This will be a redundant post for my Twitter friends. Sorry for the rehash.

But to other regular readers, you know how excited I’ve been for Rift and might be wondering why I’m not posting about Beta 3.

Unfortunately I’ve been unable to participate in Beta 3 due to an error I keep getting when I try to patch. Last week, before Christmas, I ran the patcher in anticipation of Beta 3 and all was well. Then Monday night, the night before the new beta phase started, I ran it again and got an error #2005 – Couldn’t connect to the Authentication Servers. I figured the servers were just offline but when I heard other folk had been patching I grew concerned.

As well I should have. The problem persists. Trion’s Tech Support was unable to help me (though bless them, they tried). It seems to have something to do with my network connection. I tried Rift on 3 different computers in the house, using two different Rift accounts. When that didn’t help I focused on the modem/router that FiOS supplies. I hadn’t changed any settings so it was odd that it’d suddenly become a problem but you never know. I called FiOS support (they were spectacularly unhelpful) and finally reset the modem back to its factory settings. No joy.

I literally spent all of Tuesday working on the problem and have now accepted that, for now at least, Rift doesn’t work in my house. Even though it worked flawlessly during Beta 1, Beta 2 and the patcher worked fine last week.

I’ve found a few kindred spirits who’re encountering the same problem, but it’s hard to get attention since there are other problems with the patcher being slow and an authorization error (#2002 I think) and people get confused and think we’re having the same problem.

I can ping the patcher, traceroute to it, but of course the problem isn’t the patch servers, it’s contacting the authentication servers, and I don’t know what those IP addresses are.

The saddest part is that since it seems to be a low frequency error, and one that Trion Tech Support couldn’t fix, I’m not convinced it’ll ever be fixed. At this point I’m assuming that I won’t be able to play Rift again. Which makes me sad… it really rekindled my love for MMOs, to the point where I’d kind of planned my holiday break around playing the third beta like mad.

Anyway, so that’s why no Rift posts from me. Technological issues have me shut out.