A few weeks ago, a very surprising email was sitting in my inbox. It read: INVITE - FINAL FANTASY XI VIRTUAL MEDIA TOUR. When I initially read it about GUILD WARS GOLD, I will admit that I had to do a double take, as, to me, North American Public Relations and Square Enix just do not seem to mix very often; or perhaps I should say they do not mix often enough! Personally speaking, I have been a constantly recurring character within the world of Vanadiel since the North American launch, but 2009 did not see me firing up PlayOnline on a daily basis - I was taking a break from all of the drama that came with several of SEs banning sprees, as well as the game in general. In the end, I suppose I was also a little bit disenchanted with these absentee landlords who developed the world we lived in, but were missing when it came to maintaining any form of decent communication about GUILD WARS GOLD.

I am sure everyone remembers Thayos and Elmer The Pointy very well written article, "Has Square Enix Banned Logic?" where they scolded SE for their complete lack of communication regarding our latest credit card conundrums. Even earlier than that, we have Thayos "The Silence Of The Devs," where the topic may have been different, but the core theme was definitely the same: "SE needs to speak up." Finally, even earlier than that about GUILD WARS GOLD, we have things like the salvage duping bans, which, while they were applied with good intentions, ended up, once more, exposing those lost lines of communication between SE and their most dedicated player base about GUILD WARS GOLD.

All in all, things looked fairly bleak until I received this invite to the FFXI Virtual Media Tour. I will have to admit, however, that it is fairly depressing when you realize that Square Enix so rarely communicates with their player base, a media tour is considered some kind of developer communication ¨C it is really not!