Rift & me

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.

6 thoughts on “Rift & me

  1. You may have tried these, but thought i would say them anyway.

    Do you just have a modem but no router? if so try connecting to the router directly.

    Or maybe try and set one computer in the DMZ, so that it acts like its on the outside.

    Otherwise it might be an old routing statement, cause they moved there auth server and for some reason your getting the old one.

    one other thing, try changing your dns on your computer to use opendns.

    it sounds like its something outside your home.

  2. Hi Tim, thanks, those are all good ideas. But yeah, I tried them all.

    I set my DNS to use Google’s DNS servers, put a machine in the DMZ with Windows Firewall off and antivirus totally uninstalled. Didn’t leave it like that for long!!

    FiOS provides a modem that has an integrated router so I’m as direct as I can really get.

    I *think* changing DNS servers would flush routing statements, wouldn’t it? I also did a netsh winsock reset, which I admit I don’t know what it does, but I read it on the forums. 🙂

  3. I can relate, having gone through various hijincks recently because the DDO store no longer likes my router (sometimes). On the plus side, the more common issues will probably get fixed in beta, which will make the less common issues easier to spot. I kind of doubt that this will be a “never get to play Rift ever again” issue. (Beta 3, on the other hand, is probably toast.)

  4. Dont know if you got the fix yet but if you didnt i just got it to work for me after i got the error 2005. Go to C:\Users\your username\AppData\Local\RIFT right click rift-beta.exe and run as administrator. it worked for me, dont know if it would work for everyone.

  5. I have been getting the same #2005 error and I can not seem to fix the problem. I think I will try kyleph19’s suggestion and see if that works.

  6. Good luck. For me nothing worked *until* Trion rebooted their servers, then I got right in without me doing anything at all on my end.

    Weird, I know. And very frustrating.

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