I will start off by saying this is a long winded cry for help. I'll try to quickly lay out the facts. I play regularly play a game called continuum, which is pretty old, but still active. I'm currently bouncing between work, in KY on Time Warner and PA (where I really live) on comcast. I had played this game in mid-April, with no problems and then I went back to KY and played from late April, until May. When I returned to PA, I logged in for a min, got booted out and then couldn't return. The zone shows 30ms ping within the game and a green connection, but if I try to enter, it simply doesn't ever reach the "entering" phase and says "could not connect".

I contacted the people running the server and they confirmed I haven't been banned and that this has been a problem for several others, with no known cause. Every other zone, within this game, I can enter without issue.

When I run the PingPlotter, through my wireless router, I get great results until hop 9 and 10, where it shows 100%ploss and then at hops 12-13 it shows great results. I'm assuming the 100% ploss at 9 and 10 are phantom results, because they're blocking the test packets.

The IP for the server is 66.36.247.83 port 13500. It's neighboring zone, which I can enter without issue is 66.36.247.83 port 5400. another neighboring zone has the same IP, but is on port 3900. I can enter the last 2 zones, but not the one on port 13500. I even tried port forwarding 13500 on my router, which didn't help.

However, I'm really trying to figure out how this could be. How can I run a good ping test to this server, show good numbers and connection strength within the game, but not be able to connect to the server and enter into that zone? How could I be able to access the same IP on different ports, but not the one I need to?

Any ideas on how to correct this would be REALLY helpful. I think it's a networking or isp issue, but I'm not sure how to resolve it. I'm hoping it's not related to the DHCP Lease time of my WAN IP, which was the only thing I could think of that may have changed since I had last played in PA, but even so it makes no sense to me that I can enter 2 other zones with the same IP and not the other, with the same ISP and IP

And this is the pingplotter to the server itself

Hey Tidal,

Sorry to hear about your gaming woes - stuff like this is never fun to deal with.

The screenshot that you provided doesn't show any obvious issues (as you've already deduced) - 22ms round trip latency with no packet loss is *usually* considered to be a great connection. You're dead on with your assumption on hops #9 and #10 here as well - those devices may just be set to not respond to ICMP TTL expired packets.

Is your screenshot here from an instance where you were attempting to play the game/connect to the server? If not - do you get any sort of different results in PingPlotter if you run it while trying to connect?

Your goal in troubleshooting here should be to try and correlate any issues you're experiencing with your PingPlotter results (a tactic we cover in more detail here: http://www.pingman.com/kb/47). This becomes especially difficult, however, when the issues you're experiencing don't seem to be reflected in your results. It *looks* like you're using the Free version of PingPlotter here - have you attempted to use PingPlotter Standard or Pro (in evaluation mode) to change up the packet type you're using? With either of these versions, you could switch over to TCP and target specific ports to see if there's any difference in your results there (which may help to provide some additional clues into your issue).

If you have any other questions - or if there's anything else we can try and do to help out, please let us know!

Best wishes,

-Gary

The game itself has a traceroute built in, so I can trace the results to each zone within that server address. The traced route to the specific zone IP and port, shows 20ms average with 40ms high. It only shows 10 total hops, but it shows the same exact number of hops and average ping to each of the other zones. By all accounts, the only difference is I can get into zone 1 and zone 2, which are on different ports, but the same IP and I can't get into zone 3, which is on port 13500. I was told the packet types are TCP and UDP, but I would imagine there's really no difference in packets sent/received in the other zones, within the same game.

It seems like the problem is definitely in the port being used, somehow, whether it's traffic is being blocked or not. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to remedy that. I have been told that other people experienced similar issues, only to have the issue simply resolve itself randomly. That led me to believe it has something to do with the IP and when it's released and renewed. Since I'm connecting through a router, I can see my WAN IP won't be "released" for another 2 days. I tried to use a service to run a different IP number, to see if it would work, but it actually made ONLY that zone, unavailable. With that service, P2P and torrent traffic is blocked, but otherwise it shouldn't have been an issue. With the other IP, every other zone was available, only the one running on port 13500 was shown in "red" indicating it was unavailable.

When I run TCP packets to that IP and port I get 100% packetloss at hop 2 and it says "Socket operation on a non-socket"

When trying to run UDP packets to the IP and port I get 100% packetloss at hop 2 and it says "can't create raw receive socket for ICMP.Permission denied"

Hey Tidal,

The error you're running into when trying to use TCP packets *usually* indicates that you need to install WinPcap. We've got a bit of documentation on this, which you can find here:

http://www.pingplotter.com/manual/raw_tcp_sockets_and_winpcap.html

It takes a bit of configuring to get UDP packets working as well. We've got a knowledge base article that can help out on this front as well:

http://www.pingman.com/kb/99

If you should find yourself with any other questions - please don't hesitate to let us know!

Best wishes,

-Gary