And they shall know me by the rubberbanding...

So, up until tonight, I'd been extremely frustrated with my ISP, computer, or anything else that might cause an excess of rubberbanding.

Some of you may be aware already, but I'll rewind a bit here for john q public. Feb 15th, I logged into CoH and got a rude surprise when I teamed up for a Posi 2. In the last mission, I got thrown into rubberband-hell for a good twenty minutes, plus. From a point inside the dam, through to the end of the mission, everyone was rubberband fighting.

Now, after that experience I was rather upset. But it never got better. At one Talos Rikti Invasion two nights later, I had two mapserver dc's and two coh.exe errors. All in one event, and the last pair of dc's weren't while I was on the hill, by that point I had made it close to the train.

Anyways, long story short, this hasn't stopped, and myself, real-life & ingame friends, and Paragon Tech Support haven't figured this out.

However, tonight I came across something on my ISP's website that was like an epiphany. I'm on a very tight budget, so I use Cricket Broadband. It's slow, but it's cheap. Well, like any other broadband service from a cellphone company, they cap you at (in my case) 5 gigabytes of download a month. In the case of Cricket, they don't charge extra if you go over.

Oh no.

They dethrottle your connection. It's been estimated at 100 kb/s. Not a healthy bandwidth for an MMO.

So, anyways, while this isn't proven, I'd bet money my sync issue will dissapear on March 1st.

As to why I'm posting this here, well, I was concerned that if I didn't fix this I would no longer be able to attend tf's with ingame friends that have missed having me along, as well as the 3v3 pvp tourney coming up. Suffice to say, this is a hope and a warning. It's possible I'm wrong and this won't change.

But, as I said, I'd bet money come March 1st that I'll be able to team again.

Until then, I won't be around. After that, I hope to be back to teaming with the crazy and cool folks on ShF, LB, and LFA again.

So, adios, I see a sunset needs riding off into. Until we meet again.

@Raven Lord

PS- I also want to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone who was on any tf that I used as a stresstest that inevitably failed. A few of these, I was able to get back in and quit to rescale the tf to the remainder, most I wasn't. I'm truly sorry, and if any of my fellow Liberty peoples have a bone to pick with me, I fully understand.

Have you talked to your ISP about this?

Cause if you haven't, then maybe you should, just to be sure. If indeed it is your ISP, heck, I'll just switch servers, if possible.

@Tax E - RIP CoH 2012

I think you're probably being harder on yourself than any of us would be.

But, Tax E. raises a good point. Try another server, try other powersets/characters.

That being said, March 1 is Tuesday, and IHOP is giving away 3 free pancakes! http://www.ihoppancakeday.com/

So, since you're on a budget - and aren't we all - get yourself a free breakfast, then log on and confirm your theory or continue to be puzzled and frustrated.

You might also try heading to a cyber cafe - if you've a lap top - to eliminate your connection as the culprit.

Let me share with you an incident that happened to me, maybe 5 years ago. My very first toon, an elec/elec blaster, also known as Ukase Rex, on Liberty server got deleted. For whatever reason, I could play the very low level toons without any hassles, but my level 26 blaster couldn't move without rubberbanding. It was so frustrating, I logged him and tried a lowbie.
After getting to level 7 or 8 on the lowbie, I figured I'd try the original Ukase Rex again, and still no change. I was so frustrated, I deleted him. Come to find out, it wasn't the character, but my hard drive beginning to go out on me. An hour later, I got the blue page of death (now an archaic error message, I imagine) because my hard drive crashed.

My verbose point is to be more patient than I was - there are sooooo many different things this could be. As for me, I hope you're right - as the cheap internet is something you could change, if you chose to do so. Then, you'd know what the deal was and could understand it.

Hope ya figure it out and come back to us soon!

But, Tax E. raises a good point. Try another server, try other powersets/characters.

That's not what I meant by server. I meant Internet Service Provider. I would get a new one completely. Heck, I've done it before myself. Switched companies and better plans. Booyah.

@Tax E - RIP CoH 2012

Just got off the phone with the ISP, they confirmed I went over the download cap (by over 2 gb). Reinforces what my gut feeling was on the source of the problem.

@Tax E: On the subject of changing from this usb phone modem to honest to god cable broadband, I would soooooooo do it, in a heartbeat - IF I could afford it. Atm, I can't. So, alas, I'm stuck on this podunk little thing. But, on the bright side, it's better than no Internet at all.

@Ukase: The Blue Screen of Death is not dead, it's merely less common. I know I've seen one myself in the last six months. Sidenote- Microsoft, as an April Fool's gag, 'announced' that they would allow you to reconfigure your Blue Screen to be any color you wished it to be. This was quite some time ago, but I always thought it was funny as hell. Me, I would've changed it to be a nuclear mushroom cloud .jpg, just for laughs. Maybe attach a soundbite of a 5-year-old saying "boooooooooom!", too.

Oh. And thanks for the heads up on the free pancakes... might have to do the 1800's New York voting thing - "Vote Early, and Vote Often" - I've got plenty of beard I can shave off in increments to change my looks between servings. Lol. So, maybe, for me, it won't be just three of them!

Lord knows I can eat enough breakfast in one sitting to choke a Canadian logger.

@Raven Lord (who's still more of a Denny's kind of guy, but IHOP's ok)

Alas, Denny's will only give you a free meal on your birthday.
They'd actually stopped the program in '96, I think, but for whatever reason picked it back up. The Grand Slam ain't bad at all, especially when it's free!

So, testing the game is mostly complete.

To put it simply, I told support to close the ticket, the game's back to normal.

See you all on more than recently. And hopefully, I'll even see some of you at the 3v3 team pvp event tomorrow!

@Raven Lord