210 thoughts on “SonyOnline.net Domain Expires, Shenanigans Ensue for all SOE Games, Forums, Websites”

    1. When you type in “google.com” into your browser, your computer doesn’t know where that is. Your computer needs a numerical address.

      • First, your computer asks one of the 13 “root” internet servers “Where can I get information about .com addresses?”
      • Then your computer asks the .com TLD name server “What are the authoritative name servers for google.com?”
      • In this case, there are several name servers which can tell your computer how to reach google.com: ns1.google.com, ns2.google.com, ns3.google.com, ns4.google.com
      • Now your computer asks ns1.google.com “Where do I find google.com?” ns1.google.com responds with “208.104.242.177”.

      Now, your computer caches the information and remembers that “google.com = 208.104.242.177” for the next 24-48 hours. After that time is up, the next time you try to load up Google.com, your computer will go through that whole process again. Also, your internet provider can get in on the act with their own DNS server and can cache results for up to 72 hours. This delay is not as frustrating for you as it is for the website owners who can’t get people’s computers to connect after they make a move a site to a new numerical address!

        1. Only in the sense that apples are the same thing as fruit salad because they are both associated with fruit. 😆

          In other words, despite both the internet bill and the registration lapse being associated with the internet, they aren’t the same thing. The internet bill is payment for access to the internet. Paying that bill will not give you a nameserver. Registering a nameserver will give you a nameserver. (There are also other costs, but none of them are made to the ISP, unless the ISP happens to also provide web hosting.)

          1. Whoosh.

            His response was tongue in cheek because Feldon’s 200 word essay missed the “5 year old” requirement.

      2. Almost correct. Your computer does not ask a TLD or root server directly.

        It will ask your ISP’s (or the business’ ISP, if you’re using coffee shop / office) DNS which in turn will either have a cached result or will go out to ask the Root / TLD servers.

        Each DNS entry can be set to forget cached results (TTL value). If it was originally set to 48-72 hours, then ISPs and users will be forced to wait it out (or hope someone manually resets it)

    2. Like a 5 year old? Your computer (nor anyone else’s computer) can’t find SOE’s websites or games. It’s like someone ripped out all the street signs and number plates on the houses so nobody can find them.

  2. Domain Name: SONYONLINE.NET
    Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
    Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
    Referral URL: http://networksolutions.com
    Name Server: NS1.PENDINGRENEWALDELETION.COM
    Name Server: NS2.PENDINGRENEWALDELETION.COM
    Status: clientTransferProhibited
    Updated Date: 15-jul-2014
    Creation Date: 26-may-1999
    Expiration Date: 26-may-2015

    Seemed to have been updated today… now lets get back to gaming!

      1. Yep, your computer has no idea where manifest.patch.station.sony.com is because the DNS server for station.sony.com is ns2.sonyonline.net and sonyonline.net is in the wind.

    2. yes, updated by network solutions. pending renewal/deletion. It’s their personal parking page that they use to hold the domain while giving sony more time to purchase it back. It appears they have two grace periods. One is leaving it fully functional, the second is to take it down, but still hold it. At some point it will enter the public pool of purchasable domains again.

  7. It’s nice to see someone is on top of things…there has been nothing official (that I can find) from sony/SOE on this issue. You would think a big company like Sony would have this kind of thing on auto-renewal.

    Of course this goes for EQ 1, as well as all other SOE games…not just EQ2

      1. SOE could have thrown together a downloadable app that amends people’s Hosts file with all the hosts SOE uses. The app would automagically remove itself on Saturday, and undo the changes to the Hosts file.

  8. thanks, feldon for you updates and response to the question. any idea of the time it will take to resolve this problem and what safe quards will have to be implemented in the future??

    1. Once SOE gets this straightened out with Network Solutions, the fix should propagate pretty quickly.

      Safeguards? I bet after today, all notifications about expiring domains will be sent to at least 2 people at SOE so that they aren’t missed.

      1. Better, someone should track their domain name assets with contact/billing information, and proactively pay them without needing an email notice that might get flagged as spam by their mail filtering service in the first place.

