Any Way To Find Your Original Registration Date?

Is there anywhere online or in PlayOnline that shows your original registration date?

I'm just curious to know when I registered my account - can't remember if it was 2004 or 2005 and it's annoying me.

Confirm Service history on the management page?

I don't know if it tracks the first day of purchase or the first time you logged into it.

Doesn't it tell you the date your expansion was registered?

Thanks for the tip...it only shows the Square-Enix account creation date which was 2009, and doesn't go back before that.


It used to, but not anymore apparently.

PlayOnline some place or another used to show the date; maybe still does. I don't know that anything on the squareenix site ever showed the original date unless your original date was after they moved to using that site.

You can kind of tell in your friend list, though. It's not particularly obvious. Anyway, everyone has a number that you can see in the friend list and that number was incremented by 1 every new account. So if you ask around and compare numbers and dates started, you get get a pretty good idea. I went through an ls asking about this number once and it was kind of neat to see how well lined up and how easily predictable it was for when they started based on that number. It was to the point that when an LS member logged on who wasn't on for the conversation, we'd ask them what their number was and we'd all guess when they started and be pretty close based on the answers everyone else shared earlier.

Somewhat off subject, but I find it rather humorous how many people try to claim to have started in 2002. Then you ask them if they started on the JP client and they answer no. People always seem to want to say 2002 but they don't even really know. NA PC launch was late 2003. PS4 launch was early 2004.

Look at Bank statements? lol

I don't know, but I got the game for christmas 03' and then started jan 04'

POL used to have a page that listed when you purchased/registered expansions. Zilart/CoP were synonym with the creation date of your POL ID.

I'm not sure if this page still exists, it didn't take a lot of digging to find, maybe try to look for it. I'll check if I remember.

I think that page got removed or changed recently to where it doesn't show the date. If you do find it let me know though.

I did find something interesting though. When PlayOnline was first announced, they allowed you to register your username years in advance of any games coming out. I found this on an old email account.



Nov 2000 o.O

It has indeed been removed, it used to be here:



I don't remember at all if there is a way on the management website, this info is kind of sensitive as it's used for Account Restoration. In the worst case, you can get this info from the Support Centre provided you can identify yourself as the original owner.

Do you remember a particular event going on that could help you narrow it down. I recall my year simply because of CoP content was still coming out and it was during the Harvest Festival event.

another option is check POL mails :
- inside POL viewer
POL mail server is a APOP server so once POL viewer get a mail, it will be deleted from the server and stored on your HD
you can't donwload it again
- from X:\PlayOnline\SquareEnix\PlayOnlineViewer\usr\homeXX\EMAIL
(or whatever your FFXI path is)
this is the folder where mails are stored
you can only have these mails stored on your HD if you never formatted it, or if you saved these files when you reformat.
there are files without extension in this folder, some are base64 coded but the olders are plain text
most of them are just .eml files and can be opened with thunderbird (it should decode them on the fly), outlook will not work
if TB can't, you can open them in notepad and use https://www.base64decode.org/ to decode them manually

for me, it was the only viable option to retrieve my Welcome to PlayOnline message (my host provider loose my emails in 2006)

if you never read your mails in POL viewer, great chances that your mails are still on the server
if you have a playonline logo with a number in top-right of your screen, it is the case
TIP : you can download these mails with a APOP client like thunderbird
APOP server : po000.pol.com
port : 51260
of course, you need some login/pass

Checked everywhere on Account Management, nothing. This tickle my autism.

If you never unsubbed you can check when your monthly subscription runs out and that's the day of the month you started.

For example, that helped me remember that I started December 27th, because I got the game for Christmas.