Guild Wars 2

FIOS has really dropped the ball, or the packets rather, when it comes to networking with NCsoft. The Wildstar open beta had the same exact issue. But here’s the fix!

First, find your DNS hosts file.

The file named “hosts” should be in this folder:

C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\

This may not be the same for all systems, but it should be in system32, just search etc or hosts from there if it doesnt show up.

Double click hosts, and it’ll ask how to open it. Open it with notepad.

Now, copy-paste this, below everything else, (Without a hashtag!)

174.35.56.164 assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com

Now go to file, and Save. Open up guildwars 2 and it should work! If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Jethin.6340:

FIOS has really dropped the ball, or the packets rather, when it comes to networking with NCsoft. The Wildstar open beta had the same exact issue. But here’s the fix!

First, find your DNS hosts file.

The file named “hosts” should be in this folder:

C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\

This may not be the same for all systems, but it should be in system32, just search etc or hosts from there if it doesnt show up.

Double click hosts, and it’ll ask how to open it. Open it with notepad.

Now, copy-paste this, below everything else, (Without a hashtag!)

174.35.56.164 assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com

Now go to file, and Save. Open up guildwars 2 and it should work! If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Oh no, dont ever manually adjust your LMHosts file. Unless a specific file/protocol calls for it.

Instead, change your Local DNS servers to use a different DNS server. FiOS isnt the issue, its the verizon DNS servers and how they, quite often, get overloaded and cannot handle new DNS lookups.

DNS has a default hold down timer of 30mins before purging most records, though the TTL can be set to whatever the DNS Provider chooses. Once the TTL expires the Cached DNS lookups (including zone files) are purged and require a fresh lookup (this happens on the next query for that zone and dns entry).

So move your External DNS lookups to a more stable entity, Such as Google or opendns DNS servers.

Google DNS;

8.8.4.4
8.8.8.8

OpenDNS

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

On a side note, openDNS has a DNS based content filter solution, thats free, to help protect your PC from DNS based attacks and DNS based Virus lookups. It should be considered an addon for your AV solution, as its not a total protection suite.

sirsquishy.8531:

Jethin.6340:

FIOS has really dropped the ball, or the packets rather, when it comes to networking with NCsoft. The Wildstar open beta had the same exact issue. But here’s the fix!

First, find your DNS hosts file.

The file named “hosts” should be in this folder:

C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\

This may not be the same for all systems, but it should be in system32, just search etc or hosts from there if it doesnt show up.

Double click hosts, and it’ll ask how to open it. Open it with notepad.

Now, copy-paste this, below everything else, (Without a hashtag!)

174.35.56.164 assetcdn.101.arenanetworks.com

Now go to file, and Save. Open up guildwars 2 and it should work! If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Oh no, dont ever manually adjust your LMHosts file. Unless a specific file/protocol calls for it.

Instead, change your Local DNS servers to use a different DNS server. FiOS isnt the issue, its the verizon DNS servers and how they, quite often, get overloaded and cannot handle new DNS lookups.

DNS has a default hold down timer of 30mins before purging most records, though the TTL can be set to whatever the DNS Provider chooses. Once the TTL expires the Cached DNS lookups (including zone files) are purged and require a fresh lookup (this happens on the next query for that zone and dns entry).

So move your External DNS lookups to a more stable entity, Such as Google or opendns DNS servers.

Google DNS;

8.8.4.4
8.8.8.8

OpenDNS

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

On a side note, openDNS has a DNS based content filter solution, thats free, to help protect your PC from DNS based attacks and DNS based Virus lookups. It should be considered an addon for your AV solution, as its not a total protection suite.

I’m providing this simply because it is easy to do and is another potential fix to the problem. People have expressed that changing to google DNS did not work, and they have also expressed that changing the host file did not work.

Nothing wrong with changing your hosts file. Not for the faint of heart or tech-adverse, but certainly nothing wrong with doing so.

sirsquishy.8531:

Oh no, dont ever manually adjust your LMHosts file. Unless a specific file/protocol calls for it.

Instead, change your Local DNS servers to use a different DNS server. FiOS isnt the issue, its the verizon DNS servers and how they, quite often, get overloaded and cannot handle new DNS lookups.

DNS has a default hold down timer of 30mins before purging most records, though the TTL can be set to whatever the DNS Provider chooses. Once the TTL expires the Cached DNS lookups (including zone files) are purged and require a fresh lookup (this happens on the next query for that zone and dns entry).

So move your External DNS lookups to a more stable entity, Such as Google or opendns DNS servers.

Google DNS;

8.8.4.4
8.8.8.8

OpenDNS

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

On a side note, openDNS has a DNS based content filter solution, thats free, to help protect your PC from DNS based attacks and DNS based Virus lookups. It should be considered an addon for your AV solution, as its not a total protection suite.

In my case, Verizon’s DNS servers were able to resolve ArenaNet CDN servers’ hostnames, but bad routing/performance was causing file downloads of the patch to be interrupted. Most CDN providers are using your IP for geolocation to determine which server you should pull content from. In our case (for Verizon FIOS in the NYC/Philly area), there was a problem reaching that server. Switching your primary nameserver to Google may cause you to resolve the ArenaNet CDN DNS differently (due to location of Google’s DNS) and could direct you to a working server.

Using a hosts file provides a more predictable result because it’s forcing a specific DNS hostname to resolve to a working server, rather than forcing all DNS queries to be handled by Google and then hoping you get directed to a working server.

Anyway, there are multiple workarounds to the issue (VPN, hosts, changing nameservers, etc.), but ultimately the providers need to work through their issues so we don’t need to use any of these