What Is This?

ok for a while now I would notice this little box pop up in the corner of my chat window what is it for and why does it pop up randomly?

I wondered the same. Even clicked on it but doesnt do anything

Been wondering that forever.

It's from the Japanese client. It allows them to sort through characters to decide which ones they want. They can start typing a word and sort of tab around to pick the kanji that represents the word or keep it in syllable characters. Since you're using the english client sometimes it glitches and pops up, but it is unusable.

Same, I always wondered what that was too, I never see it anymore though.

Exactly what I was going to say. It's the character management console that the JP players get to decide which character set they're about to type in. It allows them to talk in English, Japanese, etc depending on who they're speaking to or the situation.

It'd be cool if we could type in Japanese using one as well, but it seems, as far as SE are concerned, Japanese can speak English but there's no chance English players know Japanese.

Duh, we are all stupid according to SE, didn't you know that?

Yeah no doubt, SE actually took the time to have the coders REMOVE the natural input/ime section of the game when making the USA version. It was such an unesecary gutting that you still see the input box from tiem to time. I think someone got a response out of SE that was something like they didn't want japanese players getting offended. Sounds stupid yeah but race and SE bring out the worst in people anyways.

Compare the number of people in Japan knowing English to the number of English speakers knowing Japanese.

Now you see why we wouldn't need something like that. Its mostly to save space on the installation more than it is to call us English speakers stupid.

Stop jumping to conclusions saying that people are mistreating you.

I could have sworn that it was due to some legality with the IME? Or something like that.

Jaerik said something about this just recently, apparently SE has to pay for every game they sell with IME included. So considering how much use it would get outside of Japan (probably less than 0.1%), it really wouldn't be worth their time.

I speak English, I speak Japanese. I want to speak Japanese to Japanese players and I have to resort to third party plugins to do so, just because SE decided to take it out of the game.

I was speaking on my own behalf. If you don't like that, too bad.

I'm a little touchy at the whole concept of the company trying to screw people over....

I wasn't directing that last statement towards anyone, just everyone.

Keep in mind this is a PRIMARILY Japanese game, and to think that you're going to alienate half the player base right off the bat over smaller installation size or a small fee(If I even believe this) is an extremely shitty move. I shouldn't have to download ***I wouldn't use anyways just so I can type hiragana. Seriously, there is no way there was a good reason to remove it. Even notepad can handle an external natural Input window popping up and inserting the entered hiragana/kanji into it.

The fact is FFXI has Japanese input blocked from other countries being able to use it. Everything except for the language bar that glitches occasinally has been gutted to force players outside of japan to not use japanese in game. There is no reason FFXI would be forced to interpret hiragana as ???? when notepad can.
I have and always will call *** on this one.

EDIT: http://www.petitiononline.com/ffxijpim/