Persistent black screen when launching - spent over 2 days trying to get it to work

So, I've been playing FFXIV on my own computer for many months without problem. I just got the game for my GF and have been trying - for over two days without success - as I have been perpetually frustrated trying to get past the permanent black screen on startup. Interestingly, during one of my MANY attempts to tweak some variable in the below list of things I have attempted to do, I was able to actually get into the game one time - but that was the only time I got past the black screen, and as soon as I quit the game and tried to re-enter, I immediately met the black screen again - all without actually changing any settings in between.

I have researched online and tried everything that is within my power without success. Granted, I'm not highly PC savvy, but I've tried:
Resetting IE. Set frontier.ffxiv.com and ffxiv.com as trusted sites within IE.
Running the launcher as administrator.
Adjusting the settings within the FFXIV_BOOT file various different ways.
Turning off Windows Defender and Windows Firewall.
Uninstalled and reinstalled the entire game several times - including trying to download it from Square-Enix directly, from Steam, and from Amazon.
Updated DirectX files.
Flushed DNS cache.
Tried setting Chrome as default browser, and then back to Internet Explorer (v11).

She has a brand new Alienware laptop that is running Windows 10. Anyone that can help me get this figured out would have my sincere appreciation!

I and several other people who are on RCN are experiencing the same issue. Black launcher, login credentials field not showing up, forums not loading properly, account services timing out.

There's nothing you can physically do, it's a routing/packet loss issue that's unfortunately not getting any attention seeing as its been occurring for 2+ days now. I had to write this up on my smartphones mobile network, as it loads everything fine due to bypassing my ISP.

If it's any consolation, you can get lucky with a few relaunches and have the gui appear, login, and shouldnt have any connectivity issues when playing. Can just keep the game open indefinitely depending on your setup.

I literally have tried to launch the game over a 100 times the past 3 days - and only once did it actually get past the initial black screen and into the game. But when I logged out (without changing *anything*), and tried to re-launch the game, it brought me to the black screen again. I had problems with my original setup last year on my own computer, but nothing like this - it is extremely frustrating to be trying everything I can and not be able to install/play the game I purchased for my GF.

I'm having this same issue with patcher and forums. I had to have an FC mate open this post and tell me what it says >.> (263784673589 reloads later, I can finally reply to raise my hand and say "me too").
I'm also on RCN. Only started happening to me today, though - though I'd noticed the forums slow to load a few days prior (but no patcher issues, till today).
Took me about 6 or 7 restarts of the game for the patcher to either not be a black screen or to finally show at least the login portion of the patcher >_> But if it's going to be as bad as it was for you.... urgh...
I'd be surprised if I can even post this reply...

I'm running into the same issue, also on RCN, and it also started a day or two ago. Here are the results from running a tracert on frontier.ffxiv.com:

Tracing route to frontier.ffxiv.com [124.150.157.190]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

...
2 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms bdl1.wth-ubr1.sbo-wth.ma.cable.rcn.net [10.16.200.1]
3 13 ms 10 ms 12 ms bvi200.aggr2.sbo.ma.rcn.net [10.65.92.101]
4 19 ms 18 ms 18 ms tge0-1-0-0.core2.sbo.ma.rcn.net [207.172.15.147]

5 16 ms 15 ms 15 ms tge0-0-0-1.core2.nyw.ny.rcn.net [207.172.19.221]

6 18 ms 17 ms 16 ms bdle3.border2.nyw.ny.rcn.net [207.172.15.85]
7 16 ms 19 ms 19 ms peering.kddi.com [198.32.160.25]
8 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms nytjbb001.int-gw.kddi.ne.jp [59.128.3.69]
9 76 ms 79 ms 86 ms lajbb001.int-gw.kddi.ne.jp [59.128.3.1]
10 177 ms 176 ms 181 ms otejbb205.int-gw.kddi.ne.jp [203.181.100.57]
11 178 ms 177 ms 175 ms jc-ote301.int-gw.kddi.ne.jp [118.155.197.178]
12 176 ms 177 ms 178 ms 106.187.28.198
13 177 ms 175 ms 188 ms 61.195.56.133
14 177 ms 171 ms 171 ms 219.117.144.78
15 * 195 ms * 219.117.144.49
16 175 ms 175 ms 177 ms 219.117.144.29
17 * 171 ms 173 ms 219.117.147.186
18 184 ms 197 ms 200 ms 124.150.157.190

There is something weird going on once things get into KDDI's network.