          1. Expiration notices are e-mailed months in advance, but they don’t do any good when they’re sent to a deleted inbox. It’s possible to regularly query the WHOIS database for domain expiration data and use an internal mail server to send a notice to the appropriate people, but that’s just adding several more points of failure. Pro tip: keep a list of important mailbox accounts and tell IT to keep those up, do or die.

  9. WTF man!!!??? Why didnt anyone inform us about this???!!! I tried to launch the damn thing (PS2) and i just get a loading screen for half a minute and it all goes to total blackness after that???

    2. Impressive launching it from a PS2.
      But Feldon has a point. They cant inform us due to everything being down. This is a pretty epic fail on Sonys part and I hope they can fix it soon. If not give the players something for having to wait.

  13. ROTFLMFAO Proof positive those folks at SOE have no clue.

    Exchange reminders folks.

    If this is really the problem, it could take 72 hours to propagate to all name servers.

  17. So ….. Your now see how they do things , and how they spend your money you dish out for this mess. Sorry folks but , this an inexcusable ,mistake?! Sorry? e-mail unread ? really?
    If my company, the word FIRED would be used . This shows me …..
    not going to say iit but , TOLD YA SO .These are paying customers when are you going them respect with the money you use from them. 💡

    1. All told, this was about a 3 hour glitch early in the morning. It wasn’t an all-day downtime, and it didn’t happen in primetime in either the US or Europe. If you fire people for that, you’re not gonna have employees for long. We all make mistakes…

      2. I feel that they should at least give something to those of us who pay to play the game. Even if it is just something like an extra item just to say “Yeah, we overlooked this and we are sorry and appreciate you paying every month to play our game”

        1. why? why is it that every time anything goes wrong or a mistake is made some one out there thinks they should be given something special to make up for it? yeah it was a mistake. yeah it should have been monitored closer. but humans run things and humans make mistakes.

          sometimes it is a miscommunication. however, no good is done by throwing stones in a glass house. When they get it fixed and i can get back into the games and into the forums, i will be very happy. that is all the apology i need.

          1. That’s the right attitude in life! *thumbs up!*

            I also agree that we get too caught up in it all. No i’m not from California smoking medical weed! and I pay for 4 EQ accounts, so i’m disappointed that it happened, but happy that Smedly openly admitted that it was a simple error in the domain registrar email going to the wrong person… Not sure of the duration, but i can imagine 5 years, so that person responsible has left, and it slipped their mind to check their email account had forwards setup to the new person in control. Just a big oops! Sucks, but that’s life.

            Hope people don’t try to sue or quit over it.

          2. So if your electric company turns off your power for 3 days and says your still going to pay for it you’d be ok with that. I expect to be able to use the products that i pay for, when i cant and it is the providers fault through negligence then yes there needs to be compensation

          3. Because that’s how the real world works, if you screw up something while taking people’s money away from them you compensate them for their loss.

        2. Yes, the whole “company meeting on the parking lot and when you return there is an empty box for your personal stuff and a security guard at your desk” way layoffs are often handled in the U.S. does not contribute to proper handovers. I’m not claiming this is the way it happened in this case though.

  19. i had just left a huge wall of text on the planetside 2 forums with quite a bit of my personal opinions and criticisms, when everything went down. I thought that I was being banned from the websites for that forum post, but then I couldnt get the game to launch and I doubt they could ban me from the game by having it give me a black screen upon starting the program. Saw that people on the facebook page were whining about similar problems.

    The site I used to show server population on planetsides 2 gave me a very confusing chart where the pop would go from 200 to zero back to 200 then zero within a 20 minute period

    It’s 630 AM in California and those guys down in San Diego are about to have an exciting morning for what I would vote as the biggest crash they’ve had ever (game, website and forum?) for the dummest reason ever

    Kudos for looking into it, This is one of the reasons I love planetside 2 the sandbox approach they take is very unique

    1. lol all games, all websites and all forums and then eq2 will be down 2 more hours for the update. Feldon, you are awesome. I would have never known what was happening if not for you. I don’t do twittter and facebook.

