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Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]


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@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

@"Elisias.4267" said:This has been going on for a LONG TIME. How furiously frustrating is it to go through an entire chapter, fight and kill a final boss, then get disconnected during the final dialog? THEN, you have to do it all over again! I quit GW once over this because it was so frustrating. You can see that it happens to MANY PEOPLE, yet Anet does not acknowledge that there's a problem. Other posters will also claim that it's the internet connection, blah, blah, but CLEARLY, that's not the case. IT NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED.

Actually, the Devs have acknowledged, and posted a few times, the issue in the 'official' thread. You might consider perusing said thread, and posting your information there.

(You can use the 'Next ArenaNet Post' feature to read the Dev responses.)

Yup, this. Also, if anyone wants to tcpdump during a disconnect, or to experiment with hitting a skill button every second or two during the cutscene and see if that stops the disconnects, that'd be interesting data to add. Hopefully we can start to help collect useful information that may shed light on what is going on.

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My experience with this SPECIFIC DC is that it occurs IMMEDIATELY after the statue is defeated--this is the start point for the cutscene. My character IMMEDIATELY gets the film reel overhead and at that point, NO keyboard or mouse action can occur-----I have a frozen "screenshot" that devolves into the DC notice. So, trying to use mouse/keyboard to circumvent this issue is a "non-starter". Sorry that I can't even get a screenshot to add to this writeup. Once again, this issue doesn't arise on the SHORT story episodes-------just on the much LONGER ones. It "almost" seems as if the server has "forgotten" what comes next-----and is awaiting some? unknown input from an unknown somewhere?----------primarily because at the point of occurrence, NO action is requested- required - solicited from the client to "continue" the storyline.

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@"Lemon.1805" said:Hey SlippyCheeze.5483 not sure if this is what you are looking for but here is my 'capture' on wireshark https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k_cnq9Ld7IwtQZKSLd58Oeo_ci8zddjM filtered to the Instance IP

That's the stuff. I'll have to wait until this evening to take a look at it, but wanted to confirm that this is absolutely fine as a way to capture the required data.

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@"Lemon.1805" said:Hey SlippyCheeze.5483 not sure if this is what you are looking for but here is my 'capture' on wireshark https://drive.google.com/open?id=1k_cnq9Ld7IwtQZKSLd58Oeo_ci8zddjM filtered to the Instance IP

Interestingly, I took a look at that capture, and it looks like your system stopped getting responses from the ANet server at ~ 2018-06-11T22:33:03.3401030, and then finally gave up and closed the connection at 2018-06-11T22:33:22.5434210, about 20 seconds later. Most of that seems to go into a black hole: a handful of retransmits outbound, but the rest of it just vanishes.

My best guess would be some sort of outbound connectivity issue -- I see other, non ANet resets in the trace around the same time -- but I'm not clear what. Unfortunately, beyond what looks like a client timeout while traffic is being generated and sent, I see nothing especially useful.

Thanks. Sorry not to have more useful information for you.

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So its happens randomly but its always in a story mission and always right at the end of a long mission. For some reason the game will just close to the Charater select screen after a cutscene or something i can log right back in but the whole mission was was on resets? is it not possible to atlest put a grace period in if you DC or checkpoints in a mission that you can portal back to anytime? Some of those missions are really dam long lol

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I and another player have been having the same issue on the Hearts and Minds storyline. It will fail at various points through out the mission. Both me and the other player will show each others position and not have any connectivity issues until one of the cutscenes or scene changes takes place and then the film reel icon will appear for one or the other client and it all stops. Interestingly the other can occasionally continue to move until they too are disconnected 20-30 seconds later. Both computers are on the same network plugged into the same switch. We have attempted this mission an even dozen times each time with a disconnect. We have skipped this mission and are progressing with the next living season and having no issues so far.

I understand they are having trouble isolating the issue, but maybe a stop gap fix might be in order. Say save the instance state if connection is lost so we don't have to progress through a long complex fight again. Or checkpoints on the mission. A keepalive for the connection, or let the client hunt around for a server that will respond to finish the mission out. Something, anything really.

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how many damn times do I need to slap Balthazar til he uses his cheat codes to one shot me, to then find my name. Aquire my purpose, slap some donut stealing undead souls to then tell Joko to do one the crusty clown. Getting tiresome to waste 30 mins to then fail due to these ridiculous DCs. If this continues with no fix Ill just get my refund and move onto a game that can ge tthe fundamentals of questing correct.

