Connecting #1....#2....

Basically for 2 days now I haven't been able to connect during the afternoon (around 6~7:30 pm) then after an hour or two it suddenly lets me connect....normally I wouldn't mind if it wasn't during the day when I actually want to play the game.

So any suggestions/fixes for this? My ISP is shaw cable in BC canada, they don't block any ports or anything like that, game worked fine about a year ago when I played, and it worked fine for about a week before this problem started occurring.

Other than the fact that high traffic might be causing various ISP issues somewhere, all I can personally suggesst is flushing your DNS cache.

If you're running Windows, hold the WinKey, and press R to bring up the Run box, type in ipconfig /flushdns and press Enter.

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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

I had this problem quite often on my old computer, hasn't cropped up yet here (crosses fingers). As you noted, it usually does connect eventually, but it takes forever. I never did figure out *why* it did that (it wasn't DNS issues, at least - did try that), but there were two ways I found to try and deal with the problem.

First, you can add a flag to the shortcut that causes it to bypass the updater and go straight to the loading screen. Right click on the shortcut and hit properties. The 'target' box should have something along the lines of this in it:

"C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe"

At the end, after the quote mark, add the flag -project "coh", so it looks like this:

"C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CohUpdater.exe" -project "coh"

This will enable you to get into the game without dealing with the updater. (If it doesn't work, try deleting the quote marks around 'coh' - I'm not sure whether they're supposed to be there or not.)

However, this will fail if there actually is an update to be downloaded, since you won't have the same version as the server and you'll get an error message when trying to connect. You'll need to have a second shortcut to the updater (just copy the existing one) without the -project "coh" flag so that it actually tries to update.

Of course, then you'll have to deal with the connection issue. The only way I found to try to get around this is rather a kludge. I noticed that on rare occasions, the updater would actually connect quickly even though it usually took forever. Thus, if you just put the mouse over the updater and hammer the button for 20 seconds or so to launch 30 or 40 copies of the updater, *one* of them will usually connect in relatively short order. I usually ended up spreading them all out over my desktop so that I could see the text in the lower left corner of each one and tell if it had connected. Once one has connected, you can just close all the rest and let it update. Don't worry about more than one trying to connect - on the rare occasion where that happens, the second one will just pop up an error box about the updater already being running and no harm will be done.

Hello,

I am presently having this problem also. I have seen this before, and the only thing that worked was to put in the shortcut to bypass the updater. It usually clears up by itself, which makes me think its not a problem with my system.

In my case, I have a DSL line with my local phone company. I have access to the Internet just fine, and so should be able to get to the game servers as well. Perhaps there is a better way for the Updater to work so we could see what is really happening?



Stormistress

Some people (including me) reported this problem in the Mac forum a couple weeks ago, including the apparent time-dependence. It stopped as mysteriously as it started. No other info for you, sorry.

There is also a recent post about additional UDP ports that need to be open. Perhaps your firewall is preventing a connection?

Linky: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=225106

This happens occasionally to me. I close the shortcut, give it a bit of time..if it doesn't start, rinse and repeat. Usually, after 3 tries it connects. Sometimes it takes more.