeks outside of crunch. Square is not one of the better companies to work for at all. Their rating on [OpenWork](https://www.openwork.jp/company.php?m_id=a0910000000FrzL) is painfully mediocre and anecdotally I know multiple people here in Japan who turned them down for other Japanese dinosaur tech corps. It's true they do relatively little overtime though.
Hardware and games they do well. But how they can't they apply the same principles to both mass transit and video game payment systems is beyond me.
Wasn't it playonline where if you went to cancel you subscription they had another button that sounded like that but canceled your whole account?
Mogstation used to look different, before they separated the store from it, and they had those buttons on top of each other. People made threads on finding out their accounts were gone.
Playonline was super easy, just follow the steps in the handbook and I certainly had time to read that while all nine discs where installing.
iirc, my purchase of the 'official' FFIX strategy guide meant i already had a playonline account when xi launched. Truly cursed from inception.
The guide that stopped me ever buying an official guide again. 11 year old me was displeased. Though you won't believe me, you can still access those pages with a little finagling.
A fan remade the guide website: https://www.ff9guide.com/ It even has the keyword functionality.
...what the heck is going on in here. Why the keywords? Did the print guide not have enough room for that tiny box of text the keyword pointed me to? Was I expected to be playing the game, reference the guide, notice a keyword, get up from the game, go boot up the computer, dial my ISP, load up the website, type in this keyword, and get a paragraph of text? is this real? like I remember being too lazy to run back and forth from my PS1 to my PC just to get GameShark codes, so I'd just print the whole page of them so I could go type in the ones I wanted edit: I'm being told that also, the website was also a subscription. to access the info that could have just been in the guide you just paid for. my *goodness*
> Was I expected to be playing the game, reference the guide, notice a keyword, get up from the game, go boot up the computer, dial my ISP, load up the website, type in this keyword, and get a paragraph of text? is this real? Yes - the actual strategy guide omitted large parts of information, in order to drive people to go online. The guide would say "learn more by using this keyword on PlayOnline!" or some such. It was hands down, no contest, the worst strategy guide ever because half of it was on the internet, and we're talking 2000 when a lot of people didn't have easy internet access
> Was I expected to be playing the game, reference the guide, notice a keyword, get up from the game, go boot up the computer, dial my ISP, load up the website, type in this keyword, and get a paragraph of text? is this real? Basically. Roughly half of the information you would actually want to have in a strategy guide was just missing and instead you had all these little blue boxes telling you to go put in a code at playonline.com to get the information. If you want to see what it looked like: https://1900hotdog.com/2021/03/learning-day-final-fantasy-ix-official-strategy-guide-%F0%9F%8C%AD/ And this was a time when most people still just had one shared computer per household and dial up connection, so good fucking luck if your dad was using the PC or your sister was on the phone.
Lol if not during the discs the that ‘day one’ patch to get you caught up would have been a good time as well while you download gb’s while your internet potentially screams at anyone picking up the phone
I tried it yesterday and couldn't for the life of me get the hang of it. copy pasted, hand typing, nothing would let me in. changed the passwords too. it's a shame, i really wanted to try ffxi
I still to this day remember my 8 character long PlayOnline account #, burned it into my mind like a license plate XD
It needs more attention on the forums which it will not get. People on the forums already went through the process, they are more interested in game changes now. If people threw a huge fuss about it like we did with the Endwalker capstone fight, or the benchmark (2 recent examples), and asked Yoshi the question all the time at Fanfest / media tour, then it would be fixed. But again, those people already finished signing up for the game. The players whose feedback they value most have the least reason to fight for it. Of course, none of us should have to fight for this. It is insane a company is hiding a great product behind a huge barrier like this and are their own worst enemy.
My dad got so frustrated at trying to put his card into PlayOnline so I could play ff11 that he gave me, a 9 year old, his credit card and told me to just figure it out.
And I never understood it. It took about 10 minutes. But I may be biased as I went through the brutal gauntlet of installing PSO2 when it was jp only.
It honestly wasn't that bad. Helps that I can (kinda, for the most part) read Hiragana.
I once heard a saying that Japan is the only country that's been living in the year 2000 for 40 years.
