Might as well drop a line here and see if the Beamdog rep is still watching this thread (At work right now and forgot to post this to Steam/the official feedback submission page).
For the past two nights, I’ve been having a somewhat complex network issue that I think I might know the reason for, but let me explain it anyway:
When I load up AAO, I get the normal main menu, but when I click “Online” I see no active games and a notification that I have no active games. Attempting to click “Create Game” works as expected, but trying to click “Join Game” brings up another blank screen and a spinning loading icon, as if my Client is trying to fetch a list of active games from the Server, but is failing. There is a “refresh” button, but it does nothing, and the game list never appears (to experiment, I let the screen hang for 30 minutes while I was doing something else, but no game list ever appeared).
The only way I can resolve this is to close the game and reopen it until the list appears. Even then, I am only able to successfully access my games roughly one out of every three times I open the game. Any time I finish making my move in a game and return to the main menu, I risk encountering this issue and getting trapped in another reboot -> load game -> check menus cycle, which can get annoying when I am in ~7 games and it takes me about 15-20 minutes of resetting the game just to access my next game.
This is even an issue when attempting to join/leave game lobbies. I suspected that I started encountering these errors because of all the games I’ve joined (I’m in ~7 active games and was in ~20 lobbies last night), so I tried leaving all of the lobbies I’m in, hoping that would reduce the burden on my game Client. Even attempting to leave a game sometimes froze the game, leaving me with a screen that I can’t click (it’s shaded in a way that suggests a pop-up menu is open, even though that is not the case) and forcing me to restart the game.
Similarly, my game sometimes locks up in the middle of my turn, forcing a restart. The only time a restart isn’t required is if the lockup occurs mid-battle. During a battle, the game will freeze before I can roll more dice (the “roll dice” button will be greyed out even though the dice already dolled), but after about 30 seconds I will be allowed to continue. If this lock up occurs during a movement/purchase/place phase, I am forced to exit to the main menu, bringing me back to the above error about the game list not appearing.
Not sure if anyone else has been experiencing this, or if it’s just due to my network connection being shoddy/being in too many games at once. I’m playing on minimum graphics settings and I already have a firewall exception for AAO on my computer, so that rules those two possibilities out.
Please help my fiancee says I’m taking too long playing this game and she’s going to break off the marriage