Screenshot pinched, without permission, from jjmahoney3 on Reddit.
If you’ve been champing at the bit for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, you’ve probably been playing Early Access. But Early Access ends soon, so what’re you to do? Well, you activate your full game code, obviously.
The problem is that how to do this isn’t exactly clearly delineated, and doing it the wrong way can screw you over. Because website design, clear instructions, and making the thing you need to do obvious, are all really hard.
Here’s what you need to do: when you go to your Mogstation account, press Add New Platform. The Add New Service Account button will instead create an entirely new account, which is not what you want if you’ve been playing Early Access and have levelled up some characters. Where’s the Add New Platform button on the screenshot above (courtesy of jjmahoney3 on this Reddit thread), you ask? Well, it has no text. It’s the button with the weird icon to the left of Add New Service Account. Because that’s entirely clear.
If you’ve seen this too late and have already clicked Add New Service Account… well, it’s not clear what happens now. According to the above Reddit thread, Square Enix are saying that they can “merge” the accounts so that you can get both your old characters and your Collector’s Edition goodies put together. There’s a fair bit of speculation, though, that doing this will lose you your 30 free days of playtime.
To quote the support page: “Unfortunately we cannot offer refunds for any subscription fees that have already been paid for on the mistakenly registered Square Enix ID. We are also unable to transfer the subscription status from one account to another and you will be required to set up your subscription again once the process is complete.”
Which is utterly ridiculous, obviously. I’m hopeful this refers solely to actual subscription fees rather than free game time, but… who knows? I mean, let’s not forget that this whole thing happened because the big bright button on the page was the one that would screw you over. Losing game time because of it would disgust me, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
All of this is a serious customer service fuck-up, and is a massive shame because my early impressions of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn are actually pretty positive. We’ll have a quick look article checking out what I did during Early Access tomorrow, if you’re interested. (EDIT: It’s now tomorrow, and the article is now up.)
NOT AN ACTUAL EDIT BECAUSE I NOTICED THIS WHILE WRITING THE STORY BUT DIDN’T WANT TO REWRITE EVERYTHING FROM SCRATCH: Square Enix have now removed the Add New Service Account button, presumably to prevent yet more people from boning themselves and causing Customer Support further things to deal with.
THIS ACTUALLY IS AN EDIT: There’s now a support page up for this very issue, detailing how to get it fixed.
