I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.

The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.

At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.

I played on my Playstation when I played a few years back, fortunately it was a seamless process! As parent comment said though, subscription process was almost user hostile for some reason.

So you didn’t even get to the final boss, purchasing a sub.

While I played it I always had this dirty feeling imagining what the backend code must look like. Sends chills down my spine.

I was wondering why the process was so convoluted. I thought it was because I was doing it from my phone and they just had a poor mobile site. Well, apparently they have a poor desktop site that has poor mobile support!

Let me tell you, as bad as the FF14 subscription process is, it's nothing compared to what they had for FF11 back in the day. We have it good!