I am a returning player too. I was so sure that my characters were gone. I deactivated my account around October after a year of inactivity and uninstalled FFXI to make room for WoW. It was ok for awaile but it just got boring after a time. Something about FFXI taunted me to come back.
So I re-installed everthing last week. Used the old discs so the Updates were like half a day long
I plugged my POL ID and anxiously selected reactivate. And it worked! I was able to retrieve my Content ID after almost 6months.
I was so happy!!!
