Have you ever logged in to your R2 account and tried to connect to the game only to hit a black screen? Or been told you can't connect when your guildmate is clearly on the server and playing already? These are pretty common problems to run in to when playing a browser based game. But they are just as commonly solved with the simple process of clearing out your browser's cache. Below is an index of commonly used browsers. Just click on yours to get right to a guide with step by step picture instructions on how to clear your cache!
Why does clearing the cache help?
Something web browsers do to help make your internet experience more smooth is "cache" data. I'll explain an example. When you come to this website, the logo for R2 games is in the upper left corner. That is an image file that your computer has to download in order to display it to you. But when you click another link to view a different section of the forum, that image file in the upper left is still the exact same one. So instead of downloading it all over again, your browser decides to take that file and stick it in the cache. That way it can just reuse the file when it needs to without downloading it again, meaning the pages load faster. So in a way, you can think of the browser cache as a miniature hard drive storing all the files you have been commonly encountering on the web in order to keep you from constantly having to re-download them.
With that in mind, you can imagine how important the cache is for a whole video game! Every spell effect, every character model, all of the appearances of all of the items, are all files. Files that you definitely do not want to have to re-download every single time you see them. The first time you enter a map in the game you may notice it taking a second or two to load. Appearing grainy at first. Or maybe NPCs are just completely invisible for a few moments before suddenly popping up. That's the browser downloading those files and storing them in the cache. Since they are cached, you'll notice that leaving the map and coming back doesn't have the same effect. Things load instantly. Because it's pulling the files from cache instead of having to re-download them.
The only problem with the cache is that it's constantly changing. It's not big like your hard drive. It's got limited space. So the browser is constantly having to decide what is more important to keep and what it should delete in order to make room for new files. This process can eventually lead to it getting confused. When the browser tries to load a certain file from cache, but it got confused somewhere and is trying to load the wrong thing, or something it already deleted, that is when you can run in to problems like black screens or an inability to connect to the game at all. Clearing the cache empties the whole thing out so that your browser can't be confused anymore. It just re-downloads everything it needs from scratch and lets you get back to the gaming.
Is clearing cookies the same thing?
Sort of. I'm not an expert myself, but I can give you a general concept. Cookies are files your browser stores in order to speed up your internet experience. So in that aspect they are the same. But what they do is different. A cookie stores information about how you interact with the website so that the next time you go to it, it remembers how you set things up or how your browser best works with it. That way it doesn't have to figure it out again or ask you. Things like display settings. Clearing the cookies isn't required a lot of the time you encounter a problem. But sometimes it is. The only thing that stinks is that clearing out the cookies is going to effect your internet experience with other websites you usually go to, since it wont remember all the things you liked and set up at those sites. For this reason alone, I highly encourage you to pick a different web browser for your R2 Gaming. Don't use that browser for anything else! That way if you ever encounter a problem, you can clear the cache, the cookies, and the whole darn history without worrying about it affecting your other usual websites.
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