[BUG / Can Not Progress Story] Night of Fires Disconnect After Defeat of Forged Bastion

[GrayOne.8075]

I'm playing this mission with my wife and after the defeat of Forged Bastion during the dialog either one or both of us will disconnect every single time. We've tried it 5 times now. One of us gets kicked out of the instance, the other back to character select and neither of us get completion credit. It is impossible to progress the story as a result. How do we get passed this?

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

You can try a VPN, minimizing cut-scenes, changing the Option 'Streaming', continuously using a Skill or moving your character.Other work-arounds can be found in the 'official' Dev-posted thread, "Storyline Disconnections".

Good luck.

[GrayOne.8075]

I managed to fix the problem just by having us solo the content individually. Below you'll see an explanation as to why this is kind of BS.

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:You can try a VPN, minimizing cut-scenes, changing the Option 'Streaming', continuously using a Skill or moving your character.Other work-arounds can be found in the 'official' Dev-posted thread, "Storyline Disconnections".

Good luck.

You've mentioned this in a few threads... I'm sure you mean to be helpful but for starters I can't actually find the thread you're referring to? In an effort to find it by searching "Storyline Disconnections" all I found were similar topics that you had already responded to with similar advice though without actually linking the thread. I see a "merged" thread but I don't know what that means and it doesn't appear to have been started by a Dev.

Outside of that though... and forgive me if this is rude or not acceptable to say, but are you or I guess rather is Arena Net really suggesting "Just dick around with it until it works" as a solution to what is obviously functionally broken net code?

See I've tested this pretty thoroughly now, mainly out of curiosity, and this seems to be most frequent among players who play in the same household as other players, or on multiple different machines at different occasions. In fact in an effort to verify this, I re-ran this same content repeatedly on two different computers on the same network in a party simultaneously and ran the last minute or so through wireshark and found this really just seems to be a packet distribution issue. Packet transmission dies out several seconds after the boss dies. I was able to locate not 1, not 2, but 3 distinct triggers where this happens. Completion of the Raptor training exercise, completion of a night of fire elite battle, and completion of Maguuma elite battle for the village quests. Solo these work fine, but as a group in a party on the same network they simply do not function. This is just bad packet dissemination it seems.

Beyond that, there is more evidence that it's simply how the game handles simultaneous similar packet distribution because if the other player has already completed that objective, the game will not crash. This suggests something occurs at these trigger points that is sending data that just isn't designed or is being prohibited from being distributed to multiple machines simultaneously, or two sets of return packets hitting the server simultaneously is causing the packet loss. Either way this feels like a very narrow scope problem to solve and perhaps a little attention to it would see it fixed readily.

Not trying to write a dissertation here just saying it took me maybe a few hours to understand what was happening to this degree, I see posts of this nature dating back years. Maybe Arena Net should get their shit together and just fix the problem. This game released when LAN parties were still a thing lol it shouldn't have issues like this.