Crysta

So I have been having a recent problem: The Crysta that I spent on FFXIV is now not being used and the game is such a chore, I decided to quit and be done with it. Problem: Crysta is now frozen by Square Enix. Now, I know it was stupid of me to hope, but I went and sent a little letter to Square Enix customer support regarding the refunding of my Crysta, since I do not plan on spending it now, or ever really.

I would like everyone to know how Square Enix responded to my inquiries.

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Email SE sent in response to my initial request:

From: <support_na@square-enix.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2010 9:14 AM
To: <yukime_88@hotmail.com>
Subject: [t870202:c70f] yukime_88@hotmail.com

Dear Customer,

Regarding your request for account support. Please find your answer below.

Unfortunately that service is not available at this time. There are no refunds on Crysta purchases. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.
Suggestions from our customers are always valued. While we cannot guarantee implementation we will surely pass this on to the developers.

Thank you for contacting the SQUARE ENIX Support Center.

For additional assistance with this issue, you can reply to this email directly. For assistance with a new issue, please visit the SQUARE ENIX Support Center at http://support.na.square-enix.com.

Here was my response to that:

Dear sir/madam:

Thank you for your quick response. I also thank you for allocating time to investigate this matter for me further.

I have re-read the User Agreement for Final Fantasy XIV and took note of certain key points that I would now like to point out in relation to this issue. The user agreement does not specify or indicate that Crysta cannot be refunded in this manner. In fact, with regards to the billing cycle, Square Enix should not even be billing customers if they deactivate their account.

This is stated in Section 4.8 of the FFXIV User Agreement on your website:

" 4.8 Deactivation of Subscription. You may deactivate your FINAL FANTASY XIV Service Account and/or any individual Options at any time. If you deactivate your FINAL FANTASY XIV Service Account, you will be required to deactivate all Options. Other than the exception explained in Section 4.3(a), no further billing related to the deactivated FINAL FANTASY XIV Service Account or Option will occur until you reactivate by following the procedures explained at na.finalfantasyxiv.com/support. If you believe that you have been accidently charged by SQUARE ENIX after you deactivated, please contact the SQUARE ENIX Support Center at na.finalfantasyxiv.com/support for a refund upon confirmation. "

My inquiry is as follows. How would this agreement apply then if it is not possible for Crysta to be refunded, for I certainly have deactivated my account and I am most certainly not playing nor will be playing Final Fantasy XIV in the near or possibly distant future? Square Enix has already charged me for months, in this case, that I will not be playing. Is Crysta a system set in place for exactly this purpose? With the rules stating that refunds are possible, I would like to think that it was not Square Enix's
intention to take money from users who will no longer be playing this game.

Furthermore, in no way did Square Enix cite that Crysta was a non-refundable purchase upon submission of payment information, therefore it does not remove the possibility of a refund on Crysta purchases.

In many new articles published, the CEO of Square Enix stated that the company would like to regain the trust of its users all over the world, and I quote the following sentiment from CEO Yoichi Wada:

"If we satisfy our users, they will return. On the other hand, once the users say, 'forget this,' there's no turning back. We can only recover our trust so far."

I would say that resolving an issue such as this would work in the way of reinforcing and restoring the remaining trust of Final Fantasy fans and gamers such as myself. I expect that Square Enix, a corporation famous around the world for its quality in the gaming industry, would also adhere to this sentiment and follow this direction. If this issue is not resolved, I will certainly inform other users of this Square Enix product about the results pending my inquiries. Furthermore, the people in this community of
the United States who I have conferred with, will be sure to exercise far more caution and skepticism before purchasing any more Square Enix products in the future for the reasons outlined above. In addition to that, I may also be seeking resolution through the Better Business Bureau if no resolution to this issue is reached. I do not believe that any of these circumstances are in the interest of Square Enix at this time, as it seeks to win back the trust of their users through improving the game and addressing issues such as the one presented.

Thank you for your time and cooperation in these matters.

And their response to my response is this:

Dear Customer,

Regarding your request for account support. Please find your answer below.

Thank you for reporting your concern. To submit feedback on this situation, please report through the feedback form on the SQUARE ENIX Support Center website. This can be found at: http://support.na.square-enix.com > Final Fantasy XIV > Contact > Suggestions and Feedback. Your submission will be directed to the appropriate location and reviewed. We do appreciate all feedback, suggestions, and comments.

Thank you for contacting the SQUARE ENIX Support Center.

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I just sent back a response today. I will update regarding whether or not they actually resolved this issue, or say whether or not they gave me another roundabout copy + paste answer.

Thoughts?

So they go from sounding like they care, to throwing your whole story out the window and into their little feedback window of oblivion. Oh look, they don't have to respond to feedback!

Don't know why you added any crysta if you got 2month free and now other 3days and don't know why you give up on the game when nov/dec going to fix everything. at least in my eye ffxi full of *** and wow is a kid game. ffxiv ftw for me here.Sorry to hear about this but Not being rude but this pretty much your own fault on this. you should have not put any crysta too you the billing was due.

