Is There A Way To Change Routing?

[Harlequin565]

So I've been having problems connecting to Homecoming since Thursday afternoon. I'm in the UK. I normally play on Excelsior.

 

The game was basically hanging at various places. On Excelsior, it could be characters in Atlas (Talos was fine), on Torchbearer I could play fine. Later, on Excelsior, it would crash on zoning or base entrance. Teasingly unplayable.

A suggestion was made to try Reunion (an EU server). The game crashed at server selection. Reliably.

On Discord, GM Fiddleback gave me the ip addresses (thanks for this!), and this is where things get interesting.

 

I can ping the NA servers with a 92ms response time. Traceroute though gets a lot of unresponsive timeouts.

I can't even ping the EU servers. At all. No response. Traceroute goes unresponsive after the third hop.

 

And this morning, Facebook is off the air. Can't ping it, Traceroute dies at the same third hop.

 

Sites like BBC.co.uk and google, and YouTube all work fine, but that third hop is always to a different server. My limited knowledge is suggesting that that 3rd server hop is where the problems are happening.

 

So my question to the community is

a) Can I force my internet traffic to take a different route? (I tried changing my DNS but that hasn't worked) I guess if I can do this, and the problem goes away, it's proof of what the problem is.

b) Is there a way to escalate this? Going through my ISP will undoubtedly result in tedious "turn it off/on" "reinstall windows" shinanegins which I'd like to avoid. Is there any further investigation I can do before picking up the phone to them?

 

I'm not a network expert btw...

[justicebeliever]

I cant recommend a specific one, but a VPN does exactly what you are looking for - gives you a different route to all your traffic.  The only tradeoff is usually speed, but CoH doesn't require a modern lightning fast 400Mbps connection to run so it likely won't impact game play

 

If you already know about them and feel comfortable shopping around, I'll leave it at that (there is usually a fee for them, and free ones are typically super slow (perhaps too slow even for CoH)).

 

 

[Zep]

Some of the low cost VPNs are not too bad from what I have read.

 

https://www.top10vpn.com/best-vpn-for-gaming/?bsid=c33se1kw032&gclid=CjwKCAjw98rpBRAuEiwALmo-ylqef0rx_62ksUG2IUQrVeBC_yMVn6_9HvWr_ZQoSsFnLuTaP-Vy6xoCu4MQAvD_BwE

 

I have no personal experience with any of them.

[Harlequin565]

Thanks guys. I'll do some research on the VPN option.

[Harlequin565]

Just an update in case anyone has a similar issue...

 

The problem has completely righted itself over the early part of this week. I suspect that the router everything was sticking at, was fed some new jaffa cakes and all is now well.