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I encountered the same issue in the final mission of the base game, "Victory or Death".I always get a disconnect after the cinematic cut-scene after killing the mouth of Zhaitan.Eventually I got passed it, but it has costed me half the afternoon and many curses and frustration.Of course I send in a ticket to Arenanet and here's what I did to get past it, although I am not sure if this actually helped and I just got lucky on that last attempt.

  • I killed every possible process in windows 10, before starting the game.
  • I switched to full screen windowed, instead of full screen
  • limited to 60fps
  • set the option "Content Streaming" to Max, instead of Idle
  • during the un-skippable cut scenes I unfocused the game by clicking the desktop on my secondary monitor.

It ONLY happens after cinematic cut scenes in the story modes that you can NOT skip.I finally managed to get passed it, but in the following event, the celebration in Fort Trinity, after speaking with Trahearne, it happened again! But only once.It also happened a few times at the beginning of "Victory or Death" when Logan tries to be a Hero and stays behind. Also an unskippable cutscene.

Hopes this helps, if they are not gonna fix it, we need solid work-a-rounds.

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We gave up on the mission that we were having the issue with and moved to the next living season. 4 missions in and the same issue is cropping up again. Support is of no help so I don't know what to do. We absolutely cannot progress in the story at this point. So what is the use in continuing to play?

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@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Tried minimizing the client during cut-scenes?

No, and that would kinda ruin it as I want to watch the scenes (first story play through). Guess I could play through once and watch then a second time and minimise, but good I don't have the patience for that as I'd have to do it for ever cut-scene in the mission one after another.

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Tried moving your character or using skills during cut-scenes?

Just by pressing WASD and number keys? I can do that. I'm guessing the theory is that it sends some sort of keepalive to the server on keypress that stops a connection timing out? Seems plausible, will try tonight.

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Some players have had success using those work-arounds whilst waiting for the Devs to find out what is causing this issue for some players.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'd seen the minimise one before, but not the one about using abilities/movement.The silence on the issue is still terrible though.

Andrew Milne

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@JackalHeadGod.8195 said:

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:Tried moving your character or using skills during cut-scenes?

Just by pressing WASD and number keys? I can do that. I'm guessing the theory is that it sends some sort of keepalive to the server on keypress that stops a connection timing out? Seems plausible, will try tonight.

Yeah, that's the theory. In the couple of traces I have looked at, we see when the cutscene starts there is a "long" period of idleness on the connection, where by "long" I mean "thirty seconds", followed by the client being unable to communicate with the server, and eventually the connection being reset.

My pet theory is that some router or other manages to kick the GW2 client connection out of the NAT table during that time, so when the client starts sending traffic again it is either blocked by the router, or comes out with a different source port, and the server doesn't recognize it.

The theory of hitting your auto-attack is that it generates traffic to the server, which stops the weird network device dropping the connection.

This would also be consistent with the ANet statement above that they can't yet identify the root cause of the problem.

Out of interest, what brand and model router do you have where you play GW2?

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@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:Yeah, that's the theory. In the couple of traces I have looked at, we see when the cutscene starts there is a "long" period of idleness on the connection, where by "long" I mean "thirty seconds", followed by the client being unable to communicate with the server, and eventually the connection being reset.

My pet theory is that some router or other manages to kick the GW2 client connection out of the NAT table during that time, so when the client starts sending traffic again it is either blocked by the router, or comes out with a different source port, and the server doesn't recognize it.

The theory of hitting your auto-attack is that it generates traffic to the server, which stops the weird network device dropping the connection.

This would also be consistent with the ANet statement above that they can't yet identify the root cause of the problem.

Isn't that what TCP/IP Keep alive packets are meant to deal with?

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:Out of interest, what brand and model router do you have where you play GW2?

Uk, Virgin Media with their smart-hub.

I wonder if it would be worth giving my PC a reserved local IP and set up a straight port forwarding rule? That could rule out something getting confused at my routers end.

I've a DIR-615 kicking around, might dust that out and switch the cable modem to modem only mode (I certainly don't trust the Virgin media POS to not be at fault).

Edit: Well I tried the key-pressing, and literally the first cut-scene I was in it disconnected.Edit 2: Tried a manual port re-direct on static IP (well DHCP reservation but close enough) and this time it disconnected outwith a cinematic. I'd just brought in last power core and it was doing the bit where they talk just before the cinematic kicked in and it disconnected.

