Recently I've been unable to join any multi-player games at all. This was not a problem in the past so its very unusual that its only doing it now. The game tends to hang on the Login Accepted screen (In bot games it does continue past this point, so my connection to the Uber server is likely ok). I don't run any mods. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I wouldn't mind going through every possible problem again just to make sure I haven't forgotten anything. The usual suspects didn't apply (Port Forwarding, Firewall Rules etc), but its usually something simple for these problems. SOLUTION - You must play through a VPN such as Hotspot Shield. Virgin Media has blocked the ports that PA uses for multi-player. They will not unblock them on your request however. You may experience some additional lag when playing the game however this is a small price to pay for uncensored internet access. Good luck getting back to the field commanders!
An ISP blocking ports? Sounds like a good reason to start shopping around for alternatives. I've never heard of that before though, I've heard of blocking things through DNS, packet sniffing, throttling and other nastiness. But never ports. You sure it isn't your router or something?
Apparently this is nothing new. We've had problems connecting to other servers and clients, but we actually solved this issue when tackling a problem with Minecraft. As it turns out, blocking illegitimate traffic does have its downside, and since Virgin Media in particular being headstrong in the blocking of torrent sites etc, they've inadvertently blocked legitimate access that some services and clients use. In all, its their techs being lazy really. Instead of spending time on the issue, they've just cast a big net and caught a few dolphins with their tuna, in a manner of speaking.
I think this is a problem with your firewall or something because I'm with virgin media and I don't have this at all.
You have cable no doubt since you stream, there would be different restrictions in place. Back when I had cable none of our traffic was filtered. As a national customer, we're now at the mercy of our ISP filtering traffic from our copper line. A ping-trace shows an extra listing from router to hop 1, which a cable customer does not have as they go directly to a Virgin exchange. If it was a firewall issue, disabling the firewall would solve it. If it was a local port issue, opening ports or setting up a port forward would solve it. If it was a speed issue or line quality issue, it'd be a faulty line. Since I can ping my friends local clients fine but cannot connect using some services then its out of my hands and in the hands of the service provider, who in this instance have automated their traffic management. To solve the issue, they won't be selling their service to non-fiber homes in the near future, which I can understand since they have no control at one point or another over a customers connection.
what router/modem do you have? ALSO are you on a dorm/shared internet. The reason I ask is cheap router/modems have low onboard RAM so along with its OS it doesn't leave much for routing tables and this limits the number of concurrent connections. Games generally have a wide portrange and try to connect to alot of servers to see what games are up/available. This can cause issues... http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_chart&Itemid=&chart=124 Equally on a shared connection, the number of connections a server can "allow" is low. These two issues caused no end of problems for HoN's techsupport (when I did it)
There's only two of us use our router (and it wasn't cheap ) so we did rule that out earlier. Still I'm glad you posted that comparison chart, we're certainly in the market for a new router this year since the Infinity roll out will be hitting us soon and I've never given much praise for the routers companies tend to hand out.
I appear to be having this issue with Virgin Media as well. Annoying, but will be back on BTInternet in a few weeks.
I'm on BT now and I am very happy with my connection. It is a million times better, faster and more reliable than Virgin without a doubt.
Really? I have virgin media cable at 50 mbps and it's superb (and no issues whatsoever with PA or anything else). I have used Infinity at another address and that was also fine, however I can't really say it's better than Virgin's cable service at least. As for them filtering to prevent file sharing- that is off the back of a ruling that is applicable to the *entire UK* and for *all ISP vendors*. If the filtering is really what is causing the issue, then expect the problem to occur on BT and any other network you choose down the line- Virgin were simply the first to implement their filters (which as so easy to circumvent it's silly- I don't think they wanted the expense / hassle of it any more than their customers).
