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Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]


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@SlippyCheeze.5483 said: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.

Indeed, I was just using your idea as an example. And, personally, I appreciate you trying to pick up some of the slack.

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said: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.

Your probably right about a lot of that. It seems like it should be easier to just "keep it alive" rather than "store a checkpoint and come back to it later" but if almost 20 years of software development has taught me anything it's that "sounds easier" and "is easier" are generally diametrically opposed :open_mouth:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said: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.

I've tried both 80 and 443 with no difference. I even tried a different port but it wouldn't even log in then.

Going to give it another go tonight to see if its feeling kinder to me, if not I might try some of the suggestions.

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@"Jeffrey Vaughn.1793" said:This is still under investigation, but so far we haven't found a consistent common element or any way to reproduce the problem in-house. I'm subscribed to this thread, so I'm continuing to follow it and read all the posts.

Thank you for the update, It's appreciated, even just knowing your looking at it means I don't have to give up complete hope :) I'd personally really appreciate it if you could drop in every week or so and let us know any progress.

I just tried again and got about half way through the mission and had the issue again. I had just reached the part where you jump to the bigger ship. When it exited the second cinematic (the conversation one with logan) I had the dreaded cinema icon above my head and it timed out.

Had wireshark running this time so I've got a snip of that log for you around the disconnect time.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J0oXC9bdwmLDB0RwN-uxrt1i5ziednGL/view?usp=sharing

This snipet covers the TCP data over the period of the disconnect filtered to the three ip addresses windows resource monitor said guild wars had connections to. 18.195.160.196 is the ip that the ingame /ip command gave.

I'm sure your more capable of working through that log then me, but it's peaked my developer instincts, so some observations (please ignore if this is too presumptuous):

  1. To begin with everything's healthy.
  2. There's a lot of comms with 18.195.160.196 (the one /ip shows)
  3. and every 30 seconds a TLSv1.2 sent to 18.194.9.177 with an immediate response (I'm going to assume some sort of refresh with the login server or other secure communication).
  4. At 159.741940 There is a gap in the comms flow with 18.195.160.196 that lasts until 198.436916 (basically 40 seconds).
  5. When it resumes I get some retransmissions then just a stream of me sending and no responses from 18.195.160.196
  6. This lines up with what SlippyCheeze said he'd observed before
  7. Interestingly at the same time there is an unusual comms incident with 18.194.9.178.
  8. There are 4 messages in a block starting at 163.180326 where the TLSv1.2 message initiates on the server not my machine.
  9. Then at 180.087707 The usual pair of messages with 18.194.9.177 initiated by me
  10. At 200.812979 Things come to a head with a batch or retransmision errors to 18.195.160.196 followed by a reset (my end).
  11. That's only 40 seconds since the last response from 18.195.160.196 which isn't long enough to be the entire cinematic sequence, but it could have been long enough to be the length of the second conversational cinematic with logan perhaps
  12. And finally a lot more more comms with 18.194.9.177 and some with 35.157.208.241 (first time since a few messages way back at 91.109154)

I know nothing about your system but that interaction with 18.194.9.177 around 163.180326 is interesting.

Hope this is of some help.

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I play from Australia and over the last few months I've been finishing the vanilla story on my 8 alts. So far half of all attempts at the final story mission result in DC. It's gotten so bad I just instantly skip all cutscenes asap to try and complete it. It's happened on a couple of other longer story missions but that Victory or Death one is the worst. I can play the regular game or WvW for hours without DCing. It's just story missions that are the problem for me.

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@jamesg.7128 said:I play from Australia and over the last few months I've been finishing the vanilla story on my 8 alts. So far half of all attempts at the final story mission result in DC. It's gotten so bad I just instantly skip all cutscenes asap to try and complete it. It's happened on a couple of other longer story missions but that Victory or Death one is the worst. I can play the regular game or WvW for hours without DCing. It's just story missions that are the problem for me.

Yeah it's a problem on Anet's side. I bought LS2 and LS3 together because i'm interested in the lore of this game but i can't play them until this is fixed. I keep getting to the LS chapter where you fight those crystal golem things in the crystal place you're ported to and it disconnects me at the end EVERY SINGLE TIME! I had to quit trying after 8 attempts and many wasted hours :(

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@UfoCoffee.2084 said:This happens to me all the time in story mode/ LS/ and at the end of a pvp match if i click on the result tabs a few times, it will disconnect me too. I submitted a report and also used the Anet diagnosis tool. Hopefully when someone looks at it that might help.

