A System Error Has Occurred! A tale of woe about HTTP error -2146697208

[Raist]

After contacting support, we discovered that the culprit was my anti-virus program. Avast! has a feature called Web Shield, and while that was on, it was preventing me from using the launcher correctly. I feel right silly for not discovering this sooner. Hope this information can help anyone else in a similar situation.

May want to turn it back on and add exceptions for FFXIV... kind of defeats one of the main purposes of an antivirus if you are disabling protection for your web browsing.

Open the Avast control panel (double-click the icon in the systray) and got to Settings, then Active Protection, and click the Customize link for Web Shield, then the Exclusions link on the left side up near the top.

Add a few URL's with wildcards for the game:

http://199.91.189.*
http://124.150.157.*
http://124.150.158.117*

That should cover the two subnets used for both the Canada and Japan subnets, as well as one specific address used during sign-on in case they get referenced directly somehow. You could also add one specifically for the frontier server as well, in case it ever gets it's IP changed outside of those subnets:

http://frontier.ffxiv.com/*

You should also add exceptions for the games executables as well in the processes section. Can just browse into the program folders to where FFXIV is installed. Defaults should be:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\boot"
"C:\Program Files (x86)\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\game"

Add all the executables in the root of those folders...something like 6 of them total, all starting with FFXIV.

Click the OK buttons to apply and back out of the control panel. That should pretty much future proof you from any future false positives against the game's functions for a while.

[AmykinsCatfood]

After contacting support, we discovered that the culprit was my anti-virus program. Avast! has a feature called Web Shield, and while that was on, it was preventing me from using the launcher correctly. I feel right silly for not discovering this sooner. Hope this information can help anyone else in a similar situation.

OMG. HOURS AND HOURS of searching for a fix for this goddamn error and it was Avast. *headdesk*