Error 401 Advice Please

hi...so 3 week after my 401's spam (assuming i got locked for 1month) here i go looking for advice. Would like to know (if possible from somone who got stuck long time like me) if im better trying to add crysta or go with the month/fee old school way when in 1 week im gonna retry reactivating my account. thx in advance for ur input guys

Crysta.

follow that link : http://support.eu.square-enix.com/faqarticle.php?id=5383&la=2&kid=68643

and send them an email with the following infos!



Should the issue persist after checking the above, please contact us with the following information:

o Exact error message/code number
o What you are trying to purchase
o SQEXID
o Payment method you are trying to use (credit/debit card or Crysta)
o Type of the card used (Visa, MasterCard, etc.)
o Country the card was issued in
o Country you are currently in
o Name of the bank that issued the card
o Number of times you tried to process the payment after you got the initial error message



there a link at bottom of the web page "contact us"


i personnaly use a prepaid mastercard, entered all following infos and they resovled it in less than a week!
work for paying crysta or paying with credit card the montly fee!

Return of the Murgleis? Could it be?

You realise... although less than a week.. blizzard would fix this in 3 minutes.

Thats still appauling

Unfortunately, that's for EU only. They can't help NA accounts.

EU does do the whitelist credit card thing over email, NA support certainly does not.

NEXT METHOD!

After months of 401s I was able to sub a mule account using vanilla ie on a different computer. (If you search IE something like Internet Expolorer-no addons should pop up).

2/3 of my accounts are still inactive and every time I try it's either a 401 (and the last two times a 601, which is honestly really new for me).

I've talked to SE support over half a dozen times and they can never tell me or do anything. I even asked specifically about the email whitelist thing, and the people I talked to about it had no clue what it was, and even went on to say that asking for client's cc numbers would end in their termination. Every player I've seen that's been able to do it has used EU support.

- Make sure you talk to your bank. Ask that they're not blocking any transactions, and make sure they allowe pre-auth charges.
- Try and use either chrome or IE, of if you're using Firefox disable addons.
- Make sure your se account address matches your credit card home address perfectly. There's been reports of people who denoted west as "w" and had it declined. I suspect this might be a problem with some canadian accounts as not all banks use the dash in our postal codes, while se account does.

Edit to answer the actual OP: Like I said after months (talking since june/july of this year) of being unable to re-sub or buy crysta with a cc, I was randomly able to re-active a mule account. I did this setting up a monthly subscription. When I tried to buy crysta I received a 401.

And SE wonder why it has no money...

STOP STOPPING PEOPLE SENDING YOU MONEY GET WITH THE TIMES JAPAN

Maybe you need R/E/M Credit Card to even get started.

Here my advice (and this is not trooling): the world belongs to the braves, not to people who stop trying in fear to things gets worse.

For a logical reason: your situation is already the worst you can get: you cant play and dont have info how to deal with this problem accurately, and SE know less than you how to fix that, so you can imagine the amount of bull it has been throwing to users....

I talk as a person that pay multiples accounts, and have been dealing with this since february, and still, i never stopped playing for more than 1 day due to 401.

First thing is, 401, acording to a faq i read from a site similar to paypal here in brasil, means "unauthorized". Its kind of httl error, you can search for that on internet. Is kind of error where your request miss some info or was refused in some security check. Thats a bit of theory i read while researching about this error.

Practical stuff is, aparently, SE doesnt allow multiples transactions with same credit card. So, after some tries, it just start refusing a card, and in fact, when first 401 kicks, its better to stop using that cc, because it will repeat. BUT that dont mean you should stop trying. The only way i found to keep playing is to go to crysta way, and use alternatives payment options (when it was available), and lending my mother cc.

Using an alternative cc can (but not must) works, and allow a transaction, maybe 2. After some tries, it will result in 401, and if you still need more payments, a third cc would be a solution.

The 401 seems like a temporary block. I cant say how it works, but i can say after some time, the card return to normal for more transactions, and then repeat the 401 cycle.

Important to note, 401 is a card related problem, and a http error, it (probably) doesnt affect your game account. Its not that if you keep insisting you will lose your account or be banned. You card sure will be useless, i cant say the degree of how it will be useless, but it will, but your account will remain intact, so in an extrapolation, if you have infinite cards, you can try one by one, till one of them works and you can buy crysta.

An advice, once you manage to purchase crysta, make sure to pay in advance 2 or 3 months (obviously if you can). This way, after a month, you can try add for an extra month. Otherwise, you will still have enough to wait more some time till you card become normal. Also, you can hope till your crysta ran out, SE will make a definitive solution, so dont be cheap, if you gonna buy crysta, buy it for more than a month.

