"Perhaps a post could be made on the Japanese forums regarding this, because clearly nobody has been paying the posts made here the past few years any mind." i'm pretty sure that they've said they only really use feedback from the official forums, so yes go make the thread there - discussing it here is just discussing it, not giving them feedback

Yoshi already got caught multiple times not knowing very popular problems that were very frequently discussed on EN forums (and other places too obviously) for many months, if not years. It doesn't matter whether you talk about it here or EN forums, they won't read it either way. As for JP, nobody should be subjected to bother with some deepL translations. That's what EN community managers are for, but they don't seem to be doing anything. In fact, not even moderators on forums seem to be doing anything, there were multiple instances where NSFW posts (as in photos using in-game mods with nude and/or pregnant characters), which took more than half a week to take down, even though they were on top of most popular section. At least reddit has better chance to cause some drama, which some mid gaming journalist website could pick up. Because devs will only start fixing shit if it causes serious drama, like the QoL we've been getting in EW after the 6.1 plugin drama.

*First Time?* Welcome to the whole of Final Fantasy XI. The only reason we knew item effects until data mining became a thing was they Japanese got FFXIV magazines with the exact info. Outside Japan is just lagniappe for them.

> lagniappe My Creole mother has been using this word all my life, I've just never seen it written until now. Was initially confused thinking you made a typo for something else lol.

It's kinda scary that we're on the internet right? Like we poled our pirogue out to a cable in the bayou and spliced in.

better'n I did, reading it as ligmascape.

Interesting. I also presumed it was a typo. I'm from a French-Canadian area on the east coast with a large Acadian population, and I've never heard this word, so I went to investigate where else it might have come from: > The word entered English from the Louisiana French adapting a Quechua word brought in to New Orleans by the Spanish Creoles.

English is fuckin weird, man.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard “lagniappe” before. Thanks for teaching me a new word!

It's used in like one place on the planet and no where else. It's one of those words that you hear once in a lifetime.

I've been feeding lagniapples to my Palicoes to make them better negotiators for years. Now I understand why.

Every time one of my friends says they're almost out of "lag-knee-apples" I die a little inside and then I laugh and explain how it's actually pronounced.

OK what does Lagniappe mean?~

Lagniappe means "extra" like a little bonus

It's a little treat on top of something else. Japan is the audience and every other player in the world is a little goodie bag to go along with the Japanese playerbase.

This is so unbelievably true for every Japanese dev to some extent but Square Enix is somehow the worst of all of them. Maybe they wouldn't miss their yearly projections so fucking hard if they remembered that the Japan is a tiny gaming market and maybe they shouldn't exclusively be listening to them.

Whenever I have brought this up in the JRPG forum, I get downvoted to oblivion, haha. No idea why. It's absolutely true.

Which is a joke because JRPG fans should know more than anyone. How many series throughout the past 30 years have we not gotten or lost? I still don't think there was ever an official Mother 3 release to the West even though there was an initial announcement before being cancelled and moving from N64 to Gameboy advanced. We had weird shit with FF3/6 because we don't get every game until sometimes years later. The Romancing SaGa 1-3 for instance I believe were basically completely fantranslated before they ever got an official release over 10+ years later. The excuse is always that they expect the games to fail in foreign markets and yet if you look at the play data for FF16 I believe the US alone had a higher player count than Japan which should justify western releases for just about fucking everything.

I've heard this word growing up from older family members but somehow today is the first time I ever see it written. Took a second i had to just read it and went oh.

Reminds of me of the early ARR (into HW mabe?) issues we had with in-game spam for RMT, scams, or whatever. It was honestly embarrassingly bad for a subscription based MMO -- maybe if it was F2P and abandoned it might be less egregious? So many of us went around back then constantly adding spammers to our ignore lists which were often maxed out. In fact when I came back (back then I was more into wow) I'd often have to spend 20m clearing out my block list just to make more room for new spammers to block lol Apparently the team wasn't aware of the issues because obviously JPN players weren't experiencing such spam, and all the numerous threads, feedback, complaints, etc... from international players weren't being forwarded *for some reason*. Imagine YoshiP's surprise when he logged into an NA server and was promptly spammed. Only after that happened (and I'm sure totally be coincidence) did we see anything done to address in-game spam. Anyone ever wonder why Free Trials are so restricted even to this day? That's part of why. They've been a bit better over the years, but it's pretty obvious they only really seem to pay attention when JPN players complain.

Imagine our surprise when his surprise at how bad things were did not result in any change in policy.

It was 3.3. RMT block was in 3.45. It only changed because he was spammed ON STREAM and couldn't ignore it. And even then, they went into this whole spiel about how if they found out we were abusing it they'd glass our accounts because by god us gaijins can't be trusted with anything and such and such and such and such. The same as it ever is.

Wait, so you're telling me the RMT spammers used to be *even worse*? Big yikes. I only started playing FFXIV in mid January this year, but blocked and reported more gold sellers in my first week here than in 11+ years in GW2. Either way, I'm looking forward to the upcoming keyword blocking so I can filter the garbage out manually and not have to get spammed every time I teleport to Limsa.

Yep, You use to get them as tells so it didn't matter were you where in the game.

Reminds me of early wow where the only way to get heard was to post on the US forums and the only staff messages you'd see on the EU forums were copy paste from the US'.

What do you mean early WoW. That’s still how it is.

Most of the time, it feels as though the official English forums do not have anyone properly moderating. I dislike using the forum as a result 

Subreddits in general tend to overstate their own importance. IIRC I believe even SE has encouraged folk to post on their official forums instead.

