A little bit of background to start this post off with.

A couple months ago SE implemented the Secure 3-D protocol, also known as Verified by Visa [or Secure Code for MasterCard].  It’s a secondary authentication system that Visa and MasterCard want online merchants to implement.  Although it’s sold as something to keep you, the consumer, safe, that’s not it’s real intent, and after looking at it critically, I think it actually lowers the security of the card holder.

For people that were registering after the implementation, or changed their credit card information, they’d have to go through the new verification.  Anyone who was in before the new policy wasn’t impacted.  My credit cards, thankfully, don’t implement the protocol.  Since my Visa doesn’t expire until 2014,  and I wasn’t going to change any of my credit card information, I believed this wouldn’t impact me.

I was mistaken…

Tonight S.E. encountered some serious registration server problems, and SE had to go into recovery mode in order to let people log in or out of FFXI using a snapshot of their back-end database.

After S.E.’s recovery operations, my attempts to log into FFXI were denied. Evidently the recovery wasn’t complete as my product registration IDs had been lost.

You’d think I’d just be able to re-submit the product IDs and the problem would be taken care of, but that’s not the case. Although I was able to register all my expansions; Rise of the Zilart, Chains of Promathia, Treasure of Aht Urghan, and Wings of The Goddess, I couldn’t register the product ID for the base FFXI content.

Every time I tried to, the registration system would kick out an error basically saying that I needed to re-submit my Credit Card information — even though it hadn’t changed.

And there’s the rub.

With no cards that do the Secure 3-D protocol, and my not being willing to get another credit card that does support Secure 3-D just to play FFXI, this is the end of the line for Suquamish in FFXI. That is, unless SE does a one-eighty.

We’ll see if S.E. pulls their head out by the time XIV roles into the public.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.

– John Updike

Sometimes I wonder if people that log into MMO chat rooms are unable to read the the stuff they type/say.  Like there’s some sort of strange polarized glass that they hang over their monitors that prevents them from actually being able to read what they’ve just typed.

One of the most irksome things that happens all to often is someone logs in and immediately declares “I’m bored!”

Although it’s been said more eloquently by others, Harvey Danger said it most succinctly in their song Where have all the merry makers gone? “If you’re bored then your boring.”

Closely following the “I’m bored” is the person who decides to log into the game to explain that because they’ve played for multiple years (usually longer than the game has actually been out) they’re the expert to explain why the game sucks so much.  I mean, I guess the only response to these people is “Let me guess.  You’re bored?”