Curse

Gripickle · Apr 22, 2011, 10:34 PM // 22:34

Greetings. i have not had problems like this with a game since the early 90s, and it has become BEYOND ridiculous. I picked up guild wars last night so i could play with a friend who has been hounding me for years to try it. Well instead of playing last night we spend the entire night trying to get this bloody game to connect to the internet. i have been through every tutorial/tips/technical help i can find, and NOTHING i try will work.

I am behind a router, but everything that is suppose to help hasnt. Here is a list of what was tried:

ports 80 and 6112 have been opened (80 was already opened for general web use like one most modems, but we even tried disableing that, and opening the port directly from a port forward for guild wars. neither worked
exceptions to both the game and the specific ports were added to the windows firewall exceptions
the windows firewall was turned right off
the computer were we trying to get to work was placed into the "DMZ" of the router, placing it outside of the router's own internal firewall
the computer was hooked directly up to the modem, by passing the router completely
the game, which was installed off a disk that has been known to work, was redownloaded and reinstalled with the digital copy from the website directly
multiple accounts were tested, the one we had just set up, as well as my friends who has had one since launch

THe game connects and gets to the login screen, even an update was installed from the disk version we first put on, but the minute you acutally try to log into the game, it either tells us the information we typed in was incorrect (the email address and password ARE 100% correct, as i was looking at the information on the other monitor with my login creditals. i left the "character from this account" both blank, and put in "none", niether of which had any effect.), or if i tried to start a new account and attach the code to an existing one (dont know why i would have to do this twice, as i did the exact same procedure within the ncsoft members area website), then it tells me error 27, which is appearently a router issue, though i dont know how that is possible as we still get the same issue when the router isnt even part of the equasion.

This machine is under a year old, and is a gaming rig that can play any game currently on the market with all options turned on without issue, so the machien itself would have no problems running it. I have also run a whole slew of online and multiplayer games on this exact setup and NEVER had any issues. Everything from WOW to the new RIfts, and i never had to do anyting save install and login.

I have even tried everythign listed about with my second machine, another one that is capable of running everything current without issue, and have the same problem.

I have completely run out of ideas ,as i have tried every solution on the net i have found, and not one of them made any difference whatsoever. We have spent over 6 hours trying to get this game to run, and are no closer. Any extra help would be good, as im pretty much at the point of just wanting to get my money back. i have a game here i cant even log into, isnt much use to me.

grim.

TheGizzy · Apr 22, 2011, 11:05 PM // 23:05

If you registered the keys with an NCSoft account, then the email address for login is going to be your master account [email protected] - no .com

If you can't even log in, I suggest contacting support - [email protected] to ensure you have not inadvertently been locked out of the account due to confusion over the keys/NCSoft account affiliation.

If you have been able/are able to actually log in and get to the character creation screen and create a character (I'm assuming from your post you have not yet been able to create one), then please know that there is a known issue for some users attempting to connect to the actual game servers in the US/to the US servers because of a problem AT&T is having with how they're routing some connections into the Guild Wars servers. This is not something NCSoft/ANet has control over... it's up to AT&T to fix.

There are three different servers involved in the login process... when you first launch the game, it's the update server. When you type in your credentials, it is the login server. When you select a character to play, it is the gaming server. The issue I mentioned relates specifically to the gaming server and, again, is only affecting some users connecting to the US servers.

Gripickle · Apr 22, 2011, 11:29 PM // 23:29

Well i just put on windows servie pack 1 (reinstalled it), and now i can get on...i dont know if that makes any sense, or even if it had anything to do with it, but i am in now. Very, very strange. I'm located in canada, and am on shaw cable, so i dont know if the AT&T has anythign to do with it, but who knows. I'll keep looking here, cause even though it is working, the solution doesnt seem to make sense. Don't get me wrong, im very happy its working, just after spending so much time trying to get it to work, and then a "hail marry" pass of reinstalling service pack 1 fixing it just seems strange.

Thank you very much for your help though, your much more thorough and a great deal quicker to respond than actual tech support. Can you think of any services within the service pack 1 that might have something to do with the game working? i just saw some post of a post of a post on some board i cannot even remember now and tried it more out of angry frustration than anything else. This solutions feels like the ending of lost...a lot of lead up to an ultimately unsatisfactory ending.

grim.

TheGizzy · Apr 22, 2011, 11:53 PM // 23:53

I should have been more specific... I was being a typical ethnocentric American, I guess. LOL The servers are actually the American district hosting servers, not the US. So Canadian & Mexican players would be automatically directed to those as well.

Given all you went through, I almost hate to say this - but I think the SP1 thing may have been a coincidence. The issue with connecting to the American district servers has been going on, somewhat intermittently, for about 4 weeks now. Two weeks ago after moving myself to the Euro servers, I was able to connect again. I also ended up forcing my ISP into assigning a new IP address by changing my MAC address on my router - and miraculously, I was once again able to get onto the American servers. Just the few digits difference in my IP address got me off of the bad AT&T route.

With that said... for the last two days I've again been experiencing the same intermittent connectivity issue. I actually went to switch areas in-game right after I responded to your post and couldn't connect to the servers again. LOL The connection is working again now. So it's possible that you are also affected by the routing issue. If so, then it was a coincidence... you were being pathed badly and now the path is clear again. Downside is, it's probably going to continue to be an issue unless you switch to the European districts once actually in the game and stay on them until ANet/NCSoft is able to smack AT&T around enough that they fix the problem.

Euro district outposts are pretty empty, and that can be its own annoyance if you're wanting to buy/sell things from/to other players, so my advice would be to move between Euro & American districts as needed (like for trade), but be sure that when you log off for the day you are in a European district and not in your Guild Hall (assuming you join a Guild). Reason being - many Guilds originally created in the US are automatically hosted permanently on the same servers AT&T is failing to route to.

Also, I know that [email protected] is often slow to respond, and almost non-existent on weekends... but you can also kind of nag them via their Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/NCsoft_Support - if you don't hear back within a reasonable time frame. I feel that NCSoft relies way too heavily on automated response and keyword recognition templates, so I'll generally file a ticket and then start following up by phone (M-F 12-5pm Eastern) and Twitter.

This forum is also an excellent source of player-to-player support. With most issues, chances are excellent SOMEONE here has experienced it or has some ideas for fixing it. Guru is an awesome resource!

One other bit of diagnostic info... the issue with the American district servers also seems to affect the wiki.guildwars.com and guildwars.com - in other words, when players can't get into the game with the aforementioned issue, they also can't connect to the sites. So it's a good quick way to see what's happening if you suddenly find yourself stalling out at a 0% connection screen. If the sites are unavailable, the pathing is borked again. You can keep trying to load the sites until they connect, and that will let you know you can likely get back into the game again. That's what I've been doing today. LOL

Gripickle · Apr 23, 2011, 05:41 PM // 17:41

K good to know...we still havent heard back about the compromised account, so maybe ill buzz them on twitter. I'm still managing to log in, and so far no disconnects, so fingers crossed. Thanks again for the help.

Grim

oxcon · Apr 28, 2011, 11:32 PM // 23:32

Wow... With all these problems, maybe they should switch and get hosted by Verizon

davehall · Apr 29, 2011, 12:19 AM // 00:19

Create a new or copy the existing shortcut for GW then add the -image switch to it and run that. It will take a bit of time for the game to completely download the .dat contents. After the download has completed, launch the game using the old shortcut.