[Bullethead]

It was a strange thing. AFAIK only our email server and web site went down, not the server involved with the DRM. The games worked fine for me all day. And besides, you all don't need to contact the DRM server every day anyway--you've got the 7-day thing. So that wasn't the problem.

However, a few other folks also couldn't get the games running this morning. I submit they were having bad internet days. What happens is, when the game phones home at the get-go, it will allow your connection to time out up to 10 times before giving up. When it does, the game should start anyway but tell you it was unable to check for updates.

While this is going on, the game isn't technically running yet, however, so you have nothing about it in either your task bar or in Task Manager. And we, unforunately, don't provide any sign of life either, so you might have some number of minutes between the initial splash screen going away and the game starting, with nothing to indicate that the game is running. Hopefully we'll show you the game isn't completely dead during this time in the future.