I just hard locked in a game and had to restart.  No prob, it happens.  I go to reconnect and I get an invalid cd-key message.  

I somewhat remember reading about this before here but this is the first time I have experienced it and I must say it is quite lame.  I understand you want to do your best as a company to fight piracy but I cannot but help feel slighted as a paying customer being deined access to this software title that I purchased.

Overall I think the whole master server thing is a bad idea.  Granted it is based on a good concept.  That concept being software publishers getting paid for thier work, but this master server idea is just a lazy way to impliment it because ultimately it just screws the consumer.   This point is beyond discussion because I sit here this moment as a screwed customer trying to access a procuct that I paid for and being denied by the company that I paid.  All because you could not think of a better way to implement it.

So anyway ...ya I am a bit pissed about it but I don't mean to come accross as being against Raven.  I have no idea how I would fight piracy if I were in the same situation.  What I do know is the way you are doing it now is screwing legitimate customers, albeit only occasionaly, and alternate methods should be looked into in the future.  'Tough luck wait 15 minutes' is not acceptable.

Um ...so ya.  Hopefully I can get in now.  :P

plz do look into it for future releases tho.  Master server isn't cool.

tnx.

I trust you've sent a message to sof2mp@ravensoft.com with your IP and the time you received the error message?

It might help Raven to be able to identify the causes and results of these kinds of errors.

Funny thing...

I was about to email raven support but I decided to check it one more time and for whatever reason my cd-key wasn't there.  

So ...it doesn't appear that it was a master server 'key in use' type error.  Had a few (to put it mildly) drinks before I posted so I jumped the gun a bit.

I still am curious why my cd-key dissapeared.  Was on a server and I hard locked.  Reset my computer and tried to get back on (various different servers) and I got the invalid cdkey error.  The rest of my binds, coms and whatnot, were fine and untouched but my cdkey had to be re-entered.  All was fine after that.  So ya ...GG Stoley's.  

I still don't like master servers tho

happened to me once before, went away after awhile drinking beer.  so that is my suggestion from now on...

if it doesn't work, drink beer for awhile.

Errr... if your looking in the MP screen and click CD-KEY it will never show up in there.  Even if your key is in correctly it wont display the hey that you put in.

What happens when you crashed out like that was probably that the master server thought that you were still connected.  So when you tried to re-connect, it said no.

If you give it about 10-15 minutes for it to time out and drop the connection that you lost when your machine crashed that will take care of the problem for you.

You've been here long enough you should have known that...

I also had this once, I simply did he following:

Go to: SOldier of fortuen 2/base/mp and open the file: sof2key. There you will see your cd key, put lines (-) between every 4 digits, then save that, next, go to sof2mp, open it, then, on the main menu they will ask to re-insert your cd-key, insert it there and it will work

Ya that's what I thought it was Andrax and perhaps it was but I waited nearly 30 minutes and the problem persisted.  I thought I remember reading the key would timeout in a crash scenario like you described in 10-15 minutes but ya, like I said it was nearly 30.  

I usually use ASE to start games but I used the sof2mp.exe just so I could check my key (wasn't aware that it never shows up ...been a long time since I have had a need to check that screen) and as soon as the mp screen comes up the cd-key screen popped up as if I had just newly installed.

I dunno what it was but it didn't appear to be an issue of me being locked out of the master server which is what I had initially thought it was.

Either way it works now so all is well.  Was just weird.