okay, I just want to bump this.  I also have cox and I just called cox's customer service.  I ahve been informed that irc.stardock.com is blacklisted due to abuse.   The rep couldn't tell me the reason (an entire different department handles that) but they said stardock should sent a letter of concern about having been blacklisted to abuse@cox.net.

I've been dealing with this issue of not being able to connect for months in the Demigod beta and it has been infuriating.  I would shutter to think how many people with less patience than would be entirely turned off to Stardock because of things like this.

FunkOff: if it's only the Cox DNS giving false info, you can try forcing the right IP in your hosts file. Go to %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc and add the following line to the hosts file:

38.98.152.138   irc.stardock.com

If the same happens for Demigod, you can probably do the same for each address the game is connecting to, but it's a lot of manual work and if either of those IPs change in the future, you will have to manually edit your hosts file to correct them

Your best bet is to contact support@stardock.com and let them know about the problem. While they look at the forums, it's always better to send an email and open a support ticket for those kind of problems. They might be able to give you another workaround and will be able to do the necessary to contact Cox if needed.

Cox changing DNS addresses behind people back is shady behavior for sure, and they have been doing that for some time. If you know what you are doing, you can always stop using their crappy dns servers and use alternate DNS servers (but it comes with it's own set of problems, so be careful).