[Edit] After a few more tracert runs, the packet drop consistently happens once things hit or go past the IP address 219.117.144.49, which is an IP owned by Square Enix according to a WHOIS lookup?

Try opening up Internet Explorer and then going into the options and deleting the Internet cache (Temporary Internet Files) and the browser cookies. Make sure when you clear the Temporary Internet files, you should uncheck the top option for "Preserve Favourites Website Data" because if you have any book marks for the FFXIV site then it might not clear the cache for it. Please be aware that clearing the cookies will wipe any saved logins, if this is a problem try just clearing the cache first

Apologies if you already did this, but your post only said about having cleared DNS cache and from my experience the few times I've had a black screen on that page, this fixes it every time as it's just corrupted browser cache.

The main login screen is actually an Internet Explorer webpage (even if you have another web browser set as your default), it's also the username that's stored as a cookie in IE so wiping the cookies wipes the saved username.

Hope this helps!

Still no luck. I deleted the Internet cache, and still no luck. Anyone else have anything else I can try?

Try launching another D3D game, and with it running, then launch FFXIV from the launcher. If it runs, you can close the other game and continue playing FFXIV.

Yeah... I know what your thinking. Why would this fix it? Don't ask me. But since the 2.3 patch, I've had do to something like this to get the game working. Otherwise, I get a black screen, or the game crashes when attempting to launch.

If it is the launcher coming up blank and not the actual game itself, this is often triggered by security or script parsing errors. There was a notice in lodestone a while back about he change to SSL3...may need to verify support is enabled within the Windows IE components:

Open the search/run box and run inetcpl.cpl. This is the core Internet Properties page for Windows and IE. Go to the advanced tab and scroll towards the bottom. You should see a section there for encryption standards. Make sure the TLS options are enabled.

Otherwise, make sure you have both .Net 3.5 and 4.x enabled. They started disabling 3.5 by default a while back, but some applications may still use elements that were deprecated in 4.x. You can check it through Control Panel in the add/remove programs module. There will be a link for turning windows features on/off. If the 3.5 option isn't listed with 4.x, it may be under a legacy heading.

As always, run updates and such to make sure your browser tech is current: .Net (windows updates), java, and flash

Hello. I tried what Raist suggested and none of that worked (Java, Flash and .Net were all updated). TLS options were unchecked, but checking them didn't help. I've left them checked. I went into the Control Panel and fully enabled 3.5 (which was only partially enabled) and 4.x, without success. Lauraul, I'm not 100% sure what you mean by another D3D game - can you recommend one or two that I can try? Thank you for both of your responses - especially yours Raist, as it made it clear where I needed to go to verify/update my settings.

And, to clarify, it is the launcher that is fully blacked out (i.e., shy of 3 completely random times), I have never been able to get past the blacked out launcher window.

hmm.... sounds like something is either monkeying with the script engine or the site itself somehow.

See if you can get the EULA from the frontier site:

http://frontier.ffxiv.com/arr_win/eula.html?lang=en

Not much in there too unusual...mostly basic HTML and the text of the EULA. There should be a check box at the bottom and a "Next" button. The button should change it's shade slightly when you hover the mouse pointer over it, and if you click to put a check in the acceptance box, it should light up completely.