401 is an unauthorized http access attempt (which may trigger another chain of events such as locking your card/ip/pc/etc on the server side), i.e. you tried to initiate a transaction without proper authentication/encryption (unlike a 403 where the request sent to the server is correct, but the server actively denies the request) Many times 401s can be resolved by reinstalling the cert on the server side (nothing you can do). 601 is a little more ambigous, basically meaning something somehow went wrong somewhere and the server did not respond at all. With a 401 I would try at a different time, with another browser, clear cookies etc, different pc, different card or use a different payment method (crysta). I didnt read the other 401 thread and don't know if anyone had success with any paticular method, but that's just what I would try. I haven't seen the error myself to greasemonkey it to see if it's SE problem or 3rd party or a combo so I'm just offering what I can. This is probably off course if they are using custom error numbers.

Also, EU may not have as a strict ruleset on financial transactions like the US does due to SOX compliance (thanks enron et. al.) Which may be why it's much more difficult to get someone to shut up and take your money via a financial institution based in the US.

I'm having the same problem. I even went out and put $40.00 on a new prepaid AMEX to see if that would work. Same 401. Been dealing with SE reps for 3 days now. One time I was on hold for 21 minutes until I got someone on the line. I have never had so many issues with a company making it this difficult for me to pay for something. In no place of all my experiences online have I ever felt this meme is more perfect than with SquareEnix:



Edit: After firing up ol' Internet Explorer, I was able to get it to work first time. I'm guessing my firefox's adblock and noscript (even though I gave the site permission) were somehow interfering. Anyway, time for the multiple hour updating. See ya in game.

Best of luck to you. I just went through this myself. I noted everything I did in the other thread. If it helps, cool but as you aren't in the US, your payment issues are probably different than my own were despite the same error code.

However, you and Calipso should probably collaborate as your issues are more likely to be similar as you're both Canadian.

1month and 2week of afk and bam no more 401!!! alrdy bored ingame tought -_-

I'm gonna go ahead and recommend crysta, for some reason its the only way I can renew w/ any of my debit/credit cards. Went thru the whole 401 issue a little over a month ago and after waiting 48 hours it let me renew w/ crysta but after it still 401'd me for direct pay. This past month did same thing, 401 for direct pay, accepted crysta instead.

401 is a 24 hour block, not a 30 day block. Every 401 error you get restarted the 24 hour block.

yeah it work with cysta wich i tryed several times before at diferent days but only worked after over 30days from my initial spam with credit cards

yeah: calling *** as I've gotten several 401's when I didn't have enough funds on my card (didn't realize it at the time, did some poor math) and was able to get by it.

I seriously wonder about people sometimes.

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/39981/error-code-401/

And here we have jet, repeating the

"If it's not a problem for me, it's not a problem for anyone."

bull. Despite not having any trouble paying himself, he still takes time out of his day to spew this garbage in every payment error thread.

Seriously, go away. SE said there's a block. People(including myself) have had a valid payment method refuse to work one day and work after time elapsed. SE representatives have quoted how long the block is in some cases. We don't know the extent of their fraud prevention system, but it is pretty obviously a thing.

I'm refuting your anecdotal evidence with my anecdotal evidence, I didn't say anything about people not having an issue, just calling bs on the concept that the 401 = instant block, nothing more.

I got a 401 two days in a row, and then swapped from Firefox to IE just to do the crysta payment.

It worked fine

Your mileage may vary, of course, but it worked for me. Same card, same everything except browser.

It's not like people are just pulling this out of their ***. Many, many people including myself have been told directly by SE that a 401 error places a 24 hour block on your account (or longer if you try more). Heck even their 601 errors will come up with something like "further attempts will lead to restrictions on your account". Whether SE has the right information or not is up for debate, but that's the information they're passing on.

I've personally obtained two brand new credit cards since Oct 2 when my first account ran out and I can't get those ones to work either. I've gotten my CC to work a whole of twice since about June this year and I've just given up and gone to playing other games that will actually take my money.

This worked once for me and made me a little excited, but since that time (about a month ago) I haven't had any luck with IE, or any browser for that matter :/

SE hasn't had a great track record of telling the truth, so I don't really trust them.

I quite recently JUST dealed with that service of Square Enix, and they told me from multiple people on their customer support that 401 error is typically a 24 hours block that reset everytime you get it again. This proven true for me and a few others, that doesn't mean it has to be for you. But that doesn't mean you have to be a *** about it, eh?

Not sure why you quoted me instead of Jet, I was saying essentially the same thing you just said.

Not being a *** aboot it, eh?