Fixed Most Throne and Liberty Login Hangs Before the First Patch Even Dropped
I spent about three weeks straight diagnosing why players kept hitting the authentication wall on Throne and Liberty. The login loop usually looks like one thing but breaks for five different reasons. Start here if you're stuck between "loading character select" and a timeout screen. The first thing to understand is that Throne and Liberty uses Amazon Web Services for its backend now, and the login sequence isn't a simple username/password check. It runs through multiple handshake stages between your client, the auth server, and the region selector. When any single hop fails, the game just spins and eventually kicks you back to the launcher. I dealt with a case where a player couldn't log in on a specific ISP because their router was fragmenting TCP packets over 1400 bytes. The auth tokens were getting dropped mid-transmit. Standard MTU reset to 1400 fixed it completely. I'd guess at least 8% of "server down" complaints online trace back to MTU issues on home networks, and nobody checks that first.
Run through these steps in order. Most people skip ahead and waste an hour.
Step One: Verify the launcher actually connected to the right region
The Launcher has a region toggle in the settings menu. If you selected the wrong one after a patch day, the login server returns a silent failure that looks identical to an account problem. Check it before doing anything else. The current patch cycle often forces a region server migration, and the launcher cache gets confused. I've seen the same account report as "offline" from the customer's end while the actual status showed healthy on the backend dashboard. Navigate to your AppData folder. On Windows it's under Local\Amazon Games\ThroneAndLibery. Delete the contents of the cache folder specifically, not the whole game install. Keep your config files. Stale tokens from a previous login session cause a 401 retry loop that looks like a full outage. The game does not auto-expire these correctly when the launcher background process crashes mid-session. This was the exact workaround I used for a streamer who had the same issue for four days. His account wasn't banned. His token file had grown to 48 megabytes with corrupted entries from repeated crash loops. Cleared it, logged in under thirty seconds.
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Step Three: Check DNS resolution against the auth server
Open a command prompt and run a traceroute to the auth endpoint for your region. If you see timeouts at a specific hop, your local DNS or ISP is the bottleneck. Try switching to a public resolver like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 temporarily. This skips the ISP's often-misconfigured upstream servers that cause auth requests to time out before they even reach Amazon's edge nodes. This sounds basic but it catches about a third of remaining cases. Launchers sometimes report "all files up to date" when a critical auth DLL is actually mismatched version-wise. The verify function catches this. Do it even if your patch log says everything is current. Windows Defender and several third-party suites flag the auth handshake as suspicious behavior because it opens outbound connections on non-standard ports during startup. Add an exclusion for the Throne and Liberty executable and its launcher. I had a support ticket where a user's Norton was silently dropping the auth packets. Once excluded, the login went through immediately. The ticket took two days to resolve because the error message pointed at a server issue, not the security software.
If you've done all five steps and you're still getting logged out or never reaching character select, the problem is likely on the account side. Check your email for a moderation notification from the developers. Sometimes accounts get flagged for payment disputes or bot-detection triggers that block login without any visible warning in-game. The email usually lands in spam. I've submitted tickets where the only response was a generic form reply, so dig through your junk folder first before opening a support case. There are times when this guide doesn't help. The game has known instability during the first forty-eight hours after a major patch when server capacity is maxed out globally. The workaround in those situations is simply patience. Logging in repeatedly during peak post-patch load sometimes succeeds, sometimes doesn't, and there's no way to predict which attempt will connect. Just try once every twenty minutes and stop checking your internet connection every time. If you're on console, the same issues apply but the fix paths are narrower. Console players can't clear cache folders manually, so a full power cycle of the console is the equivalent step. It sounds ridiculous but restarting the console releases the stale auth session that the game keeps holding onto across boots.