    1. means they are in the process of changing ownership. that process takes a bit of time because of all that it entails- the changing of ownership is only part of the process. the dns servers have to be changed and it all has to be registered.

        1. So where would you like me to get these official sourced quotes from? You think if I called up SOE on the phone 3 hours ago they would have explained in detail? All they put on Twitter and Facebook is that they were investigating “login issues” which doesn’t really describe the actual problem “forgetting to renew the domain all your other sites are dependent upon”.

          Everything in the article was verifiable at NetworkSolutions.com as well as:

          http://who.is/domain-history/sonyonline.net
          http://who.is/domain-history/everquest2.com

          1. Called it:

  24. Around 2AM, PST, I called started digging into this and contacting various carriers, based upon the failed ‘tracert’ – I could not believe what the NOC tech at Confluence Networks told me… that their domain expired. I figured this had to be a DNS hijack, but he was right on the money. 😯

    Actually had to pick up my jaw off my desk.

    – ALBATROSS!

      1. no DNS at upper tiers of the web can take as long as 48 hours to propagate the info out to the rest of the web. at this point it’s just a waiting game and SOE no longer has control over it.

    1. did you try the ipconfig /flushdns command? I am in central california (granted, pretty close to soe) but I am not having any DNS issues whatsoever. actually have not had any issue at all during this whole thing

      3. i did and then tried to get on eq2. no luck so i figured they were updating so i tried eq1 – no luck. and as luck would have it, LOTRO did a huge update yesterday and my launch there is still downloading and patching files. I guess if it persists most of the day it will be guild wars prophecy for me.

  30. I tried to by-pass the launcher, but got the message the launcher didn’t match the current one, and to reload launcher, bah so that didn’t work. I also tried the command listed above ipconfig /flushdns which didn’t help either. So I assume its just a waiting game for now.

        1. When you load a website for the first time on your computer, it goes out and talks to the root servers, then to the TLD server, then to the name server, and then it gets the IP address and will use that information for 24-48 hours sometimes even 72 hours. When that website moves to a new IP address, it might take 72 hours for your computer to request the new information based on the last time it looked it up.

          You can usually override this 72 hour wait with a ipconfig /flushdns, but sometimes you need to reboot your internet router/modem. And sometimes, your ISP will have their own cache.

          1. I live in basically vancouver, B.C., Canada.
            It has been out since 4am here. I tried first running ipconfig /flushdns. didn’t work then I unplugged modem and restarted computer. waited a minute then plugged modem back in still get black square on launchpad for EQ1. If I have to wait 72 hours that will suck big time. My wife is gone for 72 hours figured I could play all day and well into the night and now I can’t. Was so looking forward to playing and now just thoroughly dissapointed in SOE.

    2. If using Vista or Win7, you can find it by Start button -> All Programs -> Accessories -> right-click Command Prompt -> Select ‘Run as administrator -> then in the Windows\system32 directory (folder) type the command ipconfig /flushdns.

        1. If running Win 7 or 8, it’s a little different than just going to “Run” and typing that command. You will get a not found error message from Windows. You CAN type Command or Command prompt in to the Run area and it will bring up a command prompt and the command will work from that, or as you stated in the first post about the long way around to Command prompt. At least on 7, I haven’t tried loading my Laptop that has Win 8, as I don’t like the way 8 works.

  33. /sighs at SOE All I’m getting when I try to launch EQ2 is a few seconds of the launchpad with a swirling loading symbol, then a big black square.

    And as a “make good” for today, Devs will be adding the /facepalm emote, right? =P

  36. What burns my ass… SOE had seven weeks to fix the issue of domain expiration and did nothing. Wow, talk about incompetence. Most employees would get fired for a screw up of this magnitude.

    So, do we fire John Smedley (CEO of SOE) for this tremendous, horrendous miscarriage of his duties??

    1. So, do we fire John Smedley (CEO of SOE) for this tremendous, horrendous miscarriage of his duties??

      Unless “we” includes his actual bosses, how exactly do “we” fire him (if “we” were so inclined)?

