the issue is NOT port forwarding. i have now currently done these things: manually opened ports. reinstalled the game. updated windows. turned off all firewalls popup blockers and malware services. updated my drivers. and finally changing my DNS to google's (8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4) public dns. still no change. the same account works perfectly fine on my ps4, so i still feel like its an issue on my system somewhere. i am becoming annoyed, as it is increasingly difficult to contact Sqeenix support