People are looking at it, but as ANet say, they can't figure out the pattern yet, which is unfortunate. Can you tell me, what brand and model router do you use?

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@jamesg.7128 said:I play from Australia and over the last few months I've been finishing the vanilla story on my 8 alts. So far half of all attempts at the final story mission result in DC. It's gotten so bad I just instantly skip all cutscenes asap to try and complete it. It's happened on a couple of other longer story missions but that Victory or Death one is the worst. I can play the regular game or WvW for hours without DCing. It's just story missions that are the problem for me.

Does skipping the cutscenes deal with the issue, if you do it ASAP, or do you still get disconnects?

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June 20th, 2018 and I just encountered this same issue --> 2/2 times defeated Balthazar --> disconnect. Although it does feel good to kill a god multiple times, it slowly gets annoying....Will try to skip the animation the next time and report back.Until then... happy god killing to all of you guys.

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I came here just to complain about this problem. I'm trying to do Hidden Arcana, which has annoying mechanics and is irritating enough on its own, and I got disconnected twice. I'm glad they are working on the problem, but I am pretty close to quitting the personal story altogether.

If you can't fix the problem, why can't we just "reconnect" back to the checkpoint we were at instead of starting the whole story over?

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@Jeffrey Vaughn.1793 said:This is still under investigation, but so far we haven't found a consistent common element or any way to reproduce the problem in-house. I'm subscribed to this thread, so I'm continuing to follow it and read all the posts.

I think there is one common element. It only happens in instances. Instances appear to be served from separate servers. Some report it in PvP, but most seem to report it in the Story.

So, I looked at one of my own wireshark logs, and I can tell you one thing that's different about the storyline instance. The TLS1.2 packet is sent MUCH MORE OFTEN during normal gameplay. It's possible this is because of the cutscenes being played during story mode (thinking about it, this makes sense). This would seem to be in accordance with the observation by some that ignoring the cut scenes helps to mitigate the DC issues.

I'm guessing that TLS packet is for authentication to prevent connection hijacking. When it's not sent as often, the instance server may be dropping the connection because it's not getting the response it wants from the auth server in a timely manner. Is there a way to send that auth communication more often automatically from the client in the storyline instance?

One question: is there a way those who complain about a lot of DCs could add a command-line tag to the executable, so the server would monitor the connection on its side as well? I realizing that's going to take a bit of code, but seriously, the game should have something like that, and only certain users should be allowed to use it (because monitoring will slow the servers if there are too many connections monitored). That at least would give you more data to show what's happening. And with the IP endpoints known, you can use cflowd (or its equivalent) on a router to figure out whether it's an internet issue or a server issue.

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@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@jamesg.7128 said:I play from Australia and over the last few months I've been finishing the vanilla story on my 8 alts. So far half of all attempts at the final story mission result in DC. It's gotten so bad I just instantly skip all cutscenes asap to try and complete it. It's happened on a couple of other longer story missions but that Victory or Death one is the worst. I can play the regular game or WvW for hours without DCing. It's just story missions that are the problem for me.

Does skipping the cutscenes deal with the issue, if you do it ASAP, or do you still get disconnects?

I disconnect at the start of a cutscene, right before the point it actually even starts usually. So no chance of skipping.

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A few updates:

Tried the story mission on a mac (just in case the problem is platform dependant): Still disconnected. Actually just before a cinematic started this time. In final mission, just arrived back at the circle area to hand in the three power cores and it disconnected as they were talking. 2nd time it's happened there.

I recon that was the 7th or 8th failed atempt at the mission.

Paid for and installed a VPN (from a company called Private Inernet Access, their offering got decent reviews, cost me $7 for a month). Configured it to use a server in Frankfurt Germany, which a quick bit of IP lookup on the result of /ip in-game told me is where the game servers are.

Sailed through the entire mission, watching all cinematics, along with the following mission (celebration) again watching all cinematics without a problem, first time. Success!

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@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

Does skipping the cutscenes deal with the issue, if you do it ASAP, or do you still get disconnects?To be honest I haven't noticed exactly at what point it DCs, just that skipping seems to make it more likely to get through. What usually happens is that I notice all the NPCs stop moving and then a couple seconds later I get a lost connection to server message.

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I can recreate the issue on my machine. While playing in Fullscreen Windowed mode if I click on another monitor during a NPC Dialogue portion of the instance, it will disconnect me instantly. If I click another window while just standing in an instance, i don't get disconnected. It seems to be tied to the dialogue part of the instance since that's when I'm always being disconnected.