  45. Ahhh….some of you people really, really, really need to get your lives sorted out!!
    So, we aren’t able to play for some hours……Wow – big deal!! Go do something else ffs.
    Does your entire life revolve just around your own skulls? 👿

      1. Well, technically 72 hours is some hours (since some merely means an unspecified amount, and although we know that it likely won’t go over 72 hours, we don’t know specifically how many hours it will take. It just happens to potentially be a lot of them.

          1. Why, yes, I am. I could have sworn that my nerd attributes were so obvious that they didn’t necessitate anyone commenting upon them, but I can see now that I’ll have to be a bit less subtle about my nerd affiliation. 😉

    2. Unfortunately for me it does. I have VERY limited mobility right now and would LOVE to be working on some of my lower chars right now while the number of guildies is low and we’re NOT raiding, lol. I have flushed MY DNS cache several times, and I’m currently getting the white box popup that says it couldn’t establish a connection. Not sure if I didn’t wait long enough before closing out the launcher to see that before, or if it’s new, but it IS different, lol.

  46. You know… I get an email, like months before my website expires saying…you’re site is about to expire, renew now. Kinda like I get a letter in the mail about my car registration expiring 2 months ahead of time…

    So who’s getting fired for this one?

  48. Ironic how Mepps says possibly a 48 hour downtime for some players, well let’s think about that.. 2 days downtime for a game i pay for monthly and knowing SOE you wont get any days added just a bitter disappoint from this sad turn of events.

    1. Wow – how much did these hours set you back, financially?
      I pay a monthly fee too, so I know the number. If I cannot handle those few cents/dollars, I should re-evaluate my priorities – and so should you.

      1. The amount does not matter if your bank steals a 10 cents from everyone’s account every month are you going to just say oh well. when you pay for a product you expect to receive that product.

  49. You know, you guys [SOE] have been having one problem after another the last few weeks. And for people like me who are League members on DCUO, your problems are becoming worse and worse. And what have me and everybody who play DCUO gotten as a way of you apologizing for all your problems? NOTHING! You guys need to do some serious repair work on your end cause these problems are becoming a real annoyance.

    2. It’s all about getting something right? Always about getting something.
      The sun gives you a brown tan – what did you pay the sun for it’s kindness?
      Nothing!!? Shame on you……..the sun should be getting something, right?

  51. There’s a game better than the EverQuest series. the graphics are outstanding, and the sound is amazing. It’s so realistic you get wet when you jump in the water.
    It’s called OutSide. The newest expansion is called Reality.
    It’s free to play, just like EverQuest!

    To install this game, push yourself away from your desk, stand up and walk to the nearest portstone.
    There’s a ritual to port to Outside. You have to twist the little knobby thing and pull or push.

    The only drawback is there’s no respawn if you die…

    1. and no mobs to kill, no adventure unless you have real money to do so, and let’s not forget, you have to have good enough health to walk out there. those with disabilities are kind of left with no escape button. thanks- i like my fantasy. you can have the reality.

    3. to all of you fan boys who say go play out side and stuff your a bunch of idiots im a subscriber I spend money on this and I want it to work its not the amout of money im out its the inconvience of something I payed for not working I feel ripped off because some goof ball dropped the ball I say fire the ceo and anyone below him that is responsible

  56. Just be thankful whoever was in charge of this doesn’t apply at the local nuclear plant =) haha . But now I shall go defeat the Fabled lawn with the Craftsman mount of Awesomeness ..lol

  59. I’m in Missouri and still out here. IP reset manually and still nothing. SOE already has my money and if I can’t use the excuse “oh the notice went to the wrong email” then neither should they. Game bugs, crashes, now this… SOE, I’m about done with you…

  60. i did this: If this is all dependent on DNS propigation, I would recommend the following. To help speed up the process, I would recommend adding Googles public dns server to your network adapter (8.8.8.8) followed by ipconfig /flushdns and ipconfig /registerdns from an elevated command prompt. It’s not guaranteed to work instantly but it’s probably your best option to recognize changes.

    and now i am on the game. couldn’t get on it just seconds before doing it.