I just saw your post on another thread, I can't even read what you just said. I am sorry. Please learn english.

A lot of people didn't expect this game to fail so badly at the beginning, and gladly purchased Crysta. Nowhere does Squeenix say that Crysta is non-refundable nor did they give an alternate use for Crysta if people decide to quit.

On another note, the patches in Nov/Dec will not "fix everything". They will fix problems that shouldn't have been there during release. I expect to see ongoing "fixes" before any large amount of content is put in that will look interesting at all. Adding more Guildleves does nothing but give you more boring repeatable quests. I have played FFXI since PS2 release, and WoW since Wrath. Both have their goods and bads, but so far FFXIV is all bad unless you like the broken mechanics that are now in place.

As I said in my email, I had much higher expectations of this game than what I got. I thought that they would fix these things AFTER beta testing, and not after some months have passed after the release of the game. I know that many others share my sentiments and expectations and I know they are not unreasonable. Basic gaming functions are only now being implemented, functions such as item sorting, which was something that was already implemented in FFXI, was not implemented already in FFXIV.

Why?

Well, no freaking idea. I guess developers got a kick out of that, as well as other things that make the game so much fun. Like the hours and hours of endless grinding you have to do to hit one level. That is exactly what people want to do each day. Grind hundreds, thousands of experience points for one level and once you get there, big surprise! You get to grind another hundreds of thousands of experience points to reach the next. With crafting it's even worse because you get to grind on the same item only in different forms each time. Oh sweet joy. This is all of course for the splendid end game that Square Enix has gloriously provided for players...which is nothing at the moment. They MIGHT come up with it in another year, who knows?

I can see what makes this game such "jolly good fun". It was fun in the beginning, with everything new and all, but grinding for hours and hours gets old and is NO FUN unless you like being chopped in half by a chain saw. FYI.

I am so glad I didn't buy a FFXIV game... lol

and: I am sorry it happened to you. It've must been suck if it happens to me. :(

Dam that's messed up. I knew Crysta was a scam just like the security token and onion hat from CE. Crysta is fan boy currency there is no refunds because fan boys don't want refunds you should of knew this. first off I'm not paying for any months in advance "ever" bad enough autopay is set up. Technically Crysta is pointless you can use CC debit or go buy a game card. Sorry it happened to you but you should of known better. Your probably actually better off using it now since the game is being fixed next week quit now miss out on the uberness...0.o

I agree with what both of you just said, but the sad thing about this whole situation is this. I played FFXIV since Collector's Edition launch, heck I even paid the extra to get the Herme's SHoes and all that crap. The game, as it stands now, is so lacking and so much of a chore that EVEN IF I already have the Crysta, I would seriously rather do something else with my time than grind it up for hours.

For me to reach R35 CRP, it will take me about 6.5 hours of pressing the same synth button every 2 minutes to reach the next level. That just doesn't seem exciting to me anymore for obvious reasons. The battle system isn't that exciting either after the first few hours of leveling...I mean grinding. :/

If you don't like either sitting for hours grinding for hours and running places, don't buy FFXIV, because that is apparently what the game is all about. New content will be great for a while, but that will also get old eventually. It's just basically adding new daily quests that you can do on a limited basis. Item sort function should have been there at launch, and vast other things I don't care to type out anymore...

lol then stop playing RPG's

loltroll

He's kinda right though.. RPG's (MMO's especially) almost all essentially boil down to exactly that, lots of grinding and running around. The complaint of a lack of content may indeed be justified, but Faranquis' took it a bit too far by saying it'll get old eventually regardless of new content being added.. so it just sounds to me this isn't the type of game that would appeal to him\her if that's how (s)he feels.

I believe she meant as long as the new content brings nothing but more grinding. If there are a bunch of great patches full of content with more than just new guildleves, it would be great. Unfortunately, we will probably not see anything like that for quite a while I'm guessing, as they are focusing on fixing bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Oh right, and the overall playability of the game.

Well she did not make that clear enough if that was her intent, unfortunately. And indeed, we're not likely to see much more than grinding for a good long time. Actually, I'm not wholly sure what it is content-wise people want exactly.. non-leve quests? story missions? What exactly?

FFXI was essentially nothing but one gigantic grind from 1-75 (now 1-85, and soon all the way to 99) with some story missions on the side. I mean, even with all the oodles of content XI has now after all these years, the level grind is still one of the most grueling in any game I've played.. Somehow in spite of that XI has managed to surviv until now.. Hell even WoW is basically just one big grind to the endgame.. A quest-grind and instance-grind yes, but a grind none the less. I don't really see XIV being all that different in that regard.. I expect a great deal of grinding in this game. (Just by far, less tedious and cutthroat than the grinding in XI was.)

I mean I whole-heartedly agree the game is broken as it is currently, and I am eager to see stuff like NM's make their way into the world.. but.. I dunno, I think if you're honestly expecting tremendously greater things out of this game, revolutionary things even, then you're probably looking at the wrong game. Grinding is the beast of MMO's really.

