FFXI Fan Sues Square Enix For Deceiving Customers
June 25, 2009 by Ruibo
A lawsuit has been filed against Square Enix by a Final Fantasy XI fan for allegedly deceiving 100,000 customers with their hidden fees and penalties.
Plaintiff, Esther Leong from San Francisco stated in the suit:
This case narrowly focuses on Defendants’ deceptive advertising, unfair practices, and fraudulent concealment to conceal certain critical information about their online games. The deceptive advertising, unfair and undisclosed business practices and concealment concern, among others:
- Licensing of the online games software disguised as a sale;
- Monthly fees (“fees”) to play the online games;
- Penalties for late payment of the fees;
- Interest charges for late payment of the fees;
- Charges while the online game account is suspended;
- Termination of the right to use the online game for late payment of the fees;
- User restrictions and conditions related to the online games;
- Termination of the game date for late payment of the fees.
The class action suit is seeking damages of more than $5 million, for unfair business practices to false advertising.
The game has been out for years now and if this was true, what took so long for someone to stand up? It’s been several years since I’ve played FFXI but I’ve never encountered any of the extra charges as I’ve never ran into any problems with the monthly payments.
Any of you encounter this type of problem? Do you think Square Enix deserve what’s coming?
You can read the court filing here and special thanks to an examiner.
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Well, if the plaintiff has not read the fine print, they will lose, and it’s just typical to sue for enormous bucks for less than $13 a month because you neglected to pay or your CC expired. True SE should not be charging for a month when you haven’t played and can’t because you didn’t pay, those ARE hidden fees. But 5 mil big ones? Get a life. Pay your bills, no pay no play.
Iv been playing FFXI for years, there are no hidden fee’s. Credit card is required to start playing, before accepting charges it tells you exact payment amount. If your credit card expires, it automatically kicks you from game til you put new credit card in. On top of this, SE put in like a 15 pages “terms of use” contract info that needs to be scrolled though and accepted to continue.
I had all 16 content I.D’s on at once for 3 months straight, turns out after the eighth content I.D. its not $1.00 its $2.00 per I.D. Terms of use does talk about late fee’s, and termination, but why would it say $12.95 a month and $1.00 per each additional I.D. if after a certain amount of I.D’s are on, they double the price?
I don’t know if the plaintiff did the same thing I did, or not. When I noticed SE hitting me with a $40 bill I cut my crap down to 4 characters. Really what else can ya do? FFXI belongs to SE we just rent from them.
The entire concept of Content ID’s is just plain stupid regardless. It’s cheap and entirely unnecessary. It makes experimenting with various characters an unbelievable chore and, is just an underhanded means for S-E to suck extra money from their players.
Fanboys of course, having given birth to Square-Enix and thus, love it unconditionally, will do and say whatever they can to justify this system that no one on Earth uses because, well, it’s just plain stupid.
Their ever dwindling player base is proof enough that these practices really aren’t helping in any way.
Maybe if they didn’t use Playonline (that absolutely no one likes and if they do they need psychiatric care) and the concept of charging for every character, they may have actually done better as an MMO.
I recently too have had numerous problems with Square Enix and with the recent occurrences I have been left in the dark with no help and with no way of getting my account ban lifted. Within the months of June, July, and August my account was banned twice. The first time being able to have it lifted finding out that they could not and would not express why they did ban it and that it was never justified. The second time which now places my account in a permanent ban with no means or justifiable purpose to do so. The odd thing is that I did not have any playtime in between those bans and yet they accuse me of violating their user agreement(s). Despite the fact that Square Enix reserves the right to ban an account regardless of a players action even though they have done nothing wrong, this is just plain ludicrous. This is true as I have verified it time and time again through the process I took to try and reason with Square Enix from numerous phone calls to there customer service and online “Chat Support”. I have been a customer to Square Enix for the past 3-4 years playing Final Fantasy 11 online and wanted to continue to use there services yet, what I’m I to do now? The last step I took was the final one available. That was the communication was by letter to a man named William Bisby who’s position is “Account Manager”. I was told that he could reverse any ban that’d he see fit to do so. Today is the day I received his letter back and might I add was a failure as he proclaimed in his last paragraph, “We consider this issue closed and further correspondence in regards to this is unnecessary”. I was shut out with nothing left to do. If anyone manages to read this, I have posted the letter I received from Mr. “Bisby” and then maybe you too can see how Square Enix treats there customers who’ve contributed to there products and services by banning there accounts for absolutely no real cause.
Ps. Since I’m unable to post the picture in any form except text I cannot show it on this forum otherwise reach out tome at prboymanny@aol.com and I will be glad to forward anybody a copy of this letter.