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@JackalHeadGod.8195 said:

@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:Yeah, that's the theory. In the couple of traces I have looked at, we see when the cutscene starts there is a "long" period of idleness on the connection, where by "long" I mean "thirty seconds", followed by the client being unable to communicate with the server, and eventually the connection being reset.

My pet theory is that some router or other manages to kick the GW2 client connection out of the NAT table during that time, so when the client starts sending traffic again it is either blocked by the router, or comes out with a different source port, and the server doesn't recognize it.

The theory of hitting your auto-attack is that it generates traffic to the server, which stops the weird network device dropping the connection.

This would also be consistent with the ANet statement above that they can't yet identify the root cause of the problem.

Isn't that what TCP/IP Keep alive packets are meant to deal with?

Sure, as long as the timeout is >= 1 hour, they do just fine at that. :)

So, yeah, it's true that they are, but the time visible in these traces is so small that it isn't really within the range that protocol level keepalives support. I'd love to know what would happen if ANet implemented effectively a noop application level keepalive of some sort though.

@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:Out of interest, what brand and model router do you have where you play GW2?

Uk, Virgin Media with their smart-hub.I wonder if it would be worth giving my PC a reserved local IP and set up a straight port forwarding rule? That could rule out something getting confused at my routers end.

Pretty sure that is just inbound traffic. It couldn't hurt, I'd guess, but normally the outbound traffic uses a random "local" port number, which the server then uses to identify the connection using the triple {client port, client ip, server port}. (Technically, "server ip" is there too, but since that is necessarily identical for all connections to that one server, it doesn't matter in this case.)

So, the issue would be that if the NAT mapping -- which usually changes the "local" port number on the way through -- forgets, and assigns a different port number the second time, it'd be unrecognisable on the server.

I've a DIR-615 kicking around, might dust that out and switch the cable modem to modem only mode (I certainly don't trust the Virgin media POS to not be at fault).

Edit: Well I tried the key-pressing, and literally the first cut-scene I was in it disconnected.

Well, that probably shoots that idea in the head. I had hoped, but I also feared the cutscene might block player actions, which would show the same issue.

I will be very interested to hear if the different gateway helps. I certainly hope so, as it would be wonderful to have something that might solve this even for some players.

At the end of the day, this is just guesswork, but hey, if we find something, it makes many lives better. :)

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Some of the other "fixes" on the forums talked about changing the /clientserver argument, hence thought the port forwarding could have mattered.

I'll dig out the other router and give that a try tomorrow. Fiddling with this for the last hour, rather than playing the game, has basically sapped any interest I had in actually playing the game. The other thing I might try is booting the game up on my mac and seeing if it has the same issue (which would definitely imply host or OS side rather than network routing).

I absolutely hate skipping content, I'm a story gamer, so if I can't get past this I'm basically stuck. It's infuriating; I was quite excited last night to see the final mission (I stopped playing at launch before getting to it) and now I'm fighting network issues while Arena.net seem to ignore us.

Thanks for all your help Mr. Slippy Cheeze, I'll report back if the router makes a difference or not.

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ArenaNet isn't ignoring this issue; you can read the Dev posts in this thread (using the 'Next ArenaNet Post' feature). What they haven't done is figured out what causes this issue for some sub-set of players. Some players don't encounter any disconnections, and the QA Team and Devs can't replicate it (which is necessary to solve the problem).

Good luck.

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@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:ArenaNet isn't ignoring this issue; you can read the Dev posts in this thread (using the 'Next ArenaNet Post' feature). What they haven't done is figured out what causes this issue for some sub-set of players. Some players don't encounter any disconnections, and the QA Team and Devs can't replicate it (which is necessary to solve the problem).

There are several ways to solve the problem, even if they don't know the cause.

The simplest one is to save progress at certain points in long story episodes. I keep getting disconnected during Hearts & Minds, and it has obvious save points. Many episodes have easy progress places.

That's not rocket science. While in the instance, you already have the ability to Restart at a Checkpoint. So ANet just needs to save that info and allow you to return there when you return to the instance..

If ANet doesn't want people to break episodes into chunks completed over multiple days, just give a window for rejoining a story in progress, as apparently they did in GW1.

This is one of the most frustrating bugs in the game. It's predictable (at least for me - in any long episode, chances of a disconnect are disturbingly high), punishing (your time gets completely wasted, with nothing gained) ... and completely avoidable if ANet simply allows you to return to checkpoint when re-entering an instance, just as you can from within it.

