To begin with, these issues happen at home and work wifi AND when connected directly to LAN.

Since I started this game 4 years ago, I have never had this issue ever. For the past 4-5 days, I have been having issues connecting at every step of connection. Sometimes it fails to connect to the login server, sometimes I get past the log in server and get into FFXI, it gets stuck on connecting to server lobby. If I get passed server lobby, it will stick on acquiring player data. Then after several attempts to get past all those hurdles and I finally get into the game, I'll get stuck on downloading data once every 5-10 zones and have to start the whole process all over again.

Any help would be tremendously amazing as I am at my wits end about this. I have downloaded the new launcher, I have restarted my router both at home and at work. I have even uninstalled the game and redownloaded it. I have even uninstalled the wireless driver on my laptop and restarted it.