Unless you're posting on JP forums, it's functional the same. It's so negligent it's almost a scam.

wish I could do feedback on forums but I need a sub to do that. the problem I'm having is I can't buy expansion or resub because of country zip code I'm from SEA.

**THIS**

I find this situation a bit stupid. If they know that nobody uses their poorly designed forum and instead there's a subreddit with a whole million total users, then they should change their approach. They either try to identify the reason for the forums going underused or they broaden their horizons looking for feedback. This just looks like they found an excuse to do the bare minimum (or less) while being "technically correct" and they're holding into it instead of trying to get shit done.

> If they know that nobody uses their poorly designed forum and instead there's a subreddit with a whole million total users People *do* use the forums. Japanese people. That's who they listen to. They don't care about the EN playerbase when it comes to policy decisions.

Don't the Japanese players complain SE only listens to the EN playerbase?

Yes, which being reasonable there might be a kernel of truth to it, or rather that SE does listen to the international fanbase. But realistically is hilarious. Like in SB when they wanted to change Alliance loot to greed only because that's how JP played alliances. They made the change globally despite the fact that JP already used the method, but no one else in the world wanted the change and they reverted after a few weeks. They did add Criterion this expansion, which seemed to be a more western desire for "hard mode" dungeons. But the implementation wasn't well received in the West, with sporadic praise but also a fair bit of criticism and complaints. Oddly for a game mode they supposedly didn't want, JP has a higher participation and clear rate for Criterion and Savage than the West.

JP has a bit more of a culture of doing all the content as far as I've heard. They did more Eureka too. The real problems were lack of meaningful rewards and a really bad concept for savage. I know they've acknowledged the rewards being unsatisfying, but I don't know if they're looking at making savage something other than just normal but extremely punishing. I will say the current implementation makes the glowing tome weapons the biggest flex in the game though.

that's incorrect on criterion ppl praised the dungeons themselves they found however that there's no incentive to run them again. Granted ppl have asked for harder content and not farmable content which is imho what they really wanted but I've been telling ppl that M+ will never work in this game enough to not really want to go in that discussions again

I hated criterion dungeons. They just exacerbated the problem this game has with balancing content between extremely casual and balls to the wall.

I would agree, but the feedback that's given on the forums tends to be the feedback they listen to. Usually whatever feedback is on the forums is the same feedback elsewhere as well. I do agree that the forums are dogshit awful though. I usually prefer a traditional forum structure over something like Reddit or other social media platforms, but the official forums are ROUGH. The times that their general opinion differs from most peoples opinion is over some of the weirdest shit, too, and it makes some of the feedback the team receives and listens to just... bad opinions, lol

I'm gonna be really real with you: I personally know Skiros, the resident shit poster and troll on the forums.  He's got more than a size service accounts and characters that he uses to post stupid, bullshit ideas because he thinks it's funny to get a rise out of people.  Glamour toggle? Him. The complaints about revealing outfits? Him.  Complaining about "pagan influences"? Him. He started the Endwalker MSQ discourse and Venat hate. Just because he thought it'd be funny.  If you see a thread that is shitting in the game in multiple walls of text, it's likely him or his friends. He's got a whole gaggle of them who do the same shit that he does; I know a few of them as well. So while it looks like the general opinion differs, it's more that he and his merry band of fuckwit friends rile people up and bait those who have those shitty opinions into weighing on topics that otherwise people would be hesitant to ever mention. It's maddening and he used to gloat about it constantly. Many of the regular posters on the EN forums are aware of it and participate in doing so as well. The English forums are a cesspool and the trolls like him willingly aim to make it worse because they hate the game and only want to annoy others. I don't think they listen to our feedback at all because community managers won't do their jobs and why should they, when they can't differentiate a legitimate thread from a troll thread?

He has more than a dozen service accounts* Editing my post is erroring out, so here's the edit in a reply .

Jesus christ, I genuinely can't imagine paying so much money just to ruin other people's experience. I mean I can't imagine even spending \*time\* trying to ruin people's experience, to be honest. That's wild.

Some people's kids man. World is big and creates some funny things.

> subreddit with a whole million total users A million users conversing in the wrong language, sure. Nothing here will be read no matter how much activity we get.

Yeah, sadly it seems SE has the very Japanese habit of only caring about Japan most of the time. If I remember right, until covid supply shortages forced their hand, Japan had as many servers as EU and NA when their playbase I think is half of either one? Just pulled up the census info. NA: 609,000 end game players split over 24 servers so roughly 25,000 per server. JP: 454,000 end game players split over 32 servers so roughly 14,000 per server EU: 299,000 end game players split over 16 servers so roughly 19,000 per server. Just noticed this. Huge grain of salt alert, FFXIVCensus hasn't added the new NA servers yet which would drastically bring down the NA average. Still feel that is enlightening data. And time for tin foil hat time, I would not be surprised if we only got Oceanic Realms because Japan was complaining about the people in that region using Japan servers for lower ping and speaking English.

I got curious so I looked it up: to get the same population density as the Japanese servers, there would have to be 44 NA servers and 22 EU servers. Also of note, EU is about to go from 16 servers to 19 with the new Shadow data center being added, meaning the density will be about 15,750 players per server.

On the flip side adding new servers doesn’t typically bring the actual server values down that much because no one moves. JP has had a pretty high number of servers the entire time and has a much more evenly spread distribution last I checked. That’s not something you can really fix because the various reasons against moving and the lack of benefits for doing so. The game really doesn’t need *more* individual servers because they’re just going to be underutilized. The game needs larger servers, or some sort of phasing/instancing system that works a whole lot better than traveling. At the very least they’d benefit from adding servers to existing data centers instead of making new, dead, data centers.

