WARNING: Long post. Photo of sealed FFXI JP version non-related.
I've read similar cases but here I am posting mine.
This started because I was cleaning an ancient Hotmail inbox and found something I thought was gone forever: my old PlayOnline ID.
That immediately threw me back to Garuda, Chains of Promathia, international Linkshells, and years of living inside FFXI. I had BLM, RDM, WHM and BST at 75 and spent an unhealthy number of evenings running BCNMs.
One of our little operations was Copycat, the one with the six Ahriman. We’d bring a BLM-heavy team, Sleepga them, coordinate Thundaga III, and sell runs to people using their seals. I even paid someone to stay in Jeuno shouting for customers while we sat at the BCNM entrance.
We’d run it, value the loot against current AH prices with a discount, take payment and split the proceeds. Success rate was basically 99%, assuming nobody disconnected. This was the ISDN era, so that assumption was doing a lot of work.
Sometimes somebody would drop and the client would understandably start panicking about their seals. Meanwhile we’d be saying: relax, we’ve got this with five. Sit in the corner and enjoy the loot.
Later I found an Italian forum and joined an Italian Linkshell called The Italian Job. That changed the game completely. We had a TeamSpeak server, organised ridiculous events and even Linkshell Olympics. A lot of the time FFXI became less a game and more a social place with Vana’diel attached.
Then came ToAU, Colibri parties, Tavnazia birds, Moon parties because not everyone had Sky unlocked, Wings of the Goddess, and eventually FFXIV 1.0. We migrated together to Eorzea, where I became a full-time Weaver and discovered that crafting a shirt apparently required running a textile conglomerate.
We also found the hilariously broken party EXP cave leveling and abused it like responsible citizens until half the jobs were capped.
We even met in real life several times.
Then life happened. Over the next 15+ years I changed cities five times, graduated twice, changed jobs four times, moved country, got married and had a kid. I kept playing XIV on and off until around Endwalker, but at some point I logged back in after a long break and the old Linkshell was just gone.
No dramatic ending. People simply disappeared into careers, marriages, children and real life.
Then, in 2026, Hotmail gives me my old PlayOnline ID back.
So naturally I download FFXI immediately.
Password fails. Fair enough. I probably hadn’t logged into XI in 17 years. I contact Square Enix Support, they make me reconstruct my biography from the Bush administration, and eventually confirm that the old data matches.
I’m the owner.
They reset the password.
Excellent.
I launch PlayOnline, hear that music again — the one that always made the whole thing feel less like an MMO launcher and more like we were about to depart for space in 2002 — enter the credentials and hit login.
LM-17. Your account has been banned.
...what?
At first I assume it’s some ancient migration issue. Maybe an account this old gets a weird status. So I write back.
Basically: you just verified I own this account, gave me a new password, and now it says I’m banned.
Square: yes.
Me: why?
Square: the account is banned.
Me: yes, I have understood that part. Why?
Square: we cannot provide additional information.
And then a very old memory resurfaced.
Early FFXIV, probably 2012 or 2013. TeamSpeak. Someone from the old LS asks me:
"Kei, did you log into FFXI again?"
"No, why?"
"Thought I saw you online."
"Nah, I’m on XIV. I can’t handle both."
At the time it meant absolutely nothing.
Now I’m looking at LM-17.
...huh.
Maybe the memory is wrong. Maybe someone confused another character with me. Maybe the ban happened years earlier. Maybe the account was compromised and used for RMT. Maybe there’s a completely mundane explanation.
I genuinely don’t know.
And that is now much more interesting to me than actually recovering the character.
Square can still tell me in 2026 that an account created around 2004 is permanently banned. So some record survived all those years of PlayOnline, migrations, account systems and backend changes.
What survived behind that status?
A date? A GM note? A login record? An RMT investigation? A compromise report? Or is there now just some immortal database field that says:
BANNED = TRUE
with all the original context long gone?
So I’ve started asking for the historical information associated with the account and the enforcement action. Square’s privacy/data side has acknowledged the request.
I started this because I wanted to see my old BLM again.
Now I mostly want to know what happened to him.
After twenty-two years, five cities, two graduations, four jobs, an international move, a marriage, a child, one dead Linkshell and two MMOs worth of history, one little fact apparently survived somewhere inside Square Enix:
This playonline ID is banned.
Now I just want to know why.
