Error FFXI-3001 Cannot Connect to server

[NegativeBackflow]

Hello, after a long hiatus from FFXI I decided to come back to the old stomping grounds. I connected, updated, patched, and all that happy jazz, but then once I select a character to log in, I get the error stated in the title.

I have restarted my machine several times.
Waited a few hours.
Restarted and reinstalled POL and FFXI.
I have NOT yet updated to the current content of Abyssea, and do not want to currently update for 9.99 per expansion, when buying the CD itself is 20 dollars (though incredibly hard to find.)

Do I HAVE to have Abyssea in order to connect? Or is it just some technical issue I'm just not yet aware of.

This has been going on for 48 hours, and I would really like to play again. Any help would be grand. Thank you.

[RAIST]

A few times when this happened to me, it was because there was a routing issue getting to one of the servers. Sometimes we start getting a new IP in the mix and it's getting blocked, or it's a bad routing table somewhere out there.

If you are using a firewall, try bypassing it first--if that fixes it, then you need to check your whitelisting and/or port forwarding rules and other security software (something like peerblocker could be mistakingly blocking an IP). If you are behind a router, try connecting directly to your modem and let the ISP autoconfgure your connection (DHCP)--if this fixes it, there may be a stall in the routing somewhere. For that, you'd need to get your ISP involved.

[NegativeBackflow]

Unfortunately for the ISP route, that is not my case. I use RoadRunner, and there are no blocked ports on my system, my ISP connection is also automatically obtained, and I do not use a router. I've disabled my firewalls and have even tried Port Forward, and was able to successfully ping.

[RAIST]

Could be a stalled router in route between you and one of the servers. It's been a while, but through netstat and tracerts, we've identified a downed router in Virginia and Nova Scotia before. RR forced a renew on my IP, shooting me through Charlotte for a while and it got me connecting again. Back then it was IP's in the 124.150.152.0 - 124.150.159.255
subnet. If you're familiar with it, you could try running netstat -b or something to see the IP's that POL is trying to connect to and then run tracerts to see if something funky is going on there, and forward the logs to RR to see if they can find something.

Last time I was getting booted at "downloading data", nothing I did on my system made any difference (I even whitelisted the entire subnet, and disabled ALL security, even virus scanner for good measure. Never contacted RR either--just logged into my SE Account and accepted an updated Terms of Use policy. After that I magically logged in, but that may have just been a fluke as it was during the last POL billing cycle and all kinds of weird things were going on with SE's servers. Still, it might be worth checking out just in case it is something stupid like that.