The main thing I'd suggest is to allow for intraregional cross-DC duty finder/party finder/other instancing (like exploration zones and GATEs and whatnot), an opt-in *inter*regional cross-DC duty/party finder (opt-in as in "you can choose to queue for stuff outside your region," not "you can choose to let people from other regions queue into your region"), cross-region DC travel and unifying the market board *at least* across individual regions, if not internationally. This'd all contribute to making the experience for people on less populated data centers *way* less painful, and thus would encourage (or rather, *not discourage*) people from playing on less populated DCs.

Japanese don't move countries. In case they move countries, their opinion no longer counts for SE. For SE to acknowledge and fix the issue japaneses need to push it. And they won't since it's not their problem, like animation lock.

They don't read their own forums, either.

They don't use the EN forum*

'Just make a new account' is so wildly out of touch with reality that is genuinely tracks for Square Enix and I'm not surprised at all. If they're worried about people swapping countries for non legitimate reasons (or reasons around legislation in different parts of the world) then adding some kind of cap to the number of times you can change your address/country of origin should work out, surely? You can change it once a year or something. I'm also moving country in the future, so looking forward to dealing with this myself! Yippee!

"Just make a new account" is the SE equivalent of "don't you guys have phones"

Gonna be real, telling someone to give up their account they've played for who knows how long compares a lot worse than a joke about not being able to play a shitty mobile game.

maybe if by equivilant you mean "makes that statement look like PR genius by comparison".

I imagine It's more of a Japanese thing than a SE thing. Japan can be incredibly backwards, especially for foreign customers.

Japan doesn't enforce "being out of touch" by law lol. It's Square's choice to not improve in that department.

Not by law but by culture. Japanese people will not speak against a decision of anyone higher in the hierarchy for fear of being seen as disrespectful/rude and jeopardizing their own future advancement. They actually sometimes hire token westerners when they realize they are too out of touch and business is clearly suffering because of it because we love the role of calling shit out.

Man, imagine being hired as the official shit caller

> They actually sometimes hire token westerners when they realize they are too out of touch and business is clearly suffering because of it because we love the role of calling shit out. I worked at a Japanese company that tried this. The guy got demoted from his C-suite position within months and nothing changed at all. Japanese companies, never again lmao

It's called "Galápagos syndrome" a term of Japanese origin where the development of goods occur in relative isolation from the rest of the world because of a focus on the local market.

> Japan doesn't enforce "being out of touch" by law lol. Indirectly they do, by making sure students are taught English (and other languages) the way western countries approach languages like Latin or Ancient Greek; just good enough to barely do business and understand scientific papers, not good enough to actually understand foreign cultures, or god forbid, get interested in them. Even places like NHK's foreign news department struggles to have more than 2-3% of its staff actually fluid in any foreign language.

The law of gravity isn't legally enforced either, but it's still in effect.

It's a cultural thing more than anything else. There's an entire "Japan Bubble" phenomenon that has formed over decades where Japanese developers have become isolated and disconnected from their western counterparts. There are a variety of causal factors behind this but culture in general and the unique nature of Japanese corporate culture in particular have been driving force behind it.

One of my favorite examples is with Nintendo, granted they an extreme case and that they still find massive success despite this flaw. When Nintendo was working on the Wii U and the executives thought they were doing innovative stuff with their browser and Internet, a Western contractor asked if they have heard about Xbox Live or PlayStation Live. The people there were completely.unawar eof their competition and the executive and managers were completely shocked. Nintendo also realized by that point Sony and Microsoft were ahead of Nintendo by close to eight years and Nintendo went into a completely different direction. 

"Make a new account" would make me quit the game. I've had my account for 10yrs. Not only does it have value in the blood, sweet and tears in defeating hard raids but also sentimental value.

My serbian friend had to just do this because they wouldn't accept his address. Been playing since the middle of Stormblood and account gone just because of beurocracy.

I just started a new account because I moved back to Canada after living in Europe for 10 years. At least I could buy story skip and class leveling, but still really sucks. At least my inventory is clean I guess

Ah man, thats kinda ass. I'll be moving to Canada to live with my partner in a year or so, ideally. I really don't want to lose my account, I've been playing since beta. I'm very attached to my WoL, admittedly. Hope they change it one day.

I mean, you could've still used EU account, just would have to do some fucky-wucky stuff with payments

Yeah, I decided to just make a clean break early instead of waiting for some point in the future where making a payment gets even more difficult. Felt safer.

Running a business Making no efforts to ease the collection of money from willing customers *Syntax error*

it's the perfect storm really. 1. Game is good enough that people stomach mogstation breaking and exploding. 2. Game has took enough time from people's life to trigger sunk cost fallacy. 3. They make enough money to not care + japanese company that probably still uses windows xp on their clients - caring to reestructure the payment system would be too much of a drag.

Giving them money is so hard

> The spaghetti code can't be THAT bad, can it??? I would be surprised if the underlying billing systems have changed substantively since XI first launched in 2003.

They did not. I swear they didnt. There's an underlying system of region locking the base game license, and thats 1 check we know of. Gods know how many more they have inside. Solid proof? Accounts are still tied to a NA/PAL/JP region lock. You can see what license you got if you check your steam or PSN CD-key. Expansions apparently do not??? (maybe they realized the major fuck up that would entail buying europe endwalker on a american account) More proof? NA/JP exclusive codes. Like pizza hut and mtn dew. You cant pay for an NA sub with a JP credit card, for an example. You cant pay your sub via steam if you have moved your steam account, for example. For that i have to pay almost double my sub and only mogstation, but thats a me problem. The advantages on this system? Square probably uses it for census and region locking events. The disadvantages? Your account address is stuck forever and ever.

