Your Character data may be damaged.

[Kohan]

Why would you contact the BBB or any other external agency about this? That is kind of retarded.

People expect the BBB to be legitimately useful, and to be honest, it's not a stupid assumption. The organization is supposed to help put an end to poor business practices. It does, but only if there's a significant amount of complaints, and it's worth the organization's while to actually do an investigation.

It's like trusting the cops will always be there when you need them. Extremely unlikely, but wouldn't it be nice?

The BBB won't do anything in this regard, and Square-Enix already had a terrible rating with them (last time I checked). The complication is, as you've discovered, that the majority of the actual work in relation to the game happens in Japan, not the United States.

Don't expect GMs to know how to fix something like corrupted character data, either. That's not what they're trained to do at all. You can contact them (and I believe you and others have), but such a thing is out of their league.

[Yugl]

Instead of any of these things, I'd recommend that you simply disconnect your ethernet cable when this happens. As long as the client has not frozen up, it should inevitably time out.

It's the same sort of work-around people used in the days of PSO BSODs, and it makes perfect sense from a networking standpoint, as well. You're cutting communication with the server, it realizes you're a dropped connection, and if all goes well, it should react like you'd gone through a normal D/C, not harming any of your data.

That's a good idea. I also occasionally crash during load time on PS3. I wonder if it's a console specific issue?

[Yondaime]

Only thing I could suggest is exactly what Kohan said... I'm pretty impatient too, so I've done the exact same thing, force-crashed the game. Pull the plug, the servers will just notice it's a dropped line and not keep any changes to your characters. If it's a forced crash, it doesn't get the same signal, so it assumes you're still online. Just keep calling them and bugging them - if you can't get anything through POL support, call the GM staff through your POL Viewer, they may be able to restore your character to the last known good state. Provided, of course, you know where it was, your characters race, main job and other information. If it wasn't saved to the server properly, it may be seriously lost in the data somewhere, they might have to take a while to search through the data; just tell them whatever you can and give them enough time, they should be able to find it.

[Alterman]

This happened to me about two weeks ago. Still haven't gotten my character back. I contacted a GM through POL and they told me that there wasn't anything they could do until my character was actually online, which is impossible so they couldn't help me.

I then called SE. The first time the guy told me that it was a rare error and my character could be gone forever. He also said he'd have to elevate it to the dev team and it might take 2 weeks to a month. The next day I called (got the same guy) and he told me to cancel my content ID. As far as I know now (I talked to a manager) they said my character was on its way to Japan to get looked at.

tl;dr GM couldn't help me, SE can't help me and they told me 2 weeks to a month to fix it. FML.

[Naash]

I tried to google the same error in Japanese to see if I found anything useful, but does seem like a rare error. A group of people had it back in 2004 but it was apparently a problem on SE's side that was fixed very quickly with a server maintenance, so seems unrelated. Good luck... :/

[Pikarya]

Goodluck seeing a quick fix on this. Remember in 07/08 when people were stuck on the "Downloading Data" screen with LJ/Rolanmart. Took 2 weeks after countless reports of bitching to get anything done.

[Kotomo]

Yeah, others have contacted GM's in game and I gave it a shot. Got nowhere with that. I've tried every possible contact, and the only thing you can do is call PlayOnline support and have them escalate the problem to the developers/server admins.

That's a bit more re-assuring that someone said 2-weeks to a month. I never got an estimated time, and I find that absolutely retarded. Pretty much what I'm whining about is that there should be some sort of regular service procedure for this and it just feels like there is not.

I sent a complaint through BBB because it truly can not hurt. Worst thing that happens is that BBB tells me they were not able to get any kind of response from SE. It's better that I speak up about it, than do nothing at all.

[Sai]

There's a person in my LS who had that error too. It took him 1 week to get it resolved. He called SE initially, and they said it was a rare error and that it'd take some time to work on it. We all nagged him to call SE everyday to check status on it, and so he did. Every day he would contact a GM through one of his mules, and then he would call SE to check status. There's an old saying "The squeaky wheel gets the grease" and it worked out perfectly. Calling them everyday let him get his character back after 1 week.

[S N K]

It seriously wouldn't be hard for them to just rollback your character.

[BlackMoomba]

A member in my LS has had this problem for close to a month now. She's called customer service twice a week since. To her knowledge, their has been no advancement in the recovery of her account. They've told her rollback is not an option. Your pretty much at the mercy of how much the workers at SE give a shit.

[Kotomo]

Well, by some miraculous twist of fate, I went to log in this past Saturday night and low and behold my character was fixed.

http://kotomo.net/pics/koto_back.jpg

I have not been contacted by Square Enix in any shape or form yet which really makes me wonder. So either I got lucky, and the character data got reset by chance, or someone did go through and reset it.

My time out was 3 weeks and I am just happy to have my character back.

[Pikarya]

no soboro??!?!? Congrats anyways on your retrieval.

[Binkie]

Well, by some miraculous twist of fate, I went to log in this past Saturday night and low and behold my character was fixed.

I have not been contacted by Square Enix in any shape or form yet which really makes me wonder. So either I got lucky, and the character data got reset by chance, or someone did go through and reset it.

My time out was 3 weeks and I am just happy to have my character back.

Same thing happened to the char Reizan was talking about. He tried to log onto his char and it was fixed without ever being contacted by SE.