We have no control over the Internet. That said, no one can do anything without information. Saying, "I disco'ed! Fixit!" is pretty worthless and guarantees nothing will get done, due to the simple fact, no one knows what the real problem was.
Ping Plotter is a players best tool for determining what failed and where, if it is network related.
The U.S. has experienced the loss of millions of miles of telecommunications lines, due to the extreme winter weather over a very large area of the country. This WILL impact the Internet. Specifically, it is going to hit anything real time, such as the game, really hard. Browsers do not care about packet loss, they cache, they retry and it can take longer for things to get done. No big deal.
A real time game is more sensitive to these issues. Now, on top of that is all the Internet usage which more than doubles due to the holidays. The loads are such that it will cause more problems, in and of itself.
IF the problems are network related (calling your ISP and asking them to test your local connection will no you no good. That does not encompass every router between you and any given server), you can run Ping Plotter (
www.pingplotter.com free download at the bottom of the downloads page) to our servers and get a visual indication of what the path to the servers look likes.
NOTE: The next to last hop will always show 100% packet loss. This is normal. It means that router does not honor the "ICMP ECHO" packet ping/traceroute/Ping Plotter uses.
There could be other reasons for discos, but given we know there are problems all over the Internet, especially in the East/Mid/South parts of the U.S., it is a likely place to start.
Also note, once an abnormal crash occurs, the likelihood of it happening again is higher, due to the possibility of Windows corrupting a game setting file, but that is easily tested by renaming the "settings" folder and see if the problem goes away.