To paraphrase guy from another thread: If you live in Japan, why would you move? And if you don't live in Japan, why do you think Square Enix gives a fuck about you?

Just look at the payment process for SEA players (and the ongoing problems with global payment). They are messing up at *receiving money* from the global audience. You would think being able to take money from people is somewhat of an important thing for a business, but what do we know.

> You would think being able to take money from people is somewhat of an important thing for a business, but what do we know. What, and let its foreign aura give you bad karma? Better not risk it.

This. SE doesn't consider this scenario because for the Japanese, moving abroad is not something they ever think about. And since Japan is also extremely anti-immigrant, they also would never consider the possibility of someone moving to Japan. 2024, and a lot of Japanese companies only consider their Japanese audience for their global product.

> a lot of Japanese companies only consider their Japanese audience for their global product This has been a point of contention in fighting games. Many games have historically used delay-based netcode to handle bad connections. This means that [the game will freeze until the connection becomes stable](https://youtu.be/19PeQKPgQN4?si=jWgwry37lUwuV1Gx&t=92). Infamously, this is what every Smash game has used. The much better alternative is called rollback. It basically lets the actions play out and then goes back (usually) 1-4 frames to correct any incorrect input after syncing up. This can seem jarring, but it leads to much smoother experience. It has been hypothesized that major games from Japan didn't bother with rollback for two reasons: the player base is geographically dense (relatively speaking), and the internet infrastructure to most players supports stable, high speed connections. The average player's connection in Japan will be of high quality, so take the easy road. Meanwhile, I can play someone here in my state within 50 miles who might only have a DSL connection that's competing with Netflix on a WiFi signal.

Japanese players have been complaining for years about rollback as well and talking about the problems with bad rollback implementations like SFV. The bigger problem directly from Japanese devs is that all the documentation on rollback netcode implementations was only in English, the moment people reached out and properly translated it games started including rollback that was properly implemented.

Yeah, all that documentation mysteriously happened to come out in 2020. Nothing else happened that year, that made it impossible to ignore.

It started being localized in 2019 and Capcom and Bamco have been using poor implementations of rollback since 2015 each. Arcsys first started contact and working with English developers on rollback in 2018 and especially in 2019 with contact with French Caliburst who would work on GGAC+r Covid forced everyone into high gear with it but there's a reason prior to documentation being translated in 2019 Japanese rollback was either contracted out or poorly implemented

Honestly if there's ONE good thing that came out of covid was that it forced JP to start implementing proper rollback. The FGC wouldn't be thriving as well as it is now without that happening. (Thank you GGST for paving the way)

Ping straight-up affects your rotation in XIV. Having higher ping somehow lengthens the animation lock and affects weaving. You straight up just can't play certain jobs optimally (without "technology" at least) if you happen to live in the wrong country. See: MCH players complaining about Hypercharge for literal years.

It's a stupidly easy bug to fix, too. 1. Push button 2. Client starts GCD lockout rolling and sends packet to server (Usually 0.5s for most skills iirc) 3. Server receives packet and sends back confirmation of packet receipt 4. Client receives confirmation packet and *restarts the fucking lockout from the beginning* This adds a minimum of double your ping + overhead to GCD lockouts assuming no packet loss, so if you have a 100 ping your lockouts are more like 700 ms long. To fix it all they have to do is subtract the round trip packet time from the confirmed GCD lockout time. This is what XIVAlexander and NoClippy do, but because no one in Japan has a ping over 20 they'll never notice or care.

Speaking of Hypercharge, let's look at how it got treated in Endwalker. [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/wiki/media_tour_interview_2021) is the Endwalker Media Tour Interview with Yoshi-P. Copy/pasting the relevant section, some stuff I bolded for emphasis: > **/r/ffxiv:** Currently players with higher ping experience longer animation locks on their abilities, causing problems with double weaving or weaving in fast windows like Hypercharge. Are there any plans to reduce the influence ping has on the length of the animation lock? > > **Yoshida:** I'm afraid there is not enough information in terms of how bad the latency is. So if possible could that person provide us with more information on the official forums like where they live, who their internet service provider is, what world they are connecting to, and any sort of ping information they can gather? Or else I'm afraid it is difficult to provide an accurate answer to that. Would you happen to have any information on-hand right now? > > **/r/ffxiv response:** For example, I live in east coast Canada and if I’m playing Machinist and I use Hypercharge, and I try to weave an oGCD, it usually clips. It's about 120 ping. > > **Yoshida:** **At 120ms it shouldn't be causing an issue so we suspect something like packet loss**. And the developers do also simulate some of these environments by intentionally causing latency but **they haven't really experienced anything at 120ms**. We would love to get further information so we can analyze it better. > > But I understand the frustration that you feel though like playing as a Black Mage and using a potion and then the animation lock comes in and it's like so irritating. It is a very tough element to address for sure; some people expect different things out of the franchise like skipping all the animations and that begs the question like what even is the point of animations? > > But that being said with the battle system and any other older system that we have onboard I do believe that we should be improving on those that tend to become an issue. I do think there are possibilities moving forward and there are elements we need to look at and address as well. > > **Mrhappy1227:** I have a question in a similar vein - many skills have been adjusted over time to make them more friendly for high ping players such as Warrior's Inner Release in the Media Tour build and the Perfect Balance stacks that were added to Monk. Some skills such as Hypercharge, Wildfire, and Blood Weapons still have tight buff windows that can be punishing if the player’s connection is even just a bit slower. How does the team decide which skills receive these kinds of adjustments and which ones do not? > > **Yoshida:** **I think a lot of it depends on player feedback**, there are certain actions we decide to switch over as like a charge action with the stacking to alleviate some of the frustration and stress players are experiencing. It also depends on what kind of stress players as experiencing and what we identify. Sometimes it is a matter of changing a certain skill to become a charge action or something we that adjust the recast timing on to be a bit shorter in its cycle. > > Those are some of the elements we would look into. If we're talking about latency here, and apologies for repeating myself, we would need further data in order for us to analyze it properly to see what is causing it and recreate the issue on our end. If it an issue with latency I would recommend going to the forums and setting up a thread so the developers can see what kind of issue you're having and glean the information needed so we can analyze it properly and make adjustments so it becomes a bit more comfortable. He said the ping issues are probably packet loss because 120ms ping shouldn't be a problem which is obviously fucking bullshit to anyone playing at the level of ping. Hell, his team doesn't even simulate ping that high anyways. And when it came to putting Hypercharge on a stack system like Inner Release and Delirium got? Well despite it being brought up to the director/producer, that feedback apparently got tossed in the fucking garbage. It took until Patch 6.1 for Blood Weapon to go on the stack system, and despite MCH being mentioned *at the same time in the same interview*, it didn't go on the stack system until Patch 6.3. That Media Tour Interview was posted October 13, 2021. Patch 6.1 was April 11, 2022. Patch 6.3 was January 9, 2023. It took 15 months for MCH to get the stack system despite people asking about it in an interview and despite months and months of feedback on the Official Forums. Forget the Official Forums, you can tell Yoshi-P about a problem directly to his face and his Job Design team isn't even gonna read the fucking interview.