    1. Suka I just used the command Ipconfig /flushdns and my eq2 is now online, playing at the pvp server… hehe

      but eq1 I am still getting black screen

      Strange

      oh and I am at south america Brazil. Sao Paulo.

      1. try this: open your network and sharing folder, then click your network icon (mine is local area connection) and open that. click on the properties and then on internet protocol version 4 (tcp/ipv4). Now click properties on that.

        the bottom part is the dns server. click “use the following DNS server address:
        preferred DNS server: 8.8.8.8
        alternate dns server 8.8.4.4

        click validate settings on exit

        Now go to your system tools in your accessories on your start menu and right-click the command prompt. choose “run as administrator”

        there you type the ipconfig commands: first the /flushdns and then the /registerdns. when it finishes telling you that the dns is registered, close the window.

        your eq1 should run then.

  63. Thank you, Feldon, for the incredible job you do keeping us players informed about the ups and downs of servers and such. You have a seemingly endless well of patience with players who honestly have close to zip network knowledge and especially with those whose entire online lives exist to yank everyone elses chains.

    Thank you again for your honesty. I may not always agree with you and that, Feldon, is one of the many reasons I respect you.

    Yep, website God mode suits you ))

    Virtual plate of cookies to you!

  64. Between wildfires closing them down, Dave Georgeson breaking his ankle this weekend, the conventions, and now this, having their problems aren’t they.

    Got to admit “this” is a first, as far as I’ve know. When they had the big layoff not long after alpha announcements, that is possibly where the screw-up happened. The laid off guy(s) didn’t pass on the email address for domain notifications. As was mentioned earlier, this is a good bet that that’s what may happened.

    1. well, if they laid me off i probably wouldn’t have bothered to pass anything along. if you have someone who does a job you need done or who has information vital to you company, you first make sure you have moved all of that job and info to someone you plan to keep before dumping them.

      still i wouldn’t say it is the worst they could have done. everyone makes mistakes.

  67. Thanks, resetting my default DNS to goggles free 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 fixed it i can run Everquest 1 again. All those host changes allowed access to eq2 but not eq1 for me and eq2 website but not eq1 website. So thats that. Fixed! Thanks Feldon.

  69. Suka, you are a genius!! The DNS changes you recommended above worked like a charm for me. Simply flushing the dns didn’t work for me. Wasn’t able t access EQ2 or any of the websites at all until I made the DNS changes. Thanks and well done!

  70. One quick follow up question for you Suka…….is this something I should reverse at some point? Is there any reason I shouldn’t leave googles public DNS server as the primary DNS server?? Thanks again!

  71. I’m posting from the UK Its 11:53 PM Here coming up midnight, I’m just curious if anyone knows when the FARK it will be up just come home from work 2 hours ago and expected to be gaming!! Idiots man, seriously!

      1. I have read on other boards that SoE will be adding 2 days play time to everyone’s paid accts. Not that that will help with the frustration, but they are going to compensate for the downtime. I for one am thankful for it. Got my garage and my house back in order lol.

    1. for anyone skimming to the bottom here looking for answers Suka’s solution is working for me as well, here it is:

      “try this: open your network and sharing folder, then click your network icon (mine is local area connection) and open that. click on the properties and then on internet protocol version 4 (tcp/ipv4). Now click properties on that.

      the bottom part is the dns server. click “use the following DNS server address:
      preferred DNS server: 8.8.8.8
      alternate dns server 8.8.4.4

      click validate settings on exit

      Now go to your system tools in your accessories on your start menu and right-click the command prompt. choose “run as administrator”

      there you type the ipconfig commands: first the /flushdns and then the /registerdns. when it finishes telling you that the dns is registered, close the window.

      your eq1 should run then.”

        1. May you could try

          disconnecting your machine from the internet

          then running the ipconfig /flushdns command.

          after that, before reconnecting, try setting the DNS server addresses as stated above.

          reconnect your machine and then reboot.

