Posted By: Darksaviour69
Posted by Tweeg
A post on the JP PSO Support homepage dated October 20th, 2006 contained the following information, which has been translated and summarized for your convenience. It only applies to the JP versions of the game.
Due to a problem directly related to making the game free to play on May 20th, 2006, many players have been unable to login to the servers. The problem was investigated but no solution was found.
Rather than using anymore resources to attempt solving this problem, the login server has been altered to only allow Version 2 players using a BBA (Broadband Adaptor) to connect.
And now to quote the last line of the post directly:
"On this occasion..deep..apologize."
That said, the JP version of PSO V1 is officially offline.
Source: dreamcast-scene forums