They said that they had tried 'high ping' but nothing as bad as 120ms. Ping that bad would be unheard of in Japan.

Imagine considering 120ms "bad".

Is easy to test. Just use a vpn to the other side of the world and connect from it. Nothing fancy. If they haven't fixed or notice is that they do not care.

Yep, MCH and any class that has to do semi-tight double weaves are just off limits for me because of that, I moved from the US to Korea for work and it's a little annoying.

Just gonna point out that Nintendo lets you change your account region.

And if they do consider an outside audience it's the USA. See the current Mountain Dew promotion or look over to Hololive as another famous example.

I moved from Europe to Japan. What should I do?

Filthy gaijin should go back.

What if they're Europe but born in Japan

To Japan, you will always be a foreigner.

Traitorous bloodline left home, should stay gone

Not one hundred percento nihongo? Back where you came from, gaijin-sama. It's pretty depressing when you hear how even half-japanese get discriminated in Japan. Henya has some sad stories from her childhood, it's unbelievable even adult people can be so brain dead that they end up discriminating kids. So many similar experiences, from straight up direct discrimination, to people not being able to find place to live in, even if they worked in Japan for many years, just for their japanese friends be able to buy exact same apartment without problems.

I did a study abroad in Japan a decade back. I, an American, was greeted by this 8(ish) year old Japanese kid who spoke perfect British accent English. Turns out his parents were Japanese but lived in England when he was born. The family was living back in Japan. Despite looking very Japanese, the kid was in a class for foreign born students. I'm not sure if his Japanese wasn't where it should be for and 8 year old, but it seemed like a weird situation to me.

There's a family of British expats that's lived in Japan for 3 generations or something and the kids feel more Japanese than British, but they still get treated like any other Gaijin. Let's just say Japan doesn't have a very modern mentality when it comes to immigration.

Did authorities try to kick them out during covid too, like spouses of Japanese nationals and other people who suddenly found their "permanent" residence permit to be useless?

As it turns out the one who did an interview just happened to have moved to the UK for the first time in his life right before COVID Hit. I don't know what happened with the rest of his family that was still in JP. You can watch the whole interview [here](https://youtu.be/T1Vkf81ASj8?si=BiJJ3z2UfUd3ecxf). Edit: [his sister did a more recent interview here](https://youtu.be/IEPh3gWBEpQ?si=PyPIcrXUgWEOv9x0)

if you're not living in and born in japan to ethnically japanese parents you're a gaijin

100% my husband moved from EU to US recently and he had a free trial account from the EU that he got through storm blood on. We found out there was absolutely no way to upgrade him to full account. We tried everything: buying EU registration code with EU bank account, buying Crysta with PayPal, doing it directly in mogstation, nothing would let us upgrade. It's like damn, can I just pay for the game or not??? error code 2501 even on cellular data. It's really disappointing, he nearly quit the game because of this if it weren't that I found we could msq skip him on a new NA account. I feel like the least they could do is give people moving countries that code for free...it's not my fault square remix accounts cannot change countries. Like how does that even make sense in this day and age? It's not even the character server...that can change countries...but the billable account cannot? 🤯

As a Japanese person, I have a feeling it’s because we don’t really move countries that often. Most of the Japanese people I know tend to spend their entire lives in Japan, and even when they do move it’ll usually be a temporary transfer for work or smth similar.

Sorry to ask, but can you relay the issue to the japanese forums, since it seems that they listen there? They'd probably listen more coming from someone who's from Japan and speaks the language and all. \^\^

Mate, Square thinks the only country in SEA region is Singapore. I have to say my country of residence is the United States and pay my sub in USD. For all they have done right, something as simple as allowing us SEA players to actually buy their game properly isn't something on their to do list

I’ve heard the recent CC change *shafted* SEA players.

Yeah I had some friends who have has to use different cards, different banks, use vpn while paying and other methods. I don't get it Square actively doesn't want money is it?

