Monday, November 11, 2013

Ghost in the machine : Mass Effect 3 Retaliation DLC crashed my XBOX

So I try to play Mass Effect 3 multiplayer when it freezes at the loading menu. That's the menu which looks like couple of PCs and features your galaxy at war report. It also tells you that your XBOX is connecting with EA's servers. Now this happened after I lost the Internet connection. I reconnect easily and every device that is attached works. I call EA support on a Friday. We delete everything including all the DLC and reload it. Well, it looks like it worked since I could immediately play the game starting from the menu. But the next day, I started the game back up again and it froze. My XBOX crashed.

I call EA support again. This time we did a route trace. (Don't ask me what that means. I think it has to do with looking at the Internet signal to my XBOX.) EA tells me i'ts my ISP. I call Cincinnati Bell. We do a route trace there. They analyze and say since I can play Grand Theft Auto, it ain't us. They tell me to call EA again. I call EA again. They think it's a particular DLC. I'm told to delete each DLC and reinstall to see which one. Oh and before that we created another profile to test my XBOX. On that one, the test profile ran and it worked. That means whatever is wrong is attached to my profile. Which stinks since my multiplayer profile has all the weapons maxed out. Hey I play a lot of Mass Effect. Goddess. Well, I test each DLC. Voila. It's the DLC Retaliation that is crashing.

EA moves me up past Tier 2 support. I'm now discussing my case with senior tech support. This nice gentleman tells me to take my XBOX to another network. Now I've already done everything in support protocol. Disconnect my modem. Take the XBOX off the Internet and reconnect. I literally took my XBOX and directly connected it to the Internet connection. And I had said before, created a test profile to test whether it was my XBOX or my profile. Loaded each DLC separately and found it was Retaliation. So I'm a little skeptical. He said something about re-synchronizing my profile and XBOX.

The Happy Ending.

Well, I take my XBOX to another network. And it worked. What the ? Then I took it home. It took a little bit of coaxing because I couldn't connect. I ran the connection tests and got the XBOX to go online. And it started to work! I have no idea why Retaliation crashed on my profile. All I can say is that taking it to another network may have reset everything. One more strange thing. When downloading the single player DLC again, I would lose connection to EA's servers. Not a real problem since I just would reconnect. The bottom line is that I got Mass Effect to work again. Thank the goddess.

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