      1. I just got mine to work; followed the directions multiple times and nothing, until I unplugged the modem, did the flushdns command, and waited a few minutes to plug the modem back in.

  77. I think i have found a Fix for those of you getting the socket Error from launcher….I was getting the socket Error and i figured a way to get the launcher to work…Hopefully this works for you guys….

    First: Copy and Paste http://manifest.patch.station.sony….uo-pcus-retail/live/pcus-retail-win32.sha.soe

    …..Once downloaded choose Open with option….Browse for your Launcher Exe File..which is usually found under

    “C:\Users\Public\Sony Online Entertainment\Installed Games\DC Universe Online\LaunchPad.exe” Something like that….

    Click on the launchpad.exe and open the file with that and you should be able to log in!! Try it and let me know.

  78. And the same for me. Still getting the black square. Tried the flush last night, (15th) and got onto Landmark for about 15 minutes. Turned my back, and it was gone again.
    Sigh. Funny if it wasn’t so frustrating.
    Forgot to pay their rent, rofl.

    1. Open the Start menu.
      Choose “Run….”
      Type “cmd”.
      It should say “This task will be created with administrative privileges” below it.

      Now type ipconfig /registerdns.
      Please notice the space between ipconfig and /registerdns.

  80. Sigh…my OS doesn’t cache DNS records, and I’ve tried forcing my connection to use Google’s DNS, but apparently my ISP defaults to its cache come hell or high water. I even pulled out my vista laptop (which I haven’t used the net on for over a month and anything everquest for 4-5 months) and it’s failing to connect. It’s not even worth calling Centurylink/Qwest to try and find out how often they refresh it…

  81. Any word on when things will be cleared up? I would look on the SOE website but It says:

    SOE.COM is up for sale.

    and all I get is a black rectangle when I try to launch EQ1, EQ2, Landmark, etc….

    Im not going into withdrawals like others here, but it would be nice to kill an orc or two right now. ><

    Thanks a bunch!

  82. I’m fine I’ll be patient we are human i’m not really upset or anything i have other things to do to pass my time. Only thing i care for is to just make sure to get these two-three extra days i missed added to my subscription. I don’t need or want anything for this. You all act like you haven’t made a mistake before.. They have owned up to it and are trying to correct it. Completely fine.. go on a date or something jeez.

  83. About 10:30 p.m. PDT, I logged in just fine. Toon was outside in the rain in Freeport, as the guild hall rent was due. I paid it aaaannnd… I can’t get in the hall. Self camped, swapped toons, used Call, tried a Door to Guild from a house, etcetera. No go. At that, the Door tossed me to the street outside the guild hall (clever bug).

    Can’t visit any of the other guilds in the same facility — “Enter” is greyed out — but could visit a different tier guild hall, no problem. Too late at night to ask around, but wonder if this is an instance bug of some sort leftover…

  84. I am 60 years old and have been in IT for 40. This DNS problem is a failure on the part of the DNS provider and Sony. The provider should have manually contacted someone with authority at Sony before pulling the plug. Sony should have known that a payment for DNS was coming due. The DNS provider should have enacted change control methods instead of using robots. Sony should review their contracts annually when they create a budget for the next fiscal year. This is Data Center 101 and Customer Service 101 and if you really want someone professional to fix this simple problem… you have my email address.

    1. Certainly SOE should have redundancies setup. For whatever reason, nobody had been assigned to monitor the e-mail address.

      It’s unclear if Network Solutions offers any kind of premium / white glove treatment package that a corporation can pay extra for. If it’s just basic registration with no special notification, then it’s inexcusable that they charge $35 for an annual registration while Namecheap charges $14.

      1. Network Solutions is terrible. They were my first registrar back in the days when Angelfire and Netzero existed. I’ve been with GKG.net for more than a decade now. $9/year for 10 years or $11/year on a yearly basis.

  85. I’m not used to posting comments but today I feel obliged to do so. Only last week I decided to take out annual subscription to EQ2; now this happens. There is no way to access SOE or the games everything is still down in the UK.

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