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For a few days until now I tested instanced content while the Steam client was running in the background. No disconnects so far. I have no exact idea why it works. I did not restrict Steam downloads so it basically communicates continously asking for game updates, also their is-the-user-online?-tool keeps tracking mouse movement and keyboard usage, so there's some sort of continuous communication activity too.

Maybe this sort of inet-communication also prevents the GW2 character-login-client to "assume" that the current character is offline or should be offline, which can happen in instances and then leads to a disconnection to character selection menue. A "real" D/C would also kick us from the entire client back to Desktop, but only the character gets the D/C, not the Account.

So, I recommend to try activating Steam, unrestricting its downloads (if restricted) or to use a similar program like GoG Galaxy or the like.

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@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:ArenaNet isn't ignoring this issue; you can read the Dev posts in this thread (using the 'Next ArenaNet Post' feature).

I'll admit I'm a bit salty; I just spent money on this game (the two expansions) and now I'm blocked because of what turns out to be a well known bug.

They've acknowledged the issue in this thread but:

  1. The last post from Arena.net was over a month ago, hardly good support of your customers. Even a "we're still looking in to it and here's some things to try" post once every week or two would be enough to make me feel like it's still being looked in to
  2. It isn't even on the known issues pages (or at least I couldn't find it there a couple days ago) which hardly makes it seem like a priority

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:which is necessary to solve the problem

Yes and no. To really "fix" the problem you need to have a stable reproduction case, however a normal approach in situations where replication is hard or impossible is to add more auditing code (which they could tell us they've done) and to try speculative fixes (for example SlippyCheese indicated there seems to be a big gap in comms and perhaps an intermediate nat translation is being timed out, if they think that's a possibility they could add keep alive messages and see if that fixes the issue). It's hard, but it's not impossible to fix or mitigate a bug without understanding it.

@Ringlin.1863 said:If ANet doesn't want people to break episodes into chunks completed over multiple days, just give a window for rejoining a story in progress, as apparently they did in GW1.

Even a 5 minute reconnect timer would be enough for me, just give me time for the cinematic to finish and the connection to time-out.

@Lanhelin.3480 said:So, I recommend to try activating Steam, unrestricting its downloads (if restricted) or to use a similar program like GoG Galaxy or the like.

Unfortunately that's my standard set-up. :(

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@JackalHeadGod.8195 said:

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:which is necessary to solve the problem

Yes and no. To really "fix" the problem you need to have a stable reproduction case, however a normal approach in situations where replication is hard or impossible is to add more auditing code (which they could tell us they've done) and to try speculative fixes (for example SlippyCheese indicated there seems to be a big gap in comms and perhaps an intermediate nat translation is being timed out, if they think that's a possibility they could add keep alive messages and see if that fixes the issue). It's hard, but it's not impossible to fix or mitigate a bug without understanding it.

Please note: I'm not an ANet dev, and I don't suffer this problem, I'm just trying to help out because I figure a second brain can't hurt ANet getting those details that they need, and it is nice to use those skills from my day job to help people out.

So, everything I say is up and up just speculation. I mean, I have solid reasoning behind why I guess those things, but they are still that. Ultimately, though, that'd be true: the issue they identified is they can't figure out why this happens to a small but non-zero number of players, and it happens really consistently and frustratingly for them.

@Ringlin.1863 said:If ANet doesn't want people to break episodes into chunks completed over multiple days, just give a window for rejoining a story in progress, as apparently they did in GW1.

Even a 5 minute reconnect timer would be enough for me, just give me time for the cinematic to finish and the connection to time-out.

I suspect that the mechanism used to manage instances is oblivious about this sort of thing, so even if they kept the instance alive, they would not easily be able to reconnect you to it. (I know that I definitely avoid that sort of knowledge in the router when building distributed systems like ANet use for their game, so I'm guessing again, but ... shrug)

Checkpoints would likely be much easier, because they can recreate the instance and just plop you at a spot in it, if they wanted to work around it.

Anyways, if anyone feels enthused, feel free to tcpdump or equivalent the outbound traffic and I can see if your disconnects have the same sort of pattern. (...or just check yourself, if you want. I'm not uniquely skilled at reading these.)

You might also try the clientport option for 80, and 443, and see if either of those help. In at least one case they did not -- the user was using 443 already, and got these disconnects -- but there may well be more than one problem going on here.

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