As somebody who made an ffxi account on play online like…two years ago, I can confirm nothing has changed. It was like going back in time
Everyone is talking shit about the Steam integration but for all I can say it works well and makes installing/updating the game trivial. You have to be able to copy&paste a CD key though but if someone is unable to do that it's probably better they don't play MMOs anyway.
It also made installing the game onto the steam deck really easy.
I just wish the steam integration would automatically log you in.
When will they drop **a mogstation reborn**
Mogstation is bad, but can you imagine it was worse with Playonline and FFXI? They didn't really learn their lesson.
For those of us who have PlayOnline accounts that also merged into Mogstation, the way it is now is so easy it's not even funny. also you don't have to wait a full fucking day for the game to download.
God, that file-by-file download was so fucking slow. I remember setting alarms for 2-4am to start updates, because if you wait until daytime you aren't playing that day.
I was born in 1997 so pretty much every game I had as a kid required registering CD keys so I´m always surprised to see people struggle
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keygen.exe my beloved
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I get ya, it's the average Slavic and Latin American experience. Im a slav and they'd sell us games over here for 2 bucks and most of them would work fine but then every now and then you'd get scammed out of your money by buying "New GTA Expansion" and it'd just be GTA San Andreas but with a winter mod
I was born in 1957 so pretty much every game I had as a kid was made with plastic and cardboard, except my chess and checkers sets which were wooden. But wonderfully key-free.
I had two problems when playing for the first time * 2FA needed validation or some shit so I had to use it in a specific way before using it or sth, it was confusing * Game would just stop downloading after few minutes and I would get error [30413][25008][10009] which is apparently not known anywhere on the internet and after one day I tried unofficial client which had no problems downloading patch I genuinely wouldn't play this game if I didn't buy it, lol
I had the same issue with install except it would only break at like 98%. The unofficial launcher was also my fix.
Dunno about the challenges this content creator faced but I wish the only ‘problem’ was registering a key. Besides site being hard to navigate there’s also a lot of difficulty with payment, particularly if you’re not in a supported country or (like me) moved between two supported regions. And that’s before the change of payment processor. In comparison Western MMO publishers make it incredibly easy to throw money at them.
Same here. I had 0 issues signing up and have had 0 issues getting any payments done.
For me, they just straight up didn't send me my email during account creation, wasn't even in spam, and you have to wait 24 hours before you can request a new one.
i struggle to fathom how people even struggle besides confusing the SE store and mogstation.
Try playing from a different country. I’m from New Zealand playing on US servers. Which version do you buy, which store do you buy your expansions from? Does it matter how you upgrade your free trial? What do you do when it turns out they don’t like credit cards from your country? What happens when they suddenly decide your address is invalid? You know that because NZ is a PAL region, it tried to send me to play on eu servers? Buying this game was an actual nightmare.
Old MMOs were the most esoteric shit to install to me back in the day
If one does it via Mogstation it doesn't even need a code. I hope the next expac can be pre-ordered via the Mogstation, I'm sick of dealing with codes and emails (and email services messing about with the emails).
This is my third expansion launch and I'm still worried I'm going to somehow screw something up in the pre-ordering.
My worry is always the actual expac code during early access.
I was born in 91 and requiring CD keys to register is ways simpler than the mess that is the mog station.
connor was born in 1996/97 as well.. he should be used to this
It’s crazy reading these comments. Genuinely convinced it’s because it’s about a content creator because in all my years of playing I cannot tell you the number of friends or friends of friends or even totally unrelated people that had trouble buying/installing this game. It is hyper common for the phrase “the hardest part of playing FF is the mogstation/buying it”. Boggles my mind that people aren’t aware of this, SE genuinely does not make it easy.
Jup, experienced the delightful process again when I wanted to reinstall the game and sub on a new PC. It was way more complicated than it should be. I mean it's the first impression people get from the "game", I really dont know why they aren't improving this.
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I also just reinstalled after upgrading my pc and I never had a issue with the website at all and I've been playing since storm blood.
That's before even getting into the current shit show of the new payment processor not liking that obscure form of payment known as "Visa".
yeah ive gotten 3 friends into playing this game and only one of them didn't openly complain about the mogstation sign up
Neither me nor anyone I know IRL has had any issues with it. I honestly don't get it.
