Sounds more like you have a bad cable or a soon to be bad hard drive. Whatever brand your drive is, go to it's web site, and download the diagnostics for it asap.

i vote that you suck ^.^ actually you dont ^.^ ....I am an employee of Microsoft, despite "flaws" and everyones seemingly "Know it all approach" toward Microsoft they pay me well. Lets keep it "Real" If any of you were actually half as smart as you think you are, you would be the CEO of the largest Software Company on the planet....but ur not, instead of getting up and doing it youd rather boot up Windows (Thanks BTW) to tell other people what you "Would do" and what they "Should do"....Lame....I think the phrase "Love it or leave it" applies here. If its that bad then leave.....oh wait....you cant. ^.^ Linux and Mac do indeed kick ***,(i personally use them both)....but there is a reason they dont stack up in sales and why they lack software titles. So for now , stop ******** and enjoy what you have. If you are truly sick of it.......simply leave. Just a thought....

Another World dominated message brought to you by your Local Neighborhood Microsoft Employee ^.^


Mizango
Pandemonium Server

Edited, Sun Aug 8 11:54:07 2004

Heh...maybe that's a bad example. With Windows 98, quite frequently you *could* hit Cancel and it'd work because it was trying to copy over files that already existed and were perfectly fine. ^^

Plus, with Windows 98, many system builders (myself included) finally started putting the CAB files in C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS and changing the install path in the registry so that Windows would just copy the files from the HD as needed. What a nightmare...

Yeah, I understand that, but the gist of the message almost seems to indicate that they'd be using new additional ports.

Someone further up the thread mentioned firewalls giving fits whenever the hash of the executeable making the connection attempt changed...but if this was the problem, everyone would be used to it by now, and Square wouldn't have to make a special announcement about it.

I think a lot of people can agree with me on the point that they really need to brush up on their software engineering skills. FFXI is a very very large project, yes, but releasing a patch which breaks all your Windows clients is just moronic. Releasing a follow-up patch which requires the original install media but doesn't explicity say so in the patch instructions is equally dumb. Go count how many people posted in the last update about how they hit Cancel 7-11 times and just went about playing the game.

All the people in the world can rate me down for saying that, but it remains truth. And I've done large-scale development and deployment before, so I know how this works.

Ummmm.......No
In the PS2 manual and on the PlayOnline website they give you the port RANGES that the game uses. The game will only transmit and recieve within these port ranges, and if you allowed your firewall, router and/or hybrid modem to communicate on these ports, it will work fine for every update they have.

Its not the developers fault that you dont know how to configure your system.

If you needed help theres no shame in asking for help and educating yourself a little bit, but bashing the developers in your other posts with a few words you picked up in a programming book just looks *absolutely foolish* to anyone who knows the any working behind simple networking.



More than likely your firewall is not configured correctly. When you first ran the game your firewall asked if want to allow this program to access the internet - you clicked yes and figured you were all set.

Your firewall logs that this application can access the internet and logs what ports it uses. When the game updates it changes the .exe and your firewall may detect that, but it still uses the same logs for the ports it previously used, because thats how the firewall configured itself. So when the ports change your firewall doesnt accept the packets on the new ports because it thinks thats not a valid port that this application has ever used.

Thats what internet security has come to these days, people that understand networking also understand how to exploit it and understand the majority of people dont know anything about how it works. So developers have to try and make it easy enough for common user to be able to use the software and the hard enough that the common hacker cannot exploit it. Square has done a great job expecially since the game has was released in Japan almost 2 years ago now, and there are minimal exploits to date. If anyone ever played the Diablo series they know how boring it got when every single player was using hacks.

Just wait in a few weeks when Microsoft releases XP Service Pack 2 which defaults a newer configurable built in firewall. People will be running firewalls on top of firewalls and problems all over the place, but everyone's gonna blame Microsoft for bad code development.



Why? It provides 2 things - repair damages in the update that was caused by thousands of simultaneous downloads, and makes sure you have a copy of the POL Viewer CD and arent bootlegging the game.

Enough rant I got some exp points to work on.

Configure your system!!

RIP - Rick James

Edited, Sat Aug 7 04:38:12 2004

Yep I Agree They Messed Up Totally and I Have Been Down For 3 Days Now >< With No Hopes Of Fixing The Problem ><