No you aren’t the only one, seems ahead of DMM’s maintenance that they decided to randomly block some countries/ISPs. Haven’t seen too many say they used a VPN and it now works but a few have and it worked again for them, seems this solves the “error” aka region blocking.
France is now blocked. It’s annoying.
Solution as per Discord is to use VPN. Turn on VPN to start DMM launcher, and once game is up you can turn it off. Credits to the peeps from Discord!
USA here and its BLOCKED for some reason. what the hell.
I’m from Brazil here, I also got blocked.
I’ll try to compile a lot of information in one post. Typing it after a long sleepless night, so cut me some slack if there are typos.
What happened?
DMM blocked access to games on their platform to users overseas. Something similar did happen in past years, but now we’re treated with a significantly amped-up level of meaningless hatred.
How big is the scale?
It starts from the website itself. You still can log in to the DMM account, but then if you want to proceed to download the DMM GamePlayer or try to link up your account in web-game like Granblue Fantasy, you gonna hit a brick wall “The service provider restricts access in your area.”
If you get DMM GamePlayer somehow, then the login page will refuse to let you pass, infinitely loading into an error.
Then, inside the client itself, hovering over games will spawn a pop-up window with an 803 error - service isn’t available in your area. That error is paired with a hidden “Start” button, basically disallowing you to start the game at all. The same goes for installation, but, thankfully, the bulk of the content is stored on Cygames servers.
They’ve gone very thorough this time.
Which countries were blocked?
Easier to say which were not. You can still play if you log in from South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, those I checked personally. Also, Singapore might have been spared, can’t confirm. Both American continents, Europe all the way to Russia including them too, Middle East, Africa - everyone got shadowbanned from using DMM.
What to do?
Easy solution - drop DMM and play on a smartphone/emulator. Unlike Umamusume, which can give authentication errors on some emulators, Princess Connect works just fine.
Another solution - using a VPN. Sooner or later you might get an e-mail about a temporary lockdown of your account until you change the password, it happened to me at least a dozen times in the past when I was using an assortment of crappy free VPNs in the past.
Lastly - you can set up a tunnel to a stable IP within the service area. Japanese VPS are quite rare though, and prices aren’t exactly cheap.
What to expect?
First of all, I’d like to be a voice of reason, Cygames are doing their part in keeping the games available to everyone everywhere, and I don’t expect that to change. Ye, it sucks to go to the other platform when a convenient PC client is no longer available at will, but the entire library of Cygames’ titles is still reachable and playable.
If DMM doesn’t restore access within two months from now, we’re basically doomed to use alternative clients forever. And Granblue players are triple fucked, there’s no transfer to Mobage, they are stuck with DMM controlling their account data, and have to keep up cookie records alive by checking in every day.
As for Princess Connect - recover your account by binding it and transferring to a smartphone/emulator. And hope for the best, there were times in the past when DMM blocked access overseas (not at this scale though), but they backpedaled after a certain amount of time.
This actually happened in the past with DMM player but a few weeks later the restriction was removed. Considering how jank DMM player is I wouldn’t be supposed if one of the devs broke something which enabled region blocking again.
I forgot about something important that will make life easier for people using DMM.
Use a vpn provider that supports split tunneling. What this mean is that you decide which software should use vpn and which software should not. Doing this you can have VPN start with Windows and connect to a jp server. You enable split tunneling and choose that dmm player should use vpn. Then you set that everything else should go outside of vpn. Now you wont have to bother turning on and off vpn to play the priconne and everything else will go through the normal connection. Settings will stick when restarting pc so you only need to setup once.
Note that not all vpn providers support split tunneling and some may only support that you exclude apps form vpn instead of including apps to vpn. Popular choices like PIA and Nord vpn supports this. If you are unsure if your vpn provider support it just google split tunneling + vpn providers name and you are bound to get a result if its supported.
btw for phone users the same can be done on your phone with some vpn providers.
Set my VPN to several Asian countries and got blocked. Set it to Spain. Looks like I’m in Spain but the Spain is silent.
So that’s why… It seems I won’t be able to play Priconne anymore.
Which countries are blocked by DMM?
Perú is blocked fuck
If I can’t play because of that, i don’t think I’ll keep playing the game… Which makes me sad
Edit: oh it still works, yay
US player, and I have no issues. Restarted my player to, just to be certain.
thanks Ameth I’m not experienced this. although I’m already preparing the vpn to counter this issue in the future.
I live in France and I can still launch it without using a VPN personnaly
One can actually disable vpn as soon as you get the UAC prompt from windows. Meaning before the game actually starts. Priconne only need to check that dmm is running at launch and after that it doesnt matter. This way you wont change country mid game and you should make it a routine to disable from any free vpn as soon as possible. Reason is that free vpn’s arent really that safe and people have had their info leaked, sniffed etc on such vpns while login into their bank, email etc.
My advice is that any person who use wifi outside their own router should always have a trusted vpn provider. That includes your phone and tablet. Trusted VPN isnt that expensive either.
You have a good VPN which don’t screw up your computer?
Both American continents, Europe all the way to Russia including them too, Middle East, Africa - everyone got shadowbanned from using DMM.
Spain here. Still working fine for me with no VPN, only knew about this because the ruckus, game’s opens normally. Funny enough last year happened something similar and had to use VPN for a few months but now seems like I have been spared.
(In case anyone asks… yes, I’m sure there isn’t any VPN on my PC that is ejecuting without knowing and make me think that I’m not affected by this… I barely in my life installed one and the PC got formatted not so long ago. Last year used a special VPN that only worked for PriConne created by a reddit user but I don’t remember how to found it again)