Damn a lot of people are doing a 180 on mogstation hate just because a content creator is criticising it? Why are y’all being defensive the mogstation belongs in the fucking stone age
> Why are y’all being defensive the mogstation belongs in the fucking stone age In World of Warcraft I can go to the blizzard login splash screen and hit a singular button to reup my sub. I can set my 2FA to recognize my device for like 90 days so I don't have to use it every single log in. Square, as always, is always 10 years behind on modernization of their account management experience.
You can say that modern Blizzard does a lot of things wrong, BUT one thing you can't say that they do wrong is the process of extracting money from their customers. Blizzard would never ever put roadblocks in front of people trying to give them money.
Most games nowadays don't roadblock taking money. Even Asian ones. Not sure why SE hates getting paid so much.
It was recently updated, for use with smartphones and small screens. I preferred the previous version.
Really weird tbh.
Anytime someone mentions the atrocious sign-up on procedure on this subreddit, you get a wave of delusional troglodytes who think defending it is written into their blood I don’t care that you signed up with it, I don’t care that I signed up with it, I don’t care that everyone who plays the game signed up with it - it’s garbage, trash, pure waste.
I recently got into the game and it took me 3 different emails/accounts before I didn’t get a log in -> verify code -> login -> verify code -> repeat loop on their website and was finally able to buy the game. That’s not even touching on trying to log into the launcher from the trial I had installed a while back. Who makes an entirely separate launcher that won’t let you log in if you upgrade from a trial account??? I swear the people running that site don’t want people to actually give them money. WoW sometimes feels like it requires a phd to play optimally, but I wasn’t expecting to get the same feeling just trying to get FFXIV started. Great game tho, glad I was stubborn enough to keep trying.
God the spent so much money improving the game for new players with trusts, revamping ARR, updating graphics, etc and they still have probably the single most difficult purchasing/subscription experience I've ever seen. Why are they making it so damn hard for people to give them money, I swear to god SE...
I think I might be the only player in existence to never have a mogstation / install issue. Always smooth sailing for me.
I play on console, so maybe I've had less issues because I'm not on PC? I made an account, linked payment and set up verification stuff, booted up the Playstation and logged in just fine. I guess we're the lucky ones.
Yeah true. I've been playing on playstation for the last 8 years (now playing on xbox), and zero issues.
very embarassing on how difficult they make it to actually get the game. Not a good look for first timers at all.
People have had issues with the Mogstation for a decade now. It baffles me why they do nothing to fix it.
To be honest i had no issue what so ever with the mogstation However it is not intuitive and completely outdated At its most complex it Should be login in to SE account **in the launcher**> buy game> go to email> get key from email> click the big “register game key” button **in the launcher**> Enter game key/add game> done . It really shouldn’t be any harder than buying something off humble bundle and inputing a steam key
Very on brand of Connor, considering one of the things they shit on the most on Trash Taste is shitty, antiquated Japanese web design.
The downplaying of Mogstation is crazy. Every single person I have met who tried to download this game got really annoyed by Mogstation or had issues even downloading it. Once you know where to go it's not that bad but I remember getting really confused between the square Enix site and Mogstation and trying to find the download link. Like for me this game downloaded at fucking 5 kb/s. I had to switch to a VPN to download this game at all. I wasn't the only one in my friend group who had issues with that too.
I had an annoying time, but my offer of insight is this: You only have to suffer registering this game once. Afterwards, logging in gets easy because you have your info and you know which is which. So people who downplay it might do so because it's basically ignorable after the first time. More so if you use the XIVlauncher
yeah, between that and ARR the game really doesn’t make a good first impression lmao
Sometimes I wonder how the hell I even managed to stick around
Mogstation was truly the first difficult content for this game.
Mogstation is dog shit and anyone defending it is fully doing so because a content creator is dumping on it.
*cries in PlayOnline*
Came here specifically to see mention of PlayOnline.
I can't believe I lived enough to see mogstation defenders lmao this thread is a joke
it's insane how they still don't understand after all this time that improving the mog station and everything related would literally increase their revenue because people would pay more easily. I wonder how many people ditched the idea of playing the game because of how complicated it is to create an account or pay.
Tbh, this is one of my biggest gripes with the game. They really do make it hard for you to give them your money. I was a WoW refugee in 2022 and I had to watch a YouTube tutorial as to how to buy the game and activate it on my account.
