Does Anyone Else Have The Problem Where Chat -Never- Works?

[Inez]

I'm a CB player with almost 200 hours.  My chat has never, ever worked.  Never seen region or party chat.  I play at very odd random times, ranging from early morning, afternoon, evening, late night weekends and weekdays, and never once have I seen chat.

 

Searching the forums, my problem seems unique.  

 

The DE ticket system indicates they have load problems and don't want people opening tickets about chat.  If it was a load problem, then surely once in the 190 hours I've played I would have been able to log into their irc.

 

The other day I accidentally left my VPN, which routes thru the Netherlands, on and started Warframe.  Lo and behold, I had Region and Party chat!  Turn off my VPN, chat goes away.  Turn VPN back on, and it works again.  Having my connection go from Houston to the Netherlands doesn't help the lag any, especially when I host.

 

This has nothing to do with ports.  Please don't post "are your ports open?"  I've played tons of games from the good ole days of needing someone's ip addy to join their game, and needing to open ports to host.  Plus, DE says they have a built in irc client.  IRC doesn't need you to open ports to connect to a server and chat.  And to rule out the ports entirely, I've tried putting my router in DMZ.

 

With IRC, when you mysteriously can't join a server, but then can with a different ip address, it means your ip address has been banned.  Admins sometimes make mistakes with banning, and sometimes block whole ranges.  My fear is that this is what has happened.  And DE won't even read my ticket, just giving a canned response about them upgrading servers to handle the load.

 

On the other hand, if there are other people having the same problem as me, maybe there is something weird going on with their servers, and I just need to be patient.

 

So, anyone?

[Poochy]

Never works for me either always aborted from chat.

[Blatantfool]

 I tend to not connect when I first log in, but as soon as I've played a mission through it'll connect and stay connected without a hitch. I've never been sure what is up with that.