Final Fantasy 14discourse often repeats itself. That’s largely because the same issues persist and aren’t always addressed. Cheating and third-party tool debates get dragged into the spotlight every few months, usually when there’s been some kind of high profile ban or punishment, such as the team who snagged a world-first completion for an Ultimate having their win revoked for using third-party tools. But it’s not always player drama. Sometimes, it’s because Square Enix isn’t listening to fan feedback as much as it could be.
The topic of choice this past week has been the unveiling ofthe Meister Quality Figure Hydaelyn and Zodiark model that Square Enix is charging $360/£320for. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice looking figure. But is it worth the price? Fan consensus says not, and I agree. The real pain point with this item isn’t the quality of the figure for the price, though. It’s the code that comes with it, which gives players the Ballroom Etiquette - Apocalyptic Charades emote.
Square Enix has a long history of releasing merch that comes with a code to give you a coveted in-game item for Final Fantasy 14, whether that’s a minion, a mount, an emote, or orchestrion roll. These codes fall into two categories: ones that apply to the entire service account and so every character on the account will receive the item, or those that can only be used for a single character on the service account. For this pricey statue code, it unfortunately falls into the latter. Unless you plan on purchasing multiple Hydaelyn and Zodiark figures, only one of your characters will ever get to utilise this emote.
It used to be that the codes that came with mech items were always account-wide, so all of your characters and any future characters you created would be able to get whatever item the code had given. That’s changed in recent years, much to the disappointment of the community. I can understand why many of the Optional Item Store wares are single character use only, you’re able to simply purchase as many as you like, and they’re much cheaper, for the most part. But realistically, the average fan isn’t going to purchase multiples of a CD, book, plushie, orhighly expensive figure so that more than one of their characters can get the goods.
Even if there are people happy to buy more than one to get multiple codes, given that these items are usually limited runs and often sell out, it doesn’t exactly help the wider fandom to have people buying up several when they don’t even want more than one of the physical items. They just want more codes.
Fun fact, the Hydaelyn and Zodiark model has already sold out!
It seems utterly daft to restrict codes in this way when previous merch items used to offer account-wide use. For the sanity of the fandom and for the sake of our wallets, please stop making merch redeemable codes single character use only Square Enix. I’m begging you.