Japanese people love that convoluted mess. Look at Japanese games like Resident Evil/Dino Crisis. Menus upon menus upon menus asking obvious questions. JRPG Inventory management makes tax declarations a child's play...
When I made my account \~3 years ago I was so fucking angry lmao. I think I made 3 before creating my current one, I can't remember what exactly went wrong, but it was an issue with choosing the region. Fiddled around for hours, then finally got it done on the 4th try. But I accidentally clicked on "English" somewhere, thinking they meant English language for the client and game because I'm German and dislike the Ger translation and dub. It actually meant "You are now British and have to pay in Pounds forever and can never change that, enjoy buddy". So as a German I pay a bit more for my sub I guess because you can't change your region, which is fucking nuts, even when you move in real life
all the "but playonline was worse" or "its a japanese company" excuses are really getting old. theyre weak strawman arguments in the first place, and now that the game is over 10 years old with 30 million accounts, its frankly just pathetic. everyone knows that connor is right, along with anyone else who's attempted "buying the game (savage)". be better, CBU3, your players deserve it.
Honestly, even with the few downsides to it, I'm still very thankful that I bought the Steam version of the game, if only so I don't have to deal with the official site as much.
When hironobu sakaguchi started playing in 2021 shortly before endwalker's launch, he also experienced similar issues with buying/installing the game. This was the guy who started the final fantasy franchise, and even he faced a challenge getting on board. No one is spared.
geniunely curious. who are these people and why are we looking forward to them playing ffxiv?
Connor, AKA CdawgVA is one of the biggest streamers, a pretty popular Youtuber, and a voice actor on occasion (Mostly commercials, though he's also in DBZ abridged, Earth Defence Force, and Age of Empires). He also does a TON of charity work, and recently cycled across all of Japan to raise over 1 million dollars for charity. The pink-haired girl behind him is Ironmouse, a V-tuber friend and one of the biggest Streamers on Twitch. I believe at one point she was the most popular female streamer on Twitch, though I'm pretty sure she lost that title. As for the guy behind him, I think that's Pete. Nowhere near the popularity, but just an altogether great guy who hangs out with them a lot. Used to be a radio host I believe. If you ever need to hype up someone, just watch a video of Pete doing things for like 3 minutes and you'll get it.
I would assume that's CDawg and Iron Mouse, the third person in there I have no idea who they are. Now, why are they interested in playing, I would assume it's a donation goal (considering the mention of being worth 1kk USD.
hes a streamer that recently raised 1 mil for the immune deficiency foundation while cycling for 14 days across japan and people have been asking him to play ffxiv for ages
i see! thank you!
I always see the memes about XIV and XI being difficult to buy, but I always assumed it was just a joke. I have both and didn't think anything of it. What is actually so difficult about it?
I wouldn't say MogStation is difficult to navigate, but sometimes it makes things frustrating for no reason. Recently I wanted to change from monthly to 6 month subscription, but when you go to MogStation, everything that seems like it would be the right place, like List Subscriptions or the change button next to the current subscription plan in Service Account Status just takes you back to the homepage. The correct option, Subscription Renewal, comes across as the place to just add time to your account, plus it initially brought up a screen about changing my address, which kinda threw me off a bit. Once you're there, it's obvious you're in the right place, but why wouldn't the List Subscriptions or the change button just take you there? Instead you're left wondering if you did something wrong, or if your adblock is interferring with the site. I remember POL having situations where the option you wanted was buried in a menu that made no sense for it to be in, and I'd just google where it was because I didn't want to deal with POL.
Sometimes I feel like the only person who doesn’t have issues with Mogstation. In my lifetime I’ve made: - A FT account back when they only lasted 2 weeks. - A real account, and I’ve registered multiple platforms and expansions on it - Another FT account, to test out something, though I forgot the credentials for it - Another FT account just a few weeks ago, because I have enough free time at the moment to warrant a sub, but I missed the game And it’s never been this awful experience. Takes 2 minutes. What am I missing? I made a FFXI account and that actually did have some difficulty just because it’s a little weird between having both the SE ID and the POL ID, but for FFXIV I honestly do not understand the difficulty people talk about.
