Warning - keycodes between EU - USA version not compatible

[Kadath]

Just a warning.

I've never seen anything smarter.

[Taskmage]

Re: Warning - keycodes between EU - USA version not compatible

The thing about Square sending European gaming mags EU copies of the expansion that are incompatible with the NA base game they originally recieved to review is short bus special.

The rest of that has always been the case. Region has to match. Supposedly the guy got non-matching copies of RoZ and CoP to work, but I doubt that's possible. Some old importers might be able to tell you better. The fact that he tried to jury-rig it to bypass the incompatibility and still didn't get it to work should be no surprise to anyone.

[Kadath]

Re: Warning - keycodes between EU - USA version not compatible

But how it can make sense?

I mean, what is there for Square to gain if not losing potential customers?

This goes along their other masochist choices. The point is not that the versions are incompatible (they aren't, the client works, it's just the keycode to not get accepted), the point is that there's not a valid, logic reason to have this kind of policy.

"Hey, let's make the key codes incompatible (while the game resides on global servers and is cross-platform)."

"And why?"

"Just to piss of the customers, of course!"

[Taskmage]

Re: Warning - keycodes between EU - USA version not compatible

I don't really know. Probably the same reason DVDs are region coded. Anti-piracy and market tracking.

I don't imagine Square has probably pissed off or lost a lot of customers because of this. You'd only have a problem if you imported the game or moved between continents between titles, which I doubt a startlingly significant portion of the player base has done. Anyone who went out to the store and bought copies of the games would have matching codes based on their region, as would anyone ordering online so long as they purchased from the same place.

[Kadath]

Re: Warning - keycodes between EU - USA version not compatible

There's a surprising number of european players who have american accounts since the game was published in europe only one year later and there is no way to transfer character or the location of the account.

[Macht]

Re: Warning - keycodes between EU - USA version not compatible

Actually Anti-piracy and market tracking are two pretty huge reason a company would do that. My companies Smart Barcodes are encoded for 1 time use and seperated by regions, if someone got a discount from a different region and tried to use it in theirs it would be refused.

Added reason to our purpose of regioning is because some discounts while they good for certain regions we'd just be hurting ourselves if we allowed them in other regions. Price for transporting goods is not that pretty so in fairness prices change for each region the further away from a distribution source they are, only makes sense we spent so much money to transport the goods so to cover our loss the customer has to pay so much more on certain items.

Try balancing that crap out and still keep your prices competitive with other places around you, trick is known hot items usually compete with eachother big time among competitors while the other specialty stuff ends up taking the hits. Reason why it costs you more to be unique then it does to be a general nobody.