"Failed to connect to instance" FIX (+question about improvement)

Hello dear members,

I'm new to PoE and having some problems I can not find a solution to. After selecting my character and clicking Play, the loading screen appears and after a few seconds I get kicked with a message, in the bottom left corner, saying: "Failed to connect to instance".

Found a solution here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/103073

After connecting through OpenVPN and starting PoE.exe as admin, I get a message: "Unable to connect to patching server" or if I'm at the client login screen, it won't even access my account.

The way I'm able to play the game is:
1. Start PoE.exe as admin, get into the client, login into my account
2. THEN start OpenVPN and connect to a server
3. After OpenVPN connects, I select my character and login into the game

Although it's pretty playable, I'm having some lag spikes occasionally. But, it's really annoying going through all this procedure trying to play a game. In addition, after connecting through OpenVPN, I'm unable to alt+tab and load any site on my browser..


My suspicions:
As I'm a student (studying informatics, tried everything else, nothing seemed to work) in a dorm, we have a secured LAN and we're connecting through "SecureW2" by giving details given by the faculty, so the problem might be the authentication.
Had the same problem playing CoD4, I was able to play it online from home, but the moment I connected through my dorm LAN I was unable to see any online servers. Fixed it by running a CoD4 console in the background.
My colleague had the same problem with Guild Wars, and by posting on the forums he got a special .exe file where he could run the game normally and play it through the dorm LAN.


Is there any way of fixing this issue without using OpenVPN? Any ideas and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

Sincerely,
Sargaxon

bump.

I am willing to provide any additional details regarding this problem if needed.. got really frustrated the last two days, disconnecting every 5-10 minutes. HALP MEH PLS!!

Although it's occasionally cited as such, a VPN is really not a solution; it's just circumventing the problem.

The most likely cause for your issues is the security policy of your dorm's network and thus you'd need to contact the administrator and hope he/she'll be willing to help troubleshoot. The required ports for PoE are:

6112 - Game server (homage to Diablo II, I'm guessing)
12995 - Patching server
20481 - Auth server

(All communication is TCP)

EDIT: If your network administrator is unable to help you for whatever reason and you dislike using a VPN (I can't imagine it'd yield stable latency) then I can give you proxy (SOCKS) access to my dedicated server located in Seattle in the United States (if you're not American, this probably wouldn't be suitable for latency reasons)