Random computer quirks always fascinate me. The strangest one I had involved a computer that shouldn’t have existed.
One time in the early aughts I had a patchwork computer that I put together from the junk pile of a local computer store that a buddy of mine ran.
It was barely holding together in a rusty frame, with zip ties and wood glue.
Its modem was temperamental as hell. It would only stay online so long as it was pinging a website via command prompt. It was only some websites, too. Like I could ping Geocities, but not livejournel.
I remember many weekends doing Mephisto runs in Diablo II, praying that my command prompt doesn’t bug out anytime I’d get anything worthwhile.
I’d be very interested in your theory.
I thought it had something to do with the distance to the server or ping timeout, but that is more of a guess.
I’ve not experienced that problem again despite working as a network engineer for 20 years