D&D Online not connecting. Quick timeline:
1: Never had a serious problem with getting a game to work that I couldn't fix in 1-2 days at most.
2: Get new laptop, download DDO, works fine. Girlfriend on exact same model of laptop has DDO, works fine.
3: Download Planetside 2, everything works fine.
4: Out of the blue one day DDO and PS2 won't connect. All other internet applications work flawlessly. GF's DDO works flawlessly. Spend one month (30 days) in tech support nightmare hell.
5: Girlfriend's DDO stops working.
6: Reinstall OS, install only normal updates and DDO. Works again. Install PS2, everything stops working.
7: Reinstall OS again, figuring PS2 breaks both games, don't reinstall PS2. DDO works.
8: Suddenly after behaving for a couple months DDO stops working.
9: Begin process of reinstalling DDO / firewall exceptions / etc. DDO connects! Log out and test with another character. DDO fails to connect! Continued fixing and it connects again! Then log out and restart and it fails more!
WTF.
The main problem here is a lack of debugging tools or even error codes in the game software. I want to know exactly what happened but all I can get is "You failed to connect to the server" and independently that the servers are online and working fine. It could be a million things, 90% of which I don't know anything about, but there's no way to debug and the tech support for a paying customer is absolute shit. I spent 30 days going back and forth with a moron reading from a script before I got someone who spoke Geek and by then the reinstallation of my OS had solved the problem - temporarily.
Honestly it's probably my shit laptop. It was a nice one when I bought it, but cheaply made. The DVD drive is finicky and the GF's laptop speakers are going out. This is also my first experience with WIN8 so it might be the OS screwing things up. It might also be the laptop video card not playing nice with DX10 (although the specs are fine). Why can't we just have good solid hardware and an incredibly stable, well-documented, fully-featured OS? People have been making computers for how long now? Microsoft is Windows and they can't stop fucking everything up at every turn?
A new pair of gaming laptops would cost us a couple grand. And ours are not even 1 year old. After having a laptop I just refuse to go back to a desktop. Willing to accept lower power than a desktop, just not willing to accept that shit just won't work anymore.
I just want to spend money to buy a good thing that won't fucking suck, instead of spending money buying garbage all the time.