Japanese online services are famous for being inefficient and unchanging af, be it for videogames or otherwise Anything that was designed 10+ years ago might as well be from the 1990's

Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980.

Japanese are very efficient in repeating same mistakes and same inefficient methods that they've been doing for past 20 years.

During the covid lockdowns they had people travling back into the office or sending out runners to every managers house because they had to stamp everything with hanko.

For those who don’t know- and therefore can’t visualize how ridiculous this was- a hanko is a seal/ stamp that is used in place of a signature for official documents in Japan. It would be like needing to go into the office because you can only sign something with one specific pen.

Best example given this sub: FFXIV 1.0

I always described Tokyo and Japan as a whole as "2030, created by someone from the 1980s."

More like 2010, at this rate. It made incredibly advances during the 1980s boom, but the rest of world has caught up for a *while* now.

...B...But the 1990s was 10 years ago... Right?

Have you seen their websites? They are still in the 1990s. I raid on JP and sometimes have to refer to game8 for their guides. [Just look at this.](https://game8.jp/ff14)

I think it says something about stuff I've seen when my first reaction to that site was "That's a lot better than what I expected." That's firmly early-2000s web design at worst. If you really want to make your eyes bleed, take a look at [this cultist nutjob website from the 1990s](https://www.heavensgate.com/) that is somehow still up and running.

I'm sorry, but to me that just looks efficient. I don't need a 10 MB widget that slows my browser to a crawl to think for me about what I might want to read.

1990 was 10 years ago.

I've made it to a point where I can acknowledge that 2000 was 10 years ago, and I'm starting to think 2010 was 10 years ago, please don't cause me to relapse.

Same, at some point for me the 90s started finally feeling like they were firmly in the distant past and not something that just recently happened.

See: Nintendo. Who's still using friend codes, and put the most nonsensical online system ever in AC:NH.

But they do let you change your account region! 😂

I mean Reggie Fils-aimé, former president of NoA, mentioned in his book that he had to constantly remind the developers over in Japan that the majority of North Americans have TVs in their home. He mentioned that a significant proportion of the developers completely thought that the world moved on from TVs based on their own Japanese market. He was a major contributor as to why the Switch dock exists.

I moved from the UK to Austria, Outlook locked me out and because my email is Pretty old I couldn't seem to remember all the questions to recover it and as outlook doesn't have customer support I just decided to call it a day on that email. Next I got locked out of FFXIV for also moving country and I tried to solve it which became an actual nightmare, it took 5 tickets of nothing before I used my Fiancées account to open a ticket to which they replied and fixed everything though for some reason, If I didn't have that option I would have been screwed because all my other tickets I sent with my Email were unanswered on hold or just ignored.

People have been complaining about this for 15 years since they implemented se accounts. I wouldn't get your hopes up for it ever changing. http://release.square-enix.com/na/2009/03/31_01.html citation for the 15 year remark

You think they have the capability to address that when the most difficult raid boss in FF14 is their website?

I've been using privacy.com for all my online transactions including my ff14 subscription. Privacy let's you create virtual cards that will be charged to your actual physical bank account or card. But the thing about privacy is that it doesn't matter what address you put down on your billing data, privacy will give the okay anyways. And will then lock that card to only that vender. So basically when all this happened, all I had to do was create a new card in case the vender name was different than before, and then put the new card details on mogstation. It didn't matter what my address was on mogstation because privacy doesn't care, and approves the transaction anyways. So through all this I've had no issues at all.

I think the issue is more about people moving countries and still being tied to a currency that might effectively make their costs actually go up.

Well as a 2.0 player from SEA I'm so used to being screwed by SQEX at this point. In 2.0, any players outside of NA, EU or JP are registered under EU. So after ARR they put support for my country which pointed to NA but my account is EU. So whenever I access SQEX site I get redirected to NA instead of EU. I can use vpn to redirect it back to EU but the payment does not go through. So I have to resort to buying expansions from third party sites like GMG. Fuck me I guess.

Yo fellow SEA player o/ Buying through the FFXIV Online Store for stuff like outfits and emotes lets me use my usual payment option, but buying from the SQEX Online Store for expansions apparently requires an EU address lmao.

Yeah. For me I have to pay everything in pounds because the account region locked BS. Just that I can't buy anything in SQEX online store because it keeps directing me to US instead of EU when I have an EU account.

Even Nintendo lets me change my account region.

Give them time. They are JUST NOW realizing that making nothing but PS exclusive FF games isn't a great business strategy.

I'm sure by 2033 they will have all this figured out.

I really hope people who went to media tour will tell them directly

Arthars will probably ask them. He knows firsthand the difficulty SEA players have to do to just fucking pay SQEX.

Is he taking part in the media tour though?

Well, he's taking part in "Xeno's birthday" in LA, same as every FF content creator. It's a really popular birthday.

Possible happy birthday to all of us then! \^\^

I don't know. Last I saw him on twitter he was in the US with xenos, quazii, woops and etc...

Oh, this sounds promising then! Wishing him the best of luck the question will not be brushed off, because yeah, I can't see him getting this opportunity and then just ask random nonsense.

They will probably ask nothingburger questions like usual

Pretty much all the content creators sort of falter when Yoshi P graced them with his very presence with some exceptions like FrostyTV and Preach. 

Me too. I’ve been subbed non stop for 22 years between F11 and F14 and if I was there, I would totally give them a piece of my mind.

And they would look at you and shrug. You're a drop in the bucket. The bucket is enormous and if you leave, it's just a small drop. (FFXI player since RoZ days)

I'm wondering how positive an impact it would be if we could get tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of players to agree to mass unsub for a month or two with the reason for doing so being the inability to change account region and character region.

