I've been playing this game for awhile and been having serious issues online, at first it started with random disconnects, then it was telling me I wasnt connected to live (I was) and it even accused me of not having an online pass at some point. And it's only gotten worse since the patch, i'm lucky if I can get through a game without getting booted to menu, i've never had this problem playing games online before.

The weird thing is all my friends have this problem too. So i'm wondering is this because i'm from the UK? Because Virgin Media is my provider? Anyone from the UK have the same problem? I've done a little research online and found one guy with the same problem as me but that hardly validates it.

My advice: Get the hell away from Virgin Media!

With not knowing your specific location, it's hard to be certain, but for me, I had nothing but problems the whole time I was with them. For a good while, I was living in a busy area of Leeds city centre, in which the local Virgin Media stores had sandwich boards for SUPER FAST BROADBAND, UP TO 50MB outside their doors.... What a load of toss!

99% of the time, I couldn't maintain a stable connection, I'd lag like a mo-fo, I couldn't stream anything without hitches every few seconds, downloading a 600mb XBLA demo could take hours upon hours... The list just goes on. My download speeds would usually reach 0.5mb at its absolute very best at around 4am. The rest of the time it pretty much felt like dial-up. It got to a point where our local party leader was writing to Virgin to try and get some form of action, the issues were THAT widespread!

I contacted them countless times, and they did nothing but blame my setup with nothing concrete to substantiate their claims. They'd blame lack of router port forwarding, faulty wiring, you name it... Eventually I got released from the contract early when I kicked up a massive shit-storm and went to another provider (in my case O2). It's been buttery smooth for me ever since.

Going back a bit further, when World of Warcraft was actually fun (loooong ago), there'd be endless forum threads commenting on poor latency and connection issues with Virgin. Some would moan about Sky as well, but for the most part, complaints were Virgin-centric.

I can't necessarily guarantee that the issues I've had with them (all within the past year), are in any way related to the issues you're having, and I can't confirm anything relating to DoA specifically, as I don't own the game, but I've known so many people that have had issues with them, that I refuse to believe it's just a coincidence...

I hope that that is in some small way helpful to you. You're definitely not alone with your issues... :)

For what it's worth I'm also with Virgin Media, have had zero connection problems in DoA and all other games.

In fact they're the best broadband provider I've ever had. I consistently get 30mbps speeds (slightly over sometimes too) until the throttling kicks in, but even then I'm getting around 15-16mbps, which is still miles ahead of what I got on ADSL.

Six months ago I'd have said it wouldn't have been your provider, but considering the absolute nightmare I've been having with my Virgin connection as of late, I'd hazard a guess and say it's their fault.

I'm unable to download virtually any file requiring extraction as they downloads are corrupted, Steam downloads drop literally every second and stop for long ass periods of time.

The only thing that works well is streaming, but even in the evening that is spotty as hell.

After sending me a new hub (which made zero difference), they've been absolutely no help. I'm going to attempt one more discussion with them and see if an engineer can help. If not, I'm going to demand to be cut from from contract (or wait out the last couple months, then tell them I'm not renewing).

@dekkadekkadekka: Out of interest, would you mind stating your rough location within the UK?

It's crazy how each person's tale can be such a polar opposite, I can't help thinking that locality must have something to do with it, like trying to pass through a bottlenecked data center on one end of the country as opposed to the other.... Maybe :S

From what I've found from my extensive trawling of forums, it seems the further south you go, the better it gets

@TehPickle: Sure, South-East Greater London area.

And sure, I had heard the horror stories before signing up, but I was on Be broadband (o2) which would constantly drop. New routers, line replacements didn't help.

I have a friend whose parents are on VM, in the Greater West London area, and they've had issues in the past.

I actually get pretty good speeds from Virgin, and I have no problems playing games like Halo or downloading things from Steam. The only reason i'm thinking it may be them is because my friends also use Virgin and they've got the same problem.

I'm just trying to isolate the problem so I can deal with it but I dont really want to change providers without knowing for sure that it's them.

The problem with Virgin Media is that they are essentially about 20+ cable companies merged into one. Had no end of problems with them back when I was at Uni but the service I've had since moving back to my home town has on the most part been pretty decent (as long as I don't want to stream video on iplayer etc at around 9pm which is odd for a 50 Mbps connection).

@dekkadekkadekka: Thanks for the response. I guess that proves that there's no real rhyme or reason to any of it :S

@BoOzak Maybe DoA has a super sensitive online system that disconnects at the slightest hint of a drop, but I gotta admit, I'm clutching at straws a little bit now.

Hope you get it sorted :)

@TehPickle: Thanks.

It could be my router or NAT settings or someting along those lines but it still doesnt explain why this is the only game that has any issues.

@TehPickle: I live about an hour north of Manchester and I havn't ever had problems with Virgin. We get up to 30mbs consistently and friends who live nearby get up to 50mbs also with Virgin Media. I thought they were helpful on the phone and online in the past too. But now I'm at uni in Hull and we get up to about 5mbs but with a different ISP

From just outside Nottingham and I don't have too many problems with Virgin Media. My upload speed is a piece of shit but other than that it is fine. DOA 5 takes a long time to find matches but that seems to be a NAT problem.

Well apparently the problem is less rare than I thought. Some peope also claim that the Xbox version is hacked but I think this is just some stupid netcode issue, there cant be that many hackers out there. I think i'm done with the online until this gets sorted, there's only so many d/c's my pride can handle. It's strange that there's so many glitches though, I dont remember DOA4 having this many problems.