ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So I've started playing about a week ago and I love the game thus far. However, I'm having frequent connection issues and was wondering if it's normal.

When starting a game, connecting to the online profile fails "due to unknown error" at least 50% of the time. Returning to the main menu multiple times eventually fixes it. I always wait for the profile/news to be loaded first. I'm not using Steam to connect, if that makes a difference.

Also, the te4.org website is very often slow or unresponsive for me. I tried traceroute to te4.org while it was inaccessible, and it appears to time out at the Montreal hops (OVH Hosting 198.27.73.xx) between US (my location) and France (server location). I'm not sure how reliable that info is as far as diagnosing the issue, though.

I'm having similar (but not identical) issues. Initial login usually succeeds for me, but exiting to main menu generally causes an automatic logout. As you note, multiple returns to the main menu usually fixes it, but I find it faster to simply reload the game. (Which may not help in your case.)

In my experience: using the item vault has about a 50% fail rate; accessing the te4 website is usually very slow. Some days are better or worse than others, but for the most part, it doesn't appear to be a time of day issue. I (mostly) don't use steam.