Hi everyone,
Okay, so I'm not sure if I've posted about this in the past (and I know other people have), but I have been having a lot of trouble connecting to the game especially after update 2.9. I had a similar issue right after 2.6, but that was solved. This has always been a problem, it just seemed to get worse after 2.9, even though it likely has nothing to do with the update.
Occasionally (around 1 out of every 5 log-ins), my character screen wouldn't load upon launch; the server selection screen would. Sometimes after I selected The Shadowlands to play on, my connection was good for a bit. This isn't much of a problem, but it's kind of strange considering I don't have any characters on any other servers. Sometimes, after choosing a character to play as, the play button would do nothing and I would have to restart the game. If I was able to log on, my ping would be pretty normal at around 50 or so. After around 5 minutes, my ping would go up to even 50,000. This causes a loading screen to load around 1/3 of the way and stop, so I would alt + f4 and restart. Generally, I spend most of my time on the fleet wasting time on gtn, so leveling my warrior on Nar Shaddaa wasn't this bad at all.
After 2.9, however, the maximum time I've had without disconnecting has been around 10 minutes. My house is on Dromund Kaas, and my connection there is okay most of the time, but at the moment it is very hard to play. Frequent disconnects can be very tedious when trying to decorate a house with a short window to do so, and it get's frustrating.
People in the game chat say that it's a problem with my computer, people on forum posts recommend opening wifi ports or something like that (I haven't tried that yet, but I am planning on doing so if the problem persists). The reason I haven't open the server ports is because I have a friend who I play TOR with frequently using the same wifi network I use, and he doesn't disconnect at all. I can still use internet browsers and play SWGEmu just fine on the same network/computer, so I'm convinced that I do not need to open server ports, but that is something I am willing to do.
The people who say it's a fault with my computer are probably right. Galaxies is not very internet demanding, and neither is Chrome, but SWTOR definitely is. I run the game on an Acer Aspire V3-551 laptop with 4 gigs of ram, AMD A8 processor with Radean Graphics. Clearly this computer is not made for gaming, so TOR runs on minimum graphics (everything besides medium shaders). The .exe is allowed through my firewall, so it should be working fine.
The reason for this post is to ask if there's something else I can do besides opening server ports or getting a new computer. I've played TOR fine on it before: I got a 55 bh on this bucket of bolts.
Thanks, any help is appreciated,
Herbit
