New player, I need help, timeout errors are driving me crazy

I am consistently getting timeouts at exactly 30 minutes, always with the FFXI-4002 error message. Sometimes I can re-connect via POL, other times it will crash and I have to start from scratch. I bought the game on Steam, this all happens regardless of whether I run POL through Steam or through Windower, which I separately installed. I think I have read all the connection caveats. I'm running borderless windowed and do not change focus. My system is a year-old 12th gen Intel running Win11 with an RTX 3090 GPU, latest driver. I play FFXIV without issue on this same system, as well as many other games including a few other MMOs. My broadband is rock solid.

I have this strange theory the problem is related to my having both FFXI and FFXIV on the same Square Enix account, and FFXIV has a known 30-minute AFK timer. But I'm not logged into FFXIV when I'm playing FFXI. Could Square Enix be confused? Extensive searching has not found any other description of this precise situation. Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

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I have this strange theory the problem is related to my having both FFXI and FFXIV on the same Square Enix account, and FFXIV has a known 30-minute AFK timer.

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There is no connection. FFXIV's timer is for FFXIV. The servers are entirely seperate and there is no way for this to happen. Most likely your connection is being dropped for outside reason. ISP related possibly. Especially if you're actively playing and not just idle. FFXI has its own idle disconnect feature in Playonline under the global settings. But this will only happen if you are idle. This setting can also be controlled in game by going to config on the main menu > global.

If you're not idle when this is happening it is almost certainly some kind of outside interference. Parental controls on the PC or internet connection, settings on the router, or something else.

I have checked and double-checked that the disconnect settings in both POL and in-game are OFF. And I am definitely not idle. DC has happened in the middle of combat, or while running, or while in NPC dialog, or while doing inventory management, basically anything. There is always a delay between when I see the red ball next to my character name, at which point I know I'm DC'ed from the server, and when I get the actual error message; this could be anywhere between 10 seconds and a couple of minutes. I trust my PC and my network, whatever is going on is unique to FFXI. I don't currently know where else to look.

did you turn off the network check?

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/t...hlight=network

the network settings at the playonline startup menu > Network check > Set to Off (Reccomended)

I got it to work, meaning no more DC's, but the steps were not intuitive.

First off, in the POL network settings, I had to set the Connection check ON, which is the reverse of the default and recommended setting. Second, in my Win11 Device Security settings, I had to turn off the "core isolation memory integrity". I don't like this, because it is an implicit security risk, however small. The alternative would be to set up a virtual box and run POL inside that, and I'm not prepared to put the time and energy into that process right now.

So why was this necessary? Because POL's client hardware detection is fundamentally broken, and it can't adapt its passive network detection to very modern systems with some combination of super-fast CPUs, super-fast GPUs, and super-fast network speeds. Square advises players that FFXI on Windows might not work if the client system is too weak; however they fail to mention there is a different set of problems if the client system is too strong.

Buried inside POL is a third-party piece of code they use to detect system and network hardware configuration, something they got in the mid-2000s from SourceForge. It uses a 32-bit driver named sysinfo.sys, the same name a lot of other people once used for other things, including malware. It does not install on a Win11 system if the core isolation memory integrity is on, and POL gives the user no message saying it wasn't installed. Without that driver, POL has no clue what the user's system looks like. Unfortunately, the driver's author took it out of the public domain circa 2009, so Square can't get an update for it. There are multiple better ways supplied by MS to do this task, but Square hasn't updated POL to use any of them. Bottom line: If POL can't get its client system identification to work, it has an internal 30-minute shutdown in place, and the only way to suppress that is to force the network connection check ON via the setting, even though I doubt it actually does anything else. A number of hours of trial-end-error testing and poking around led me to this finding. Hey Square, I hereby rename POL to POS. :)

It wasn't my system or my network at fault.

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First off, in the POL network settings, I had to set the Connection check ON, which is the reverse of the default and recommended setting.

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Normally this has to be OFF or it will cause connection issues. Sooo yeah lol.

Do you have gigabit or something? I'm getting 630Mbps down (which is considerably higher than the 500 they promise me) , and I'm playing on a new, modern machine (socket AM5 AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12 core / 24 thread CPU) and haven't had any issues.

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It does not install on a Win11 system if the core isolation memory integrity is on,

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Some logitech driver has been preventing me from enabling this, so maybe this has something to do with why I'm not having a problem lol.