Perth, Western Australia here and the exact same problems except that I was running the game on Windows 8 Pro x64 edition and kept bumping into a brick wall with EA who washed their hands of the issue with a generic 'We don't support any of our products on Windows 8.' They may as well drop 'on Windows 8' from the end of that sentence and leave it there.
The game had been working fine for me up until recently, then I started having multiple issues with it, everything from it failing to login on the main menu so that I could no longer use or play my DLC, to the issues reported by some of you regarding launching the multi-player component and being presented with greyed out options, then being dumped out.
I'd suggest that given that we are in the midst of the holiday season, the EA service is more likely at capacity and is dropping connections, of course this creates massive problems for us all because components of the single player game are dependent upon multiplayer. To add to the problem the only other way to maintain your Galactic Readiness is to own an iPad and play Mass Effect Infiltrator, because the Datapad does not work.
I will confirm this one way or another, I have reformatted my computer and completed a fresh Windows 7 installation. Though I am having problems with this too.
I too have been through the canned list of meaningless crap to do, everything from opening UDP port 3659 to dropping Windows firewall. At the end of the day, if the problem isn't communications beause the ports are open, when will EA pull the finger out and do something.
agam3mn0n, I know your anger with this one but I'm certain it's a communication issue up the pipe on the Sydney-Hawaii-Los Angeles path. And yeah, I seriously doubt its a Windows 8 problem either but as a tech' that one is going to be thrown around a lot as a scapegoat until EA openly declare they'll support the O/S. :\
Please run the UOTrace tests and pass the information on to your ISP so they can at least check for the Level3.net routing failure. Though if you're with Telstra or TPG, you have my sympathies since they didn't want to know about it either... hopefully you'll get lucky and the ISP Support will hear you out like iiNet and Internode did.
Desertrunner, fortunately, I am with Westnet which is an iinet subsidiary and yes this issue is looking like an issue on the other side of my router. Reverting back to Windows 7 is not exactly a welcome regression but what can we do when thats a typical response. Thanks for the info though, I do appreciate it, I'll send this info along to Westnet...
Cheers
agam3mn0n don't bother downgrading to Windows 7. Other player I know who are using Windows 8 say it works fine, but Origin can be a bit prickly at times when being updated.
Did Westnet report any new information?
