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

[Saseal]

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...

[MadFriarAvelyn]

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?