Despite having ‘installed’ FFXIV and having an icon all ready to click, it turns out that I was still a long way from playing once I actually did click it. Best laid plans etc.

The first challenge was to logon to my Square-Enix account. Sounds simple enough. I looked in my password database and found the details I’d used to buy the game, plugged in my email address and… ran out of characters about half way. Hm. Well maybe it’s asking for my nickname, that would make sense. But using that along with my password gave an ‘incorrect user or password’. Huh. I tried various combinations, double checked everything, and eventually thought about changing the password - but abandoned that after I managed to successfully logon to the website using it.

Stumped, I turned to the internet hive mind, and found a lot of people had a similar experience. While I couldn’t find a definitive or official answer, eventually I determined that there seem to be two different Square-Enix account types - one for the shop, and one for the game. Ugh. I ended up on a site that looked pretty dodgy, with fake looking Norton ticks and clumsy fonts, but turned out to be legit.

Trustworthy?

Armed with my new account details, I tried again: success! The launcher screen that greeted me was a wonderful eyesore, all colours and fonts and busyness, quite a change from the austerity of the Blizzard launcher. It promised much, from MogStation (not sure what that is yet) to theme songs on iTunes to Ceremonies of Eternal Bonding (will this month make me ready for that kind of commitment?).

All of the things

Compare that to the Blizzard equivalent which rather more tamely highlighted some transmog shop items and an upcoming outage.

Less of the things

My plan was to settle in to character creation next, but of course being the era of always-on, there was a massive 40GB of downloading to be done. So there won’t be any playing just yet - but it won’t be long.

In other news, Classic month is ramping up in Blizzardworld1, with the news today that a universal stress test will be held on August 8 at 1100 PDT - aka 0400 August 9 for Australians. I won’t be waking up for it, but it will be interesting to see how Blizzard’s scaling tech handles what I’m sure will be pretty much every current subscriber logging on for a poke around. And all in one zone trying to kill this guy too I suspect.

For the Horde!

#Blaugust02

  1. It seems clear that Blizzard are going to try to get Classic to suck up all the MMO oxygen for August. Tough month for the competition. Lucky the Blaugust crew will be keeping Blizzard honest! ↩