It's called i'm LD look it up :)

Honestly I don't think i've played an MMORPG that wasn't a grindfest at some point, and i've played a lot of them.

The reason you don't notice it as cleary in some games is the fact that the grinding experiece in itself is more enjoyable, with goals to achieve and worthy rewards. Which is where I see FFXIV lacking atm.

I don't feel my character has any sort of purpose for being there in the game, if you know what I mean. There has to be goals to reach in order to keep you playing. I find myself looking at the big picture of things and thinking "Ok so, I get to R50, then what?", which of course makes me not want to even play.


With all that said, I believe a lot of these issues will fixed with the coming updates, we'll see.

i can get 10-15 in FFXIV in 2-3hours, Now in FFXI that took me what? 1-2days? and i played FFXI at it's prime. Once the update come getting 11-31 would be more cake. I think the problem is most ppl want to solo in ffxiv and never party. So that why ppl say omg take forever to lvl up.

Everyone need to get together and party and stop soloing.

Note: FFXI when i play had no dumb Ring give you more EXP so ya it was pretty hard to rank up.

FFXI "now" is easy to grind if you know how to do it which a lot don't. Prior to last year 11 was a total grind fest from 1-75. I know casual players who sit around and wait for prty inv as most do(instead of making your own prty) took them almost a year to go from 1-75. 11 used to be hell if you didn't know what you were doing. (Subjob qst,Kazam keys for airship access, genki 1-5, story line progression for endgame access the list goes on and on equaling a total grind fest)Now with level sync/campaign battle/abyssea grinding in 11 has become easy...lets not forget the state of the game 2 years ago lol

Why are people under the impression that a repeat of XI would be considered a success?

A direct repeat of XI's subscriber numbers and update schedule will not work in this current market and XIV's development costs/overhead. They will go out of business.

The game needs to be orders of magnitude more successful, and needs to do it within a matter of months, not years.

That's absolutely asinine that they can't refund crysta. I guess lawsuits will once again be the only thing to change SE's mind on things.

Personally, I noticed it in XI.. I noticed it constantly. I do know what you mean about goals keeping you going though, and you're right that we're sort of lacking those in XIV at the moment. Though as you said, the updates should be ushering in changes that will (hopefully) fix this anyway.

Average? Not in today's sense it isn't, and that's the context people generally use.. XI was designed around the old MMO mindset of the EQ era, where you did nothing but grind your brains out.. WoW brought in a new era where they at least tried to disguise the grinding in some way..

I also would hardly call XI easy, even now. Hell, even if you do consider it easy now it's still daunting and tedious a game compared to other MMO's currently on the market. (Yes it was about the norm back then, it's not now.)

I actually do not altogether think so, and would not want to see XI ver. 2. However my point was simply.. the majority of the people here I'd assume are XI players, whom are complaining about a lack of 'content' without specifying what they want as content.. it has been boggling my mind when XI itself was virtually nothing but one long grind - and in fact still pretty much is nothing but that even after all these years.

But Revelation brings up a good point about goal-oriented play.. and if that's what it is that's bugging people, I think everyone just needs to sit tight and wait on these updates.

I've never really heard of ANY kind of "buy points" system where you could refund them. At least if you could on any I've dealt with previously, it's hidden extremely well..

I have. Many in fact. And XI was still ranked up there as one of the worst for me. Not THE worst by any means, but one of the worst certainly. I admit that most Korean MMO's are so horrid that I rarely play them enough to have the honor of truly suffering their grinds.. but at the very least XI was one of the worst mainstream MMO's in terms of a grind that's come over to the west.. There's far too many Korean MMO's out there for me to really argue this point anyway. (And it's silly anyway as it's my personal opinion on the subject, I'm not meaning to impose it on anyone else.)

My context of it not being the norm now was in regards to mainstream stuff that's made it over here anyway.. there are so many dozens of crap MMO's out there that I can't even acknowledge 99% of them as existing. And for that I apologize I suppose.

And yes they've made FFXI easier these days, much easier. It's still tedious as all hell though in my opinion if no longer the grueling beast it once was.

I loved RO, never played the other. RO was indeed very grueling though at times, no arguements there.

I was actually playing one of those free Korean MMOs yesterday that I downloaded. The name starts with an A, but I can't recall it off hand while I'm at work. It was about on par with the content you can find in FFXIV at the moment, but the constant world spam about visiting the shop to buy items with money bugged me after a while.

Just for clearification, I wasn't saying it wasn't noticable in FFXI. I agree it was also. I was just saying that, while some games have the appearance of a lower amount of "grinding" than others, it's actually just disguised in forms of quests, battles, etc, like you stated.

I think you can get refunds on gpotatoes in Rappelz from a GM if you're not satisfied with your purchase in the Cash Shop. Not completely sure though.

but Rappelz sucks...

Not the point.