Hey there fellow FFXI players.

I've had a pretty turbulent on and off relationship with FFXI since it's launch, but lately with all the improvements i've been hoping to make a return once again...

Only problem is that i've moved to China for the year, and my Playonline Viewer can't even update properly. Is it impossible to connect to the playonline servers from China? Are all connections from here blocked? And is there a work around of any sorts?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Couldn't tell you. You could contact support just to ask them if you'll be able to play from China. I played from the Dominican Republic without any issues on and off for a year and a half.

I'm afraid unless someone else lives in China here, they won't be able to help you. We have very few people that visit these forums as it is.

In the meantime, to try to eliminate user-error as a possibility: can you tell us what error you're getting that prevents you from updating POL/FFXI?

It appears to the the horribly ambiguous POL-1160 errors and says that either the network is busy or that i have a connection problem on my end. But i've done the usual connection troubleshooting and i was playing WAR and Atlantica Online no problem a couple weeks ago.

It could be any number of things. SE support opens in about a half hour, if you want to try asking them whether or not you'll be able to connect to the game from China. Hopefully they can at least answer that simple question.

If you contact support via webchat, make sure you have plenty of supplies in your house. Normally, it takes support anywhere between 30-60 years to answer your ticket.

Once they confirm that you can play from China(hopefully), your next step would probably be to contact your ISP to see if they have any restrictions in place for ports 50000-65535(or connecting to the game in general).

Thanks for the advice and help... i missed the live chat window though as i'd gone to bed after my last post.

But in the morning i discovered that it was one of my antispyware processes that was causing the problem and managed to update the viewer no problem, although navigating it is incerdibly slow. However it's better than nothing :)

Any ideas on which server might have a good population for a returning player?

There are plenty of servers to choose from with a good population. I'm from Kujata and with the jobs I've been leveling, I didn't really have much of any problem getting parties. With level synch, it doesn't really matter what the newbie population is, since any one higher than level 10 can synch together. If you happen to choose it, let me know.