Well, basically I was reading a bunch of blogs written by FFXI players from Odin, and I decided to get my own, though I don't particuarly expect anyone to read this, I'm only really writing this to write it. I used to be a 59THF/NIN, but I deleted that character and quit FFXI on June 30, 2005 (character was created December 23, 2004), so within the last month I have started two new characters, deleted the first to make room for my old THF which the POL tech support said would likely be restored, but they couldn't restore it so now I'm waiting for my first new character to be restored. I guess I'll start with some stories about getting characters restored.
When I was first convinced to try to get my character restored by some members of a linkshell that I am currently in (very nice link, got in thanks to an old friend that I knew from my first character), I was extremely excited about getting my character back. Bad move. Not only does it take forever for a character to be restored, you also won't neccesarily get the character back AND you will have NO motivation to play the game until you get the character back (cause who the hell wants to level an unsubbed level 5 WHM in ronfaure when they have a 59 THF on the way?).
So after a few days of waiting, I get an e-mail saying the character restore was successful. I go and check my character list and. . . . . I have Sodako back, my first new character. I figured since the name of my old character was Sorako, it must just be because the names are similar. Of course, POL are cruel and character restore stuff seems to always happen at 6:10 PM PST. Ten minutes AFTER all the people you can call to have your character restored go away. So, I was forced to wait until the next day. I called again, gave them all the info, and waited. At 6:10 PM PST that night, I had Sodako back. Again.
This time I realized something. When they're gathering info about your character so they can restore it, they ask for job levels. Sodako's WHM and BLM levels were extremely close to Sorakos, 3x and 2x respectively. So, the next time I called POL, I didn't give them those levels. Thankfully, this time they didn't restore Sodako. After about 5-6 days of waiting, I got an e-mail saying the restoration failed. I figured that was probably the end of it, but in the hope that I had the deletion date slightly messed up (when you "delete" a character, apparently for the first 3 months its only "cancelled", not "deleted", and originally I had given POL the date my character was "cancelled"), so I told them the date that my character was past the 3 month point, and that evening I got the same e-mail as before, saying the restoration failed.
During this whole process, one of the POL staff members I talked to had something interesting to tell me.
POL: Have you ever had a character restored before?
me: Well, you guys restored the wrong character twice before and the last time the restoration failed.
POL: Well you can't have more than one successful character restoration on one account regardless of whether we restore the wrong character or not.
me: Ok.
POL: Ok so what was the info for the character you wanted restored?
Guess that policy just kinda gets ignored though they say it anyways.
Sadly, the conclusion was that I couldn't get my old character back, but the good part is, honestly, if I had my 59 THF back and had to start at 59, I would've been a complete noob. The sucky part is really only that I have to level my ninja again, which sucked money wise.
Another part of my return to FFXI was the rise in prices of things. I crapped my pants when I saw someone /shouting for a teleport for 5k. When I left, each teleport was 500. After that, I went to the AH and cried when I saw what some things were going for. Leaping boots used to be a mere 300k, now they're up at 1 million or more! This alone would've been enough for me to want my THF back because I had an emperor's hairpin, leaping boots and a monster signa just kinda sitting there. Not to mention 7 million gil to screw around with.
But, thankfully, several of my old friends still play, so I actually have some connections with high level players and don't have to meet completely new people and risk the inevitable noob "friends" that leech as much help as they can off me.