Edit: Doesn't seem to happen while in Fullscreen mode. So far I can only recreate in "Fullscreen Windowed", haven't tested in just Windowed.

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@"Koreanz.6259" said:I can recreate the issue on my machine. While playing in Fullscreen Windowed mode if I click on another monitor during a NPC Dialogue portion of the instance, it will disconnect me instantly. If I click another window while just standing in an instance, i don't get disconnected. It seems to be tied to the dialogue part of the instance since that's when I'm always being disconnected.

Edit: Doesn't seem to happen while in Fullscreen mode. So far I can only recreate in "Fullscreen Windowed", haven't tested in just Windowed.

@Jeffrey Vaughn.1793, apparently a reproducible case, in case you missed it!

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Guess I'll post here as well since I'm getting this happening lots to me as well and cannot get through the final personal story mission and have had no response from a ticket raised. SlippyCheeze you're doing a great job at trying to help out but this is the kind of thing I expect the developer to be doing as they have access to the codebase, design and can help to narrow down the problem rather than us all trying to scrabble around in the dark.

@Jeffrey Vaughn.1793 Please can we get yourself or one of the other devs allocated to working with the community to track this down, you may not be able to replicate the bug but a lot of us here can but we need responses from ANet on what to try and how to track/capture data for this issue. Some of us could run a special client with additional logging/tracing built in, debug modes, etc. Without that people are wasting yet more time trying to test ideas.

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@Bariel.3562 said:Guess I'll post here as well since I'm getting this happening lots to me as well and cannot get through the final personal story mission and have had no response from a ticket raised. SlippyCheeze you're doing a great job at trying to help out but this is the kind of thing I expect the developer to be doing as they have access to the codebase, design and can help to narrow down the problem rather than us all trying to scrabble around in the dark.

@Jeffrey Vaughn.1793 Please can we get yourself or one of the other devs allocated to working with the community to track this down, you may not be able to replicate the bug but a lot of us here can but we need responses from ANet on what to try and how to track/capture data for this issue. Some of us could run a special client with additional logging/tracing built in, debug modes, etc. Without that people are wasting yet more time trying to test ideas.

Jeffrey Vaughn IS the ANet developer working with the community to track this down, my friend. I'm just throwing in my ideas because, well, it's not that wildly different to my day job, and I'm a busybody it's nice to try and help out the community, plus you never know when that one magical thing will pop up and it becomes obvious.

On which subject, what brand and model router are you using? That is one of those current guesswork things I'm trying out. ;)

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@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@"Koreanz.6259" said:I can recreate the issue on my machine. While playing in Fullscreen Windowed mode if I click on another monitor during a NPC Dialogue portion of the instance, it will disconnect me instantly. If I click another window while just standing in an instance, i don't get disconnected. It seems to be tied to the dialogue part of the instance since that's when I'm always being disconnected.

Edit: Doesn't seem to happen while in Fullscreen mode. So far I can only recreate in "Fullscreen Windowed", haven't tested in just Windowed.

@Jeffrey Vaughn.1793, apparently a reproducible case, in case you missed it!

Just a quick update. In Fullscreen I have been able to progress most of the story until I got to killing Balth. When the cut-scene starts i get disconnected. I tried that twice and then tried to skip the cut-scene and still got disconnected on the third.

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I didn't have this bug until recently. I stopped playing for a few months then came back. But last night I had it, I had hit the next level of MR in a quest in Orr, and when I reconnected... I still had the MR progress I had when I encountered the bug.I just now tested the clicking out of GW2 to replicate it, as in I alt-tabbed on a early storyline quest on a new character, and it allowed me to finish the quest.However, it has happened to me MULTIPLE TIMES while in fullscreen mode, since that's all I've ever played in.

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This just occurred for my GF. We are having trouble entering the same story instance for the HOT and POF starter quests. We are both on the same part, one of us enters the instance and the other person accepts the popup to join... but only the first person ever gets credits for completion. We had decided to do the HOT second mission in separate instances after noticing one of us was still not getting credit.. and in the final part right after Rox and Ritlock talk about his return, my GF did not get the "exit" point like I did. She walked around for 15s looking for it aaaaaand disconnect. Full mission progress lost. Both on same internet connection, her PC is much better than mine too. Only difference beyond graphics options is that she uses fullscreen and I have windowed fullscreen.

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