I just started this game a few days ago, and have now probably blown over 10 hours (no lie) on trying to get it to run, which doesn't include waiting for tech support to respond.
It's basically unplayable on my machine mainly due to connection drops, 5-6 minute load times, ports, etc, and that's if it actually loads up without hanging.
If I do manage to get logged in, the server lag makes it unplayable. I don't have graphics speed/quality issues, just anything involving server communication. So, trying to get a vendors inventory takes 5+ minutes!!, I get many seconds of lag just trying to talk to an npc.
Before you say "he has an old machine", know that I have a 1 year old, top of the line system. The *Best* stuff you could buy 1 year ago. This machine *still* kicks ******.
I play ALL my games, like Oblivion, Tomb Raider Legends, Guild Wars, Quake 4, Fear, etc, all at great framerates at 1600x1200 2xAA and the highest quality settings.
I have a cable modem and get very fast throughput to almost every web site, great download speeds for http, ftp, and news servers. No lag on ANY multiplayer games including some recent (bad) betas I tried, UO, Guild Wars, etc. No connection problems, dropouts, etc.
I've tried all of these things:
* Turning off my ZoneAlarm completely (only way to even get into the game)
* Before that, added all? the Horizon apps to trusted apps, AND, opened up unrestricted access to ports 47101-47104, and 47701-47704
* Opened up those ports on my D-Link router as well
* Been working with tech support and nothing they have mentioned has worked (some cfg tweaks, other stuff was to give them dxdiag reports, debug reports, etc)
* Defragged
* Shut off all non-essential processes and services (I run lean as it is)
* Updated to Catalyst 6.4 (where immediately after I did this, the game actually loaded in 2.5 mins (a record for me), and had very little lag, but then I lost connection again, and never could return to this state (of little lag and fast loading)
* Cleared the world cache
* Tried launching with all combinations of patcher settings, and tried stand alone patcher
* Turned off loading screen
* Countless other things I can't remember
* Trying to reinstall the game (now)
* Been trying to read all posts involving firewalls, connectivity, lag, etc. None of them have helped.
Strange stuff:
When the game loads, it doesn't pin the hard drive like one would imagine. It seems like something is causing it to delay in actually loading the game. The drive light blinks 1-2 times a second instead of high activity like all other software when they load. The one time the game loaded quickly, it pinned the drive like I would have expected. Too bad this only happened once and I can't recreate it. The process does take up 99% of the CPU though when loading. I wish I knew what it was actually doing.
The game does something different EVERY single time I launch it. Sometimes I get the GUI's up quickly (but no character for many mins after), other times I get a black screen and nothing happens for 5-6 mins where I end up killing the process.
I'm glad I'm not paying for this yet, as it's completely unplayable like this. I'll keep trying for a couple days or so, then uninstall for good.
Really a shame, as the game looked pretty sweet. Seems like a lot of work went into various aspects of the game. Too bad connectivity wasn't one of them.
I've been reading about the memory leak after porting around a few times. Jeez, I haven't even been able to play the game long enough to see it. So in 2.5 years, these guys were unable to fix this?