I've come across a problem several times now that i can't seem to track down. I happens very rarely but leaves no feedback. I managed to reproduce the error (at least i'm fairly certain that i've found the cause).
When players enter the multiplayer part of the game they'll be connected to player.io and while the game waits for any server response, there will be a waiting bar animating.
On a few occasions this takes a long time (30 seconds at a guess) and then it just crashes. The problem is that the flash debugger doesn't catch the error, instead i get a windows popup that says : an error happened in Flash Player 10.1 r53 and must be closed.
This happens (i think) when the server is somehow not capable of responding at all. About an hour or so ago it happened again, and when i visted the playerio site, i got a "HTTP Error 503 - Service unavailable". This 503 error is the only time i see a link between playerio and the error however, so it could not be related at all.
As a test, i commented out the actual connection code, so the animated waiting bar waits endlessly, this produces no error.
But when i unplug the network cable, i get the same error again (immediately when the connect is attempted). Now chances are people won't be able to load the flash game to begin with if there's no internet connection, but other factors could come into play here. Is there a sure way to test that the server is online (internet connection doesn't mean automatically the server can be reached), before or during the connection attempt?
I also tried some of the examples from the playerio site and they also throw this error when my pc is not connected to the internet.