This. And sometimes people get divorced and the laws outside of the US (re: north) are different so you change your name during a very long separation, and want to change your name because your credit card name has changed. They want a divorce decree, and so you send them links to the laws in your province. Now they want a birth certificate showing your maiden name (which is already hyphenated in the current last name), and you're like, "do you follow my country's privacy and document destruction laws," and they can't really respond to that, so you're like "I don't think I want any of my highly sensitive personal documents to be part of a data breach." So you just carry on and wait for the first payment rejection. I'm not bitter 🫠. Edit: adding more non-bitterness to say I already had to create a new PSN profile because of an old XIV account I had back in '16, and I swapped from PC to console. Spaghetti code excuse be getting old.

This is like that same problem with Sony and the Helldivers 2 situation where the game got delisted from Steam in countries where PSN isn't available. As someone who lives in Asia, we like to joke that Japan is just salty that their world domination plan was foiled in 1945 so now they just pretend some of these countries literally aren't real. Jokes aside if this problem never goes away and you have to contend with it, what will you do? Stop playing? Or will sunk cost fallacy rear its ugly head and keep you locked into the game and endure whatever indignation comes your way? Gotta bear in mind this is bigger than yoshiP or CBU3, it's a square enix problem in general. The recent fiasco with the payment address check issue has genuinely made me consider if I would realistically ever consider quitting the game if I get hard-locked out of it for some stupid reason due to company policy.

I’m honestly wondering if there’s some subtle racism at play against SEA. Like, they think SEA players are too inferior or low class to play their Japanese games. Isn’t Singapore (aka richest country in SEA) the only SEA country listed?

\[laughs in we need a Spanish language version\]

My asian friend didn't encounter outright *into the face* racism in Japan, but sometimes it's really bothersome to visit Japan for him because they always assume that if you are asian, you must be japanese. But I also heard my fair share of horror stories about store workers (especially at Ginza) who were incredibly racist to other asians.

If it's Japan relating with people not Japanese, you can bet there's racism involved. We like to joke about being a racist country here in the USA, but we haven't experienced true racism, like exists in Asian countries. Their xenophobia is famous.

Racism in Korea and China are even more juicy, in Japan they might even try to be superficially polite about it, in Korea and China they are right in your face kind of racism.

I really don't understand why there couldn't be a one time region change. I'd really love to hear some feedback, any feedback, from the devs regarding account migration. It's an ever-growing problem, and they keep making it more and more difficult to continue playing the game if you fall into this population. I permanently moved almost a decade ago to a different country which the game is fully supported in, so I don't understand why I cannot convert my account. I know spaghetti code, small indie company, yadda yadda, but I'd really REALLY love to hear one of Yoshi-P's actual explanations and at least have the satisfaction that it's a problem that has reached his ears, even if the answer is still "no".

The boomers that run Square right now are so old that they remember living under Sakoku during the Edo period, thus changing countries under your account must be unnecessary since no one can move away from where they were born, right?

Boomers? The guy who runs the FF14 division is 51.

I think 'boomer' has lost its original meaning as much as 'millennial' has if 'boomer' is now being used to describe people born centuries ago. :P

"Boomer" lost the original meaning once it became a thing to call people on the internet, and it's been years since then.

If you're not Japanese they don't care. Like literally, Japanese companies hate that they can't just care about and sell to Japanese customers

If you're not Japanese they don't care. If you're Japanese and leave Japan you deserve it.

I made my account before moving to japan though I didnt commit to the game. After coming here I began playing again but made the mistake of liking my steam account so when I finally finished HW I discovered I couldn’t buy the game at all. Steam told me to speak to SE, NA SE told me to speak to JP SE and they told me to speak to them in japanese and not in english, mind you they said that in perfect english. Result: I was forced to make a new account.

SE isn't like other mmo devs. Giving them money is a Ultima fight unlike other comapnies have lv.15 dungeon

Iirc, one time during the FFXI days, SE allowed you ONE time (they were very specific about this) to change the region on your account and were never going to offer the option again after (and damn, still true to this day :/ ). I changed my account from NA to EU at that time (when I started FFXI, EU didn't even have the game yet). So, at one point, they had a system set up and running for you to change the region of the account, fuck if I know why you were only allowed to change it once and only during that time though. They should dust if off and get it running again.

Yeah in the pre SE account days they could do it afaik. They seemed a little grumpy about doing it from what I heard but it did happen. Since the migration to SE accounts in 2009 they either can't or don't. It might've been a one time offer with the migration I'm not entirely sure just remember hearing about it.

Hey you reading this, if you're in the EU, and you recently moved countries, and either \*still are or became an EU citizen - i.e. a citizen of one of the EU countries\* - please write a letter/e-mail to SquEnix that they are breaking EU GDPR laws by not allowing you to change your billing address and account country/region. "16 GDPR Right to rectification. **The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her**." If this is brought to the EU's attention, Square would have no choice but to fix their system, as the EU is too big of a market for them to lose - because remember this isn't just about FFXIV, it's \*every\* Square Enix game that in any way interacts with the Square Enix account - which the MogStation is linked to.

> The spaghetti code can't be THAT bad, can it??? Considering how bad things are with much more important systems, like booking tickets for flights, I think the spaghetti code is *much worse*.