If none of that rings true, than something is monkeyed up somewhere with your browser/network/internet. check your internet properties to see if a proxy is running--some malware will lock you through their ad servers or something and it does strange things. For that matter, if you haven't done it yet you might want to hit it with a full scan of malwarebytes or something similar to try to rule out any malicious stuff in the background. To the extreme end, we could look at resetting your protocol stacks and such I guess. Need to run a CMD prompt as admin to call:

Code:

---

netsh int tcp reset c:\tcpreset.log

---

Make note of your IP settings if you are running a static IP beforehand, as this will be resetting things to the defaults.


Crud...almost forgot. May want to double check your router configuration for UPnP settings. It tends to be flaky in some setups (especially playstations), so turning that off may help prevent some other weirdness you might experience down the line as well. Really don't need any kind of port forwarding set up for this game unless you are in an environment with really tight security like work or a university that has their networks configured to block just about everything by default. The router has it's own mechanism for tracking and forwarding your packets properly (NAT, SPI, etc.).

I was able to get the EULA from the frontier site, and was able to click the check box, allowing the "next" button to light up.... so that aspect is working fine.

I'm not very "behind the scenes" computer-savvy.. but I was able to open the gateway to the router (http://10.0.0.1).... but couldn't find any settings that had "UPnP" in the name... is there another name for it? Actually, scratch that, I was able to finally figure out how to check this part of the router... UPnP had been enable, but I switched it to un-enabled.

I also tried what Laraul suggested and installed Lord of the Rings Online and had that open and running while attempting to open FFXIV. Still no luck.

I did not try the netsh int tcp reset c:\tcpreset.log but should I do you think? I'm open to trying about anything.... just frustrating to feel like I'm just stumbling in the dark :-(

Bumping... just in case anyone else has any ideas - since no matter what variations on the above I try, I still can't get the game to get past the all-black launcher screen. Thanks.

Are you on Windows 10? If so, it happened to me when I reinstalled my system (Windows 10) and the game. Give this a try, run the FFXIV launcher as administrator.

Edit: I see you've tried with running as administrator. Hmm that is strange then.

And if you found yourself unable to save the username, ensure Edge/IE11 is not blocking 3rd party cookies.

Quote:

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Add frontier.ffxiv.com to IE's trusted sites list

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From: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...roblem/cvugjtm

May be a long shot, but just to make sure it isn't knackering things up...let's make sure some Java components aren't part of the problem.

Let's double-check that basic javascript is working in Internet Explorer. Even if you don't use it, it's core components are at the heart of Windows and the launcher is using them (it basically is a custom IE browser of sorts). Open Internet Explorer and load this URL:

HTML Code:

---

http://www.javatester.org/javascript.html

---

It is a simple page that should tell you if javascript is working, what version is supported, your browser version, and spits out your user agent string. Hopefully all that is working properly.


Go into your Settings/Control Panel and launch the Java control panel, then move over to the Advanced tab to check on a few things.

One of the first few sections there will be one for browser support. Internet Explorer should be checked and possibly grayed out, and there should be another box for Mozilla Family. Make sure a check is also there for Mozilla support (this isn't limited to just browsers like Firefox---MSIE originally was sort of Mozilla as well). Thoughts here are just in in case for some reason the ID string for IE11 isn't meshing well. It should be reporting itself as a Mozilla 5.0 variant, so this might make it behave properly if there is a problem with the launcher not being able to parse the java components properly. Just something I thought might be worth trying.

A more important option may be listed further down though. Just like the Internet Properties settings for Windows and MSIE, there are also options for SSL/TLS support as well. Scroll to the end of the list on the Advanced tab. You should see some checkboxes for TLS 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 just like in the Internet Properties page for Windows. Make sure to enable those TLS options.


Last but not least, may want to try clearing your caches. On the General tab of the Java control panel, there is a section for Temporary Internet Files. If you click the Settings button, you should see an option for deleting files. Should probably also do this for your Internet Properties as well (inetcpl.cpl from the search/run box, Delete button will be on the General tab there).