I know I was a little harsh on Illinois yesterday, so I want to make it clear that Final Fantasy XI isn’t off the hook. Their cancellation process is plain bad.

Like I said yesterday, you have to go through the PlayOnline Viewer to officially stop getting billed for the game. But the viewer, as I discovered yesterday, isn’t a separate download, unless you’re using Vista. You have to have the game installed to use it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is where the confusion initially arose.

If you don’t want to play a game anymore, you’ve probably uninstalled it, and probably PlayOnline along with it. Reinstalling a game like FFXI is no small feat, though I’m not clear at what point you can get to your account to stop your subscription, assuming you know where your install CDs are in the first place.

Square-Enix’s cancellation service may be awful, but I still don’t like the Illinois law. I’m not against the government mandating that businesses do things. I am against the passing of laws that are poorly researched and ineffective.

Case in point: I’ve read about people cancelling their account through the support chat at playonline.com. So, you can cancel your account through the web page, which is what the law mandates. So Square-Enix is already in full compliance with the law, and won’t even have to think about changing their lousy cancellation process.

These are the sorts of things you should spend ten minutes googling before you call up your buddy in the state legislature.

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