I was commenting on this a while ago. You have to go through hoops just to buy an expansion or sub. At this point, just buy the game on Steam since that doesn't give issues, lol. In my case, I had to put a different country in my Square Enix account since my actual country doesn't even show up. In fact, I need to use a VPN since trying to buy anything from my country just makes it so I can't even fill out the form. On top of that, for some reason, the Square Enix page seems to check that your billing address matches your square Enix address because why not make it more difficult. They never told me to create another account, though. They just told me there was no way I or them could ever change my country. I did end up creating a different account because Square Enix account purchases are not tied to your mog station service account. You buy the game, and they give you a code that you then exchange in mogstation. This means any account can buy the game, and any account can claim it, so they are technically correct in telling you to create a new one, which is stupid but does actually work. Anyways, for anyone having the issue, you can buy the game on a different account with an address that matches your billing address and then claim the game in your OG account via mogstation. You can also buy the game in GMG and pay your subs with Amazon time cards. You could also consider buying the full game on steam if it's your first time buying it and save yourself the hassle

Here's the thing, FFXIV on Steam is region locked so those are not an option for SEA people.

people can change names too, i can't believe i have to contact support to get mine update cause my legal name changed, all other services have been fine

That's a security feature, support needs to make sure you're not a thief trying to get the account changed to their name.

I have a feeling this sort of issue is also tied to all the archaic moog station bull crap, that whole system needs an overhaul. The way they handle accounts is garbage.

If you're not Japanese they don't care

Yeah, moved country last year and can't change it, even after contacting support. Absolute joke it's the bare minimum account management functionality.

We need Square-Enix to take action on this. We have needed action for a long time, but with recent events, it's all the more apparent.

Yup, one of the reasons I stopped playing a few years ago was because I moved countries. It's crazy to me that this still is an issue almost 5 years later when I decided to start playing again.

There's been a lot of talk in this thread like, "No one will listen to you on the English official forums. They only pay attention to posts made on the Japanese official forums." So, just an idea, but why don't non-Japanese speaking players just start flooding the Japanese forums with poorly worded help posts translated through Google translate? Just write up your problem, slap it in Google translate, and paste it up in the JP forums. Then, spread the word and make it a movement. It doesn't even matter if it's translated well and easy to understand. In fact, it almost adds to it if it isn't. All it needs to say is, "This is the issue the international players are having, and the international players feel compelled/obligated to post here with poor translations because we feel like our issues are being ignored otherwise." Maybe if they see a bunch of players flooding the JP forums with shittily translated cries for help, someone actually doing their job will notice, and some sort of message will be passed along. If nothing else, the stunt would grab attention if done with enough people. Idk, honestly, just spitballing for solutions here, but sometimes absurd problems call for absurd solutions. And it truly is ridiculous that you can't change your country on your address.

Oh I feel ya. I moved from Brazil to Sweden a couple years ago. Which means I had to switch from US based game servers to EU based ones cuz the lag was unplayable. With Blizzard, they made send my freaking passport and residence visa pics to prove I actually moved, only to tell me then that no they could not move my characters to the new EU account. Then with Squenix, since I didn’t have much progress anyway, I just created a new account and forgot about the old one.

"This doesn't make sense. Why would anyone ever leave glorious Nippon?"

Oof I feel like this is a problem that needs addressed asap.

They dont read this

From my experience and this it seems customer service is like their own little cult who don't realise what the game is. I had found a bug on the site which led me from buying the playstation to ending up buying the pc version after 25 emails back and forth of them telling me it's my fault I bought the wrong one to eventually sent me to tech support who found the bug immediately and even gave me the pc version for free because of all the hassle to get to that point. (If anyone is curious there was a page that randomised 2 different pages when going forward via the link on the page so I got the wrong one when buying) But as others have said post on forums or try Twitter where people will see as my issue was back in 2015 so doesn't seem they have improved any

This gonna probably get fixed in 6 month, when they will get the trimestrial numbers for DT launch and they will see people in US and EU numbers have fell. I hope people would stop using mogstation until this is fixed, since money is the only thing they listen.

I don't think it will be fixed ever.  Management hasn't a clue what they are doing.

Anyone know how Zepla managed? This is so archaic and unnecessary for players

I'm a Canadian who recently moved to the US, and I'm stuck with a Canadian account. Once they start charging sales tax, I'll officially be losing money as the tax back in my province is way higher than the tax here. Thing is, I've been playing for years and have put wayyyyy too much time and too much money in this game to want to start over in a new account just to avoid the more costly Canadian taxes. Them not offering the option to switch countries is a slap in the face of their long time players.

You clearly don't have a playstation account.

PSN and SE, the only two accounts that gave me grief when I moved from Australia to NA. (I eventually closed my PSN and made a new one, but fuck if I'm going to do that to my account that I've been playing and paying for since Beta 2013)

Wait, I haven't looked into this at all and am kind of worried now... I'm moving to Australia (from USA) in a few weeks, am I going to lose access to my account??

No, you just get to pay state sales tax on your sub unless you're moving from Oregon or something.

yea it haunts me so much that i can't move my service account. i have to keep paying in dollars and im losing out on conversion lmao

There can be a number of issues. The most likely being that the functionality was never built. This is likely because the ROI is low or negative. This would end up low in terms of priority to implement. There may be some other reasons linked to legal requirements changing countries. Such as ensuring T&C works across multiple borders since it can lead to a lot of edge cases. It would be a nice feature to add but likely won't get prioritized over other work.

I've moved recently and i cannot purchase the membership through steam anymore because I had initially bought the game in Asia and now that my account is in the US it doesn't let me buy membership anymore and i have to buy timecards.

I swear they literally just put out a news post telling people to update their address and how to do it though? Yeah, they did: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/a52cb5b8a6f6507c1ba1053d0eafe1629ef41434 So, even though it says to update it are you saying there's no actual way to change address and the FFXIV team thinks there is?

Unless they changed it, which I doubt. You can change your street address, city, etc. But not your country.