Finally worked out my inability to connect to the GTL multiplayer lobby.

You wouldn't believe what I had to go through. Completely removed the game, rebuilt NIC drivers, added a new NIC. Ran IP connection tracking on all inbound and outbound connections etc to no avail.

For reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, my hosts file had an entry for GT Legends, pointing my PC to itself as the primary host (127.0.0.1).

Strangest thing.

BTW - credit must go to 'TRmin8r's post on this site:

http://keskustelu.plaza.fi/Muropaketti/bbs/t385267,975

I don't speak (or read for that matter) Finnish, so after much flexing of the intution, I managed to glean the gist of the post, leading me to my host file. This of course fixed the issue, so I'd like to join 'JaTaMa' in sending a big ol' "Kiitän!" to TRmin8r.

Good thing you posted something like this, in case someone else has similar problems.

In case Enis is being sarcastic (upon review, my previous posts may not have been particularily clear), the 'hosts' file is located in:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\

It's got no extension - just called hosts. You can open and edit it with notepad.

If you see something like

127.0.0.1 www.gtl-server.net

then delete that whole line and save the edited hosts file.

I caught some malware once that wrote things to my hosts file. I couldn't get to ebay or amazon, among a bunch of others, because they had been written into my hosts file with 127.0.0.1 entries. I blamed my ISP for the longest time until something prompted me to find it there.

Might be worth a virus scan or adware scan to see if you've got something. I can't remember the name of the one I had, but I'm guessing a google search might turn up what to look for.

S'true, a fair number of malware 'aps' will hijack certain destinations (a couple of years ago, viruses would redirect sites like symantec.com, mcafee.com etc to other destinations).

I ran a whole battery of malware tests and found nothing. Although I'm not saying it's impossible, it seems unlikely that malware would arbitrarily redirect www.gtl-server.net.

I've been thinking on it, and I have an idea it may have been the altbierbude patch I applied a couple of months ago. What's odd is that it didn't affect me until a couple of weeks ago.

Who knows. Suffice to say, if you find you are unable to connect to the GTL servers, check your hosts file.

Sarcastic? No.