FFXIV: Finding the Falcon (And Some Goodwill)
Last summer, FFXIV announced a promotion where you could get a free Falcon mount as long as you were subscribed for 90 days within the promotional period of time.
When I saw this, I was like… “Pffft. No problem. I’ve been subbed to FFXIV since 2013! I don’t see that changing.”
And that’s true. I have been subbed nonstop since Sept 2013 (dang!), and for a good chunk of that time, I’d done it monthly. At first, it made sense to sub monthly since this was the first MMO with a sub I’d played in a long time. You never know when you want to pull the plug and leave a game.
But as the years rolled by, it got a little silly that I didn’t sub for a longer chunk of time, since that would save a little bit of money to do it that way. So, the whole Falcon mount promotion prompted me to finally upgrade my sub to pay for 3 months at a time.
Surely, that mount was a shoe-in for me. And while I’m not over-nuts about gathering mounts, I like mounts, and I’ll always take a free one. This one was pretty cute, too.
But there was one snag…
Promotion vs. Promotion
Feeling secure in obtaining the mount, I forgot about it. It would be a while until any of us saw it in the mail, after all.
Somewhere down the line, Midgardsormr became a preferred server. This meant that new characters rolled on this server got an experience boost, and if you leveled a new boosted character to 30 during the time period, you also got a free 15 days of play time.
Seeing this, I jumped on the bandwagon and pulled Amoon along with me.
Only, what I didn’t realize is that those free 15 days would interrupt the 3 months of sub time during the Falcon’s promotional period. It’s confusing, but to make a long story short, when the time came and other people were getting their Falcon mounts last fall, mine never showed up.
At first, I didn’t realize what had happened. Then, pouring over my account history, I realized that due to the 15 free days for rolling a character on a preferred server, I missed being fully subbed for 3 months (in the eyes of the game)… and I missed it by 3 days. Even though I never stopped being subbed since 2013!!
Yeah, that’s some crap right there.
But what made me feel worse… was that Amoon also didn’t get his.
I mean… we’d forgotten because we just figured we’d get it automatically. How would we know that one promotion would cancel out the first?
Go to support! you’re probably saying. You were a fully paid subscriber for 4 years straight by that point. They should be able to do something about it!
Right?
Yeah… no.
I thought about putting in a ticket, but saw other people on the forum doing the same thing. Reading the Reddit and forum threads, it seemed the service reps were unable to do anything for the situation. Apparently, the system passed these out automatically, detecting which players were eligible. If you weren’t, you were out of luck.
I was bummed about it, but resigned to the fact that I made a bad choice and now I had to live with it. Again, I was more bummed that Amoon didn’t get his mount, too. I hoped maybe they’d run the event again, or offer it as an achievement reward.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Syn ride hers, either, because I think she knows we were both sad we didn’t get one. Every time I saw someone else riding one around, I was always reminded of the fact I lost out on it.
Falcon Mount Realized
Fast forward to this morning. I got a text during breakfast from Syn telling me that I might get my mount after all. There’s a new post on Reddit about it… and apparently, FFXIV is reviewing accounts that were effected by this very situation.
Due to the way the free play period granted by the “World Population Balancing Incentives” functions, it is automatically granted by the system under certain circumstances, so it may have been granted at a time the user did not want it to be.
Because of this free play period granted by the “World Population Balancing Incentives,” the timing of payment for play time shifted. We will add a Falcon mount to eligible accounts for users who could not accumulate enough play time to fulfill the requirements of the Fly the Falcon Mount Campaign due to this.
I logged in, trying not to get my hopes up about it. Much to my surprise, there it was!
I got my Falcon Mount! (And I hope Amoon gets his, too!)
Thank you Squeenix!
I see some folks saying things like, “It took them months to fix this! It’s about time!” But, honestly, I’m just happy to get it because I’d given up thinking I would. If this happened to you, know that they’re working through the accounts today, and it might take up to 24 hours to get yours. But keep your eyes on your in-game mailbox!
Anyway!
I will close with a snippet of silly chat I saw last night as we were zoning out of the Reach into a roulette. The user name just makes it, so I didn’t edit it out.
