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Submitted by Xenoveritas on
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Let's say you made a brain-dead decision when you designed your service that would allow people who bought your game to deactivate it so that they couldn't play again without buying a new copy. Let's say that a lot of people left to play another game. Let's say that many of them decide that they want to return to your game and - surprise! - discover that they can't without buying a new copy.

What would you do?

Well, Square-Enix has apparently decided to start a campaign called Return Home to Vana'diel. This campaign will allow people who purchased the game but then quit to start playing again.

You'd think this would be a simple concept. You'd think Square-Enix would want to regain customers. But instead of, say, making it so that you're always allowed back, they're running a limited-time campaign.

People who return will, basically, be getting a "free copy" of the game registration codes. (Basically, it's a free copy of the game minus all that boring physical stuff like a manual and game discs. Based on the assumption that if you're returning to the game, you already have the game.)

Instead of going the sane, sensible route and allowing people to reactivate their account (like, say, every other MMORPG in the world), they're doing a one-time event to give people who used to have accounts a brand new account.

The next obvious question: do they get their characters back? Well... According to the site I linked up there, returning players can "...even recover and play their old characters from before!" However, according to this post on Allakhazam, that's actually only limited to characters deleted in the past three months. Before that, you're still left out in the cold.

While it's nice that Square-Enix is realizing that people may be willing to pay them money again, it's still too bad that they have not reversed their brain-dead account policies. Hey, Square-Enix: maybe if you let people return and reactivate their old characters without forcing them to go through all this crap, you'd get more people to return!