Troubleshooting reference
Online game problems, sorted by what you can see
Innovabase is a reference for people in Australia who play games that need an internet connection to work. Every page here starts from something observable — a window that closes half a second after you open it, a character that slides backwards across the ground, a verification email that never turns up — and works backwards to the handful of causes that actually produce it.
Most guidance about game faults is written by people who already know the answer, which is why it skips the step where you work out which problem you have. The order here runs the other way: find the description below that matches what is in front of you, then follow the page it points to.
Start with the symptom
- The game will not start at allA launcher that closes, a black window, an error code, or nothing happening at all.
- It runs, but badly — lag, stutter and dropoutsDelay between input and action, characters snapping backwards, and sessions that end mid-play.
- The account will not finish being createdVerification emails that never arrive, activation links that fail, and rejected fields.
- Downloads and updates fail or never finishPatches that stall at the same percentage, install errors and stores that refuse to update.
- A payment failed, or something paid for never arrivedDeclined cards, doubled charges, missing purchases, and what consumer law says you are owed.
- The account has been taken, or someone is tryingSign-in alerts you did not cause, offers of free currency, and the first hour after a compromise.
- Setting up a game for a child in the householdClassification, device controls, spending limits, and who to report a problem to.
How Innovabase is paid for
This site carries paid links, and there is no reason to be coy about which ones. When a reader follows our link to Star Stable Online and creates an account on the vendor's side, Navigorex Group s.r.o. — the company that publishes Innovabase — is paid a commission by the advertising network that runs that game's affiliate programme. Nothing is added to what the reader pays; the terms you meet on the vendor's site are the terms anyone meets, whether they arrive from here or type the address in themselves.
What that money buys is placement: it is why one named game appears here rather than a dozen. What it does not buy is the content — the steps below are the ones that work, in the order they are worth trying. The affiliate disclosure page sets the arrangement out in full, and the same note sits beside every paid link.
The game covered by name, and why only one
Star Stable Online is the game named throughout this site. It is an online horse-riding adventure game, and the network supplying our description lists it as playable on Windows, macOS and Linux desktops, on Android, iOS and Windows phones, and on tablets. A new player creates an account, plays, and — for those who go that way — makes purchases inside the game. Anything beyond that, including cost, is not stated in the material we were given, so it is not stated here. The vendor's own site is where those answers live.
Visit the Star Stable Online website
Paid link. Navigorex Group s.r.o. earns a commission if you create an account after following it; your price and terms are unaffected.
One game rather than twenty is a deliberate limit. A site claiming to cover a whole category while earning from one product is telling a small lie about itself, and it usually shows in the writing. Innovabase covers the category generally and one product specifically, because that is the single commercial relationship the publisher holds. The about page explains how pages are chosen and written.
Five checks worth doing before anything else
A surprising share of the problems people lose an evening to are cleared by one of these. Ten minutes in total, and they mean a symptom page starts you on real causes rather than obvious ones.
- Restart the device, not just the game. A full restart releases graphics drivers, network adapters and file locks that a closed window leaves behind — the cheapest way to clear a whole class of problems at once.
- Check whether the problem is only yours. If the game's own status page or social account is reporting an outage, every step you take on your own machine is wasted effort. Look there before you look anywhere else.
- Try a second network. Tethering to a phone's mobile data for two minutes separates a fault in your home connection from a fault in the game.
- Note the exact wording. Error codes are the only thing distinguishing one failure from another. Copy the text before clicking anything that makes it disappear.
- Write down what changed. A driver update, a new antivirus product, a router swap, a Windows feature update, a house move. Faults that appear out of nowhere almost never do.
How the pages are put together
Each symptom page follows the same shape. A short answer sits at the top for people who only need the likely cause; below it, causes run from most to least common, each with a way to confirm it before you act. Pages end at the point where the problem stops being yours — the fault only the vendor can fix, the dispute that belongs with your bank, the compromise that needs reporting rather than repairing. Knowing where that line falls saves more time than any setting.
What distance does to a connection in Australia
Australian players meet one problem that guidance written elsewhere rarely addresses: the servers are often a long way away. Light through fibre travels at roughly two-thirds its speed in a vacuum, so a round trip to a European data centre has a floor no router setting, accelerator or plan upgrade can move. It is set by geography.
That separates the problems worth working on from the ones that are simply how it is. Consistent high latency to a distant server is a fact about the world; latency that swings second to second, packet loss, or a session that drops after forty minutes, are local faults with local causes — and those are what the lag and dropouts page is about.
When you have paid and something does not work
Games sold to people in Australia are goods and services like any other, and the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law apply to them. Those guarantees sit alongside a vendor's own terms rather than being signed away by them. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission explains how the guarantees work and what remedies exist.
Most disputes are resolved by the platform the purchase was made through rather than the game's developer — a distinction worth getting right before you email the wrong party. The payments page works through who is responsible for what.
Problems that are not technical at all
Some of what goes wrong around online games is not a fault in software. Australia has public bodies whose remit covers these situations, and they are better placed to help than any guide:
- Scamwatch, run by the National Anti-Scam Centre
- Where scams are reported and current types described. Free-currency offers and paid account-recovery services are ordinary scams in a game's clothing.
- Australian Cyber Security Centre
- Government guidance on securing accounts and devices, and where a cyber security incident is reported.
- eSafety Commissioner
- The online safety regulator, including harm between players and material involving children.
- Australian Classification Board
- Where classification decisions are made, and where a title's classification can be checked rather than guessed at.
- Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
- The privacy regulator, for complaints about how an organisation handled personal information.
Who publishes this
Innovabase is published by Navigorex Group s.r.o., registered in the Czech Republic under company number 21777187, at Křižíkova 180/28, Karlín, 186 00 Praha 8. The full details appear in every page footer, on the about and contact pages and in the privacy policy. Correspondence goes to info@innovabase.online and is read by a person.
The site collects nothing: no form, no newsletter, no account, no analytics, no cookie. That is a position rather than an oversight, and the cookie policy is short for the reason you would expect.