Hi gang, Sometimes this happens to some of us: no matter what you do you cannot reach the Empire website, at all. It simply doesn't respond. But if you try using your phone or ask some of your friends then chances are high that there won't be any issues. So what happened? Did Aikar suddenly decide to block your Internet connection? Fortunately that's not the case: the cause for this can be traced back to a few routers in the US which sporadically act up. When that happens then some connections simply can't reach the Empire website anymore and you also can't connect to the game either. Which can be highly annoying, what about your vote bonus?! Well, fortunately for us these hiccups have never lasted longer than 10 - 15 minutes so far (for me that is), but despite that these outages are still extremely annoying. Especially if you're in the middle of something. But there is a solution for this. One of which is so simple that everyone can easily use it. However, it does require the (temporary) use of another browser: Opera. Now, one small disclaimer: Opera is build upon Chromium, which is the open source project behind Google Chrome. As such Opera and Chrome share some features. However, because I don't use Chrome myself I don't know if this is one of them. As far as I know it's not, but I suppose it could. Using the Opera VPN VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it means so much as using a network on top of another network, in most cases the Internet. This may sound highly complicated, but when looking at Opera it basically means that you'll send all your browsing requests to another server on the Internet after which the actual connection with the website will be done from that remote location. This has 2 advantages. First, for privacy concerns, the physical location of your IP address is guaranteed to be somewhere else. And second, the one I'm after, because it is somewhere else you'll also be able to "bypass" those broken routers I mentioned earlier. Simply because all requests are handled by/through another computer. How does this work? Well, that's the reason for this mini-guide. It is so extremely simple that anyone can do it. First you go to the Opera settings (alt-p, or use the Opera menu in the upper left corner) and then go to the Privacy & security section: Here you need to click on the "Enable VPN" checkbox, which I highlighted. Reminds me to turn off the automated crash reports, I only used that while beta testing something If you look at your main browser screen you'll now notice a blue VPN icon in front of the address bar. This indicates that you're currently using the VPN: And that's it. Right now you're browsing the Internet, but from a different location. So chances are high that you'll now be able to access the Empire website again. What if it doesn't work? Of course, if you're located in the US and the VPN redirects you to another US location which also uses this set of broken routers then this won't work at all. Fortunately there is a solution: Opera allows you to use different locations. Just click on the VPN icon and it will show you a small control screen, which also allows you to select the location from which you want to browse: Apart from choosing a location this pop-up will also show you the amount of data you used (as you can see), your current IP address and the slider allows you to turn the VPN off again. Just keep in mind that if you turn the VPN off this way then you'll always see a gray VPN icon in front of your address bar (for easier access). If you don't like that then you can also go back to the settings (see above) to turn the feature off in there. Keep in mind: browsing the Internet without the VPN feature will always be faster than having it enabled. Simply because of the extra 'hop' you're using (sending all your data to another computer, then that computer sends all the data to the website you want to access). Concluding.... Even if those routers do hiccup and you don't want to wait for 10+ minutes before things get fixed again then this might provide another good alternative. In case you're wondering: yes, I just experienced a small outage, then used this and that gave me the idea for this guide.
What. You too?? The EMC site AND server were down for about 45+ minutes for me (which ended a little over 1 hour ago) too... It still, like you said, worked on my 3G on my phone. Thanks for sharing this (temporary) solution! One question; does this VPN only cover the browser, or also the rest of the computer, as for my problems today both the site and the server didn't work. Either way, thanks for this guide.
Yeah. Fortunately this happens very seldom now these days but it's extremely annoying. And in some cases it makes no sense either. I'm using cable (Ziggo), my parents in Amersfoort are also using cable (Ziggo). Funny thing is that whenever I have connection issues they don't have any problem at all. It's all very localized. I'm just glad I wasn't playing. Because that's the part I hate most: you're in the middle of something and then p00f. You're out and you'll remain out for quite a while. Browser only. So unfortunately it won't help you to get back to your Minecraft builds.
I also have Ziggo cable, but I don't recall this happening to this big of a scale (45 mins site + server) before, only sometimes for perhaps a minute, or just a little kick. Luckily I hadn't started playing yet, but was just about to... And I guess the next time this happens, I'll have to look for a whole computer VPN.
Cool! Also... you might want to bump this guide more than the ussual cause this needs to be read b4 it happens(cause it wont be usefull during the hiccup =P)
Happened to me as well today. Like Tom said, it was out for about 45 minutes and I'm also using Ziggo. It worked fine on my phone's network (which is KPN) but not on my home network. EDIT: I'd like to add that if you don't want to use the Opera browser for some reason, you can also use external (free) VPN services like Windscribe. However, you'll most likely have a data limit, so don't keep it on while watching YouTube video's or large downloads
