Battle.net not working for Starcraft II

[Craig234]

I finally installed Starcraft II, trying to run it for about 6 hours it says battle.net is down. But Diablo III that also uses battle.net is working. Any ideas why? Configuration issues? I tried restarting the game.

 

[JTsyo]

Start battle.net first and then SC2 from it. Are you trying to play multiplayer? I just tried and got on without an issue. Whenever SC2 updates, I get Windows message that it is being blocked by the firewall but it usually doesn't cause an issue.

 

[Craig234]

I'm running a battle,net app, where I pick the game and hit a play button. Starcraft starts up and gets an error that battle.net isn't available, while Diablo III starts fine.

 

[Craig234]

Well, Blizzard support is disappointing. I talked to two agents and a 'specialist', and they collected diagnostics showing packet loss around 30% on some of the ISP network connections, and immediately said that's the problem.

But Diablo III showed the same issue and connects fine.

When I'd ask them, 'so you're saying packet loss prevents connection for SC and not D3?', they'd say no, that's not what they're saying and that they had answered everything.

All they'd say is, get the ISP to fix their servers or try a VPN.

 

[Stuka87]

D3 does run on different servers. So just because the path for SC2 is bad, does not mean its bad for D3.

 

[Craig234]

I just compared the ip addresses for D3 and SC II, and for my region, they're the same.

Comcast support isn't good either.

I'm with the third person - a tech manager - after two escalations, and his answer is that I need to get a new modem to address the packet loss on
Comcast servers.

I said that doesn't fix that problem. He agree but said he can't fix their servers. He tried a 'DNC' change that didn't help. Right now I'm on hold as he tried to see if there's a way to get their packet loss, which he agreed is a problem, fixed when I pushed him how to do that.

 

[Craig234]

Well, I spoke with person number 4 in tier 3 support and she said she has to escalate further and I'll hear back in 24 hours.

I was considering posting the ip here if I can find it again for people to compare how much packet loss.

 

[Craig234]

If you'd like to see if yo have any packet loss, the ip is 24.105.30.129.

 

[Tweak155]

Did you allow the Starcraft app access through Windows firewall?

 

[Stuka87]

This is not the best test (as the pings are not that fast), but I am in California, on Comcast, just did 395 pings to the IP you gave:

Ping statistics for 24.105.30.129:
Packets: Sent = 395, Received = 395, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 15ms, Maximum = 20ms, Average = 16ms

But if they are the same IP, I cannot think of any physical layer networking issues that would be there for one connection, but not another when the two end points are the same. I would try disabling your firewall, and run it as an administrator just to make sure windows is not blocking certain protocols. As blizzard does use more than one port to connect with.

 

[Craig234]

I've tried running the app as administrator and disabling the Windows firewall - no change. I installed another Blizzard game that uses the same ports, it works fine. It's specific to Starcraft II.

 

[Craig234]

Blizzard support is just crappy. they just keep repeating it's packet loss.

But the game connected to the EU battle.net fine.

When I do the same test on that ip, it has a lot more packet loss - three nodes are 100% loss.

Their answer is, they can't explain it but they wont do anything until the packet loss is fixed and the just close chat.

 

[Craig234]

To be fair - I contacted them again and talked to a manager, and it went a lot better. He quickly said the previous agents had not done as they should, and even made the nice gesture of providing the two expansions for free, though I already bought one and just hadn't installed it yet.

 

[Stuka87]

Was the last guy able to figure anything out?

 

[Craig234]

The manager didn't try - he set up a call for today with their higher tech group.

 

[Craig234]

Update: fixed. The senior person just called, and had already come up with a new theory that something on the Blizzard backend about my account specific to Starcraft II Americas had gotten messed up and had 'locked and unlocked' my account to clear it.

I tried again and it worked.

So, it wasn't the packet loss three techs had been so pushy in saying they were sure was the issue. She is going to follow up with them.

Terrible Blizzard service changed to great service.

 

[Stuka87]

Update: fixed. The senior person just called, and had already come up with a new theory that something on the Blizzard backend about my account specific to Starcraft II Americas had gotten messed up and had 'locked and unlocked' my account to clear it.

I tried again and it worked.

So, it wasn't the packet loss three techs had been so pushy in saying they were sure was the issue. She is going to follow up with them.

Terrible Blizzard service changed to great service.

Awesome that you got it fixed. I think most low tier tech support in general sucks. You have untrained people just reading off a list. Glad you got somebody higher up that knew what they were talking about.

 

[you2]

What I don't understand is why they didn't just test for packet loss or why packet loss would have been an issue to begin with. I presume they use udp instead of tcp but still they should be able to confirm the issue with a few minutes of testing.

Update: fixed. The senior person just called, and had already come up with a new theory that something on the Blizzard backend about my account specific to Starcraft II Americas had gotten messed up and had 'locked and unlocked' my account to clear it.

I tried again and it worked.

So, it wasn't the packet loss three techs had been so pushy in saying they were sure was the issue. She is going to follow up with them.

Terrible Blizzard service changed to great service.

 

[Craig234]

They did test for packet loss (well they had me test for it) and there was about 25% on several of the connections. The question was whether that was the cause of the problem. They had me open some TCP ports and opening some UDP was on my list of things to try.

 

[you2]

if you truely had 25% packet loss then I'm surprise the game would be playable in multi-player mode.

 

[Craig234]

if you truely had 25% packet loss then I'm surprise the game would be playable in multi-player mode.

I just know they had me run a utility which listed each server (11) to get to their server, and kept a total of the packets sent and received, and that utility showed 7 of the 11 with packet loss from 10% to 35% each.

When I did speak with the Comcast tech, he said he did acknowledge 'that is an important problem' but said he was uanble to get it fixed and that he thought - he was right - it wasn't the reason for the server not connecting. Blizzard said it was the biggest packet loss they'd seen in a while.