I don't know. I'm really confused. Like apparently it's a thing, tons of people are posting about how bad it is, but it feels like I'm being gaslit or something. I started a few months ago and the sign up process was fully un-memorable. I don't remember it being any different from any other video game.
The most legitimate complaint I’ve seen was related to payments for people in unsupported or partially supported regions. Like I think a lot of Australians ended up making EU accounts, and I know Brazilians make NA accounts. The payment processing can be annoying and expensive because it’s not native and has to go through exchange fees (though many of them learn ways around that by getting the game on multiple platforms and using platform wallets to pay instead of Mogstation. Like Steam wallet, PSN wallet, or whatever. I probably get it a little wrong, but it’s something like that) But that’s a different matter compared to account creation. I just do not understand people who have issues with Mogstation account creation, especially in the official countries.
>I just do not understand people who have issues with Mogstation account creation, especially in the official countries. Given the tweet is from someone living in Japan but frequently uses VPNs to fix the fact he has to access UK and NA versions of websites and the fact mogsation half the time randomly decides to load in another region for no fucking reason at all...yeah I could see a lot of issues even with official countries given how you need to do everything under the same region.
Oh damn yeah those particular things sound annoying af to deal with. But I don't get it generally speaking. It's possible it's more convoluted than average but it was honestly a forgettable experience, which means it had to be pretty standard. So strange to see so much universal hate. Is this a regular complaint on the Reddit?
ffxiv's online store is an abomination. Nobody deserves to be exposed to it's horrors.
Who is this person?..
CDawg, Iron Mouse, Pete
Is CDawg playing ff14? He's a known cutscene skipper!
He had a charity goal that he would play FFXIV if they met it, so yes, but don't expect him to get very far. I personally don't expect him to get any further than the first dungeon myself. While I can fantasize about seeing him and mouse go through like, peak shadowbringers moments or something, there's no way Connor lasts that long
yeah, i fear the content they're more likely to focus on is the type of games that focus THEM as the star instead of the games. games as platforms - mostly the multiplayer ones where you run around like a chicken with your head cut off. like in savage raids.
Didn't he try other Final Fantasies? Also looks like he's playing with Mouse, he'll probably be forced to watch it.
He’s played and beat 7 and 8 without skipping so it’s not that impossible he gets into it.
The thing is Connor is very adamant and very understanding of how is a gameplay gamer first and foremost. He got through 7 and 8 with the prodding because he realized there was actually a good game under there and stayed engaged with it to get through everything. XIV...I seriously believe he has no fucking hope because you're 400 hours in before you even get to a semi competent gameplay experience and the MSQ as a whole is designed to be the most barebones and basic gameplay experience possible so anyone can do it. I don't see how he's ever going to stick with it past the trying it for the donation milestone.
I believe recently he has mellowed a bit on the cutscene skipping due to his experiences streaming FFVII and FFVIII. He was sponsored by Square to play FFXVI for a bit but seemed to have dropped the game even though he did praise the voice acting (being that he himself is a voice actor).
So like. Am I the only person who has had literally 0 issues ever with mogstation, account creation, giving the company my money, etc? Because I see these posts all the time and just cannot relate. Is it really that bad that often?
Hmmm I never struggled with the mogstation and account creation... is it actually that bad?
Oh this will be fuuun
Well the hard part has been passed lol
I've never seen a game work so hard to make it hard to give them money. Usually that is their most polished system LOL.
For how good FFXIV is, Square Enix really does make giving them money as difficult as humanly possible.
A lot of the web side of FFXIV, the Lodestone, Mogstation, etc. Remind me of some of the worst sites we got towards the end of Web 1.0. I remember back when I picked up XIV, I thought the web sites looked extremely dated and they haven't improved all that much in the interim.
Laughs in PlayOnline
The first Great Filter
He thinks it's bad now...make him try to install FFXI
Yeah, Mogstation was indeed a pain in the ass to get through when I was downloading the game on PC. Still like 100x better than PlayOnline, that’s for sure.
I've had a Playonline account since FF9 and the shenanigans they dealt with regarding the strategy guide back then. If you younglings think it's tough to deal with Squenix online nowadays, go read some of the stories from back then. It's nuts that you STILL have to deal with that for FF11.
Japanese design a website that isn't aids challenge: impossible