Nato.2051

I've been a pessimist for the last 4 years, seeing this game go down in what felt like a giant fire. Been around since the beginning, so it felt like something precious was being taken from us. However, THIS post alone, is giving me hope. Welcome back old homies, we missed ya.

I just wanted to thank those of you who put in a legitimate thought process into your responses. Also to agree with @Daddy.8125 on their post about the cash shop. I just checked my bank out of curiosity, and I had spent $500-ish USD, last year alone (2020), on keys, mounts, glittery thingies that look amazing, and shiny stuff, for both my partner and I. TL;DR - Cash shops are great, they make money. GW2 wont ever have a P2P, it just doesn't make any sense for this type of system. It might gain them some consistent cash flow, but most of the players I know play this game because it's not P2P, and so they risk losing a lot of their player base, and potential cash shop bling. ------------------------------------------- More words below if you're bored. I'm gonna go on a ramble because it's covid and I'm feeling verbose. Just to give an example that cash shops rake in money. And if I'm doing crude math here, and assume there is just 10k players out there spending the same as I am, that's $5.4 mil. Now, for some pseudo research - 10 bored minutes of digging around. The average estimated number of GW2 players per month is about 542k - sourced from: https://mmo-population.com/r/guildwars2#:~:text=Guild Wars 2 is estimated to have 14%2C265%2C884 total players or subscribers. (They say it's an estimate too, not sure where they scape that from). I didn't dig into this number much at all, or checked other sources, as I'm mostly attempting a very poor thought experiment. So let's assume this: 5% of the population is: 0.05 x 542k is: 27,100 people. Take 27,100 x $500 (average assumed spending per year) gives you: $13,550,000.00. So even if those numbers are WAY off, like 50-70% skewed (which they probably are) - you're STILL looking at: $4-6 mil per year. That's not laughing matter cash. It'll keep some lights on and pay some salaries. Cash shops work, GW2 P2P is a terrible idea and wouldn't deliver what people expect anyway, as it was told. I miss Rurik though...he was a good dude. Cared about his people wanted nothing in return except their safety. I reflect on that sometimes. Having leaders that go above and beyond. I'm disappointed I didn't see him in the mists yet. Brother is probably just chilling. Well...see ya later.

This comment needs many thumbs up.

Routing the client through the Windows Firewall, doesn't (contrary to popular belief) fix the entire problem. It needs to be forced on the executable side too. This only addresses the router configuration and app through the firewall, which I had set up, years ago, to no avail. It's because it enables the router to in fact do all of these things (it opens the doors, so to speak), but doesn't force the app to route the data through an encrypted connection. This is where the command line arguments proved handy, because I had spent the last week forcing port 80 and 443 and running the diagnostics option, and testing the Storyline Disconnects. Turns out for folks in geographical areas of the planet where ISP's require traffic to be routed through HTTPS, port 443 will solve that problem. So the additional configuration requires -clientport 443, which for many people that play this game, is the problem.

So I've done extensive research on this, using the Guild Wars 2 Diagnostic command line argument and finding out specifically how my ISP filters encrypted traffic. Results:On port 80, (unencrypted) connection it turns out my ISP is dropping nearly 80-85% of packets from source (me) to destination Anet servers. I believe this is a security mechanism from some ISP's to block a lot of unencrypted traffic that might seem like data mining. I am not able to identify why Storylines Specifically disconnect, but there's good news. I switched to -clientport 443 and my problems disappeared. RECOMMENDATION TO ANYONE HAVING DISCONNECTION ISSUES IN STORYLINE INSTANCES:Set your command line argument on your executable to: -clientport 443 - this ensures that your traffic is going through an encrypted port. My results have been exeptional. Sure I had a few disconnects here and there, but I have been able to confirm zero disconnects during story line instances. Reference: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments P.S - As customers, we shouldn't have to worry about this. I'm lucky have a network engineering background and was able to really dig into this. Otherwise most people, would just give up, and I almost did.

For folks who are interested. I've been digging into this. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments -clientport 80Instructs the client to connect to the game servers over port 80 (HTTP) instead of 6112 (commonly used for games).Some ISPs may prioritize traffic at certain times, and some networks may block port 6112. This may be useful to avoid such scenarios.Some ISPs, networks, and other forms of MITM attacks may modify traffic on port 80 which will lead to issues with the GW2 client if this option is used. -clientport 443Instructs the client to connect to the game servers over port 443 (HTTPS) instead of 6112 (commonly used for games).Some ISPs may prioritize traffic at certain times, and some networks may block port 6112. This may be useful to avoid such scenarios.Some ISPs, networks, and other forms of MITM attacks may modify traffic on port 443 which will lead to issues with the GW2 client if this option is used (this is less-likely to occur than with port 80). I'm going to try both of these, to see if connection issues persist. Other than that, I could try to diagnose this issue through a game dump file, and see what might cause this. Update: I did skip the cinematic, but it still didn't kick me out. So -clientport 80 seems to work, for now. May I kindly request the rest of the community to give these options a try, so I can compile some data on whether this was a fluke or viable solution for the time being.

I alt + tab the cinematic at this point, because people have said they noticed this helped, but it doesn't in my case either.

https://imgur.com/Lrcyqv6 - this happens at the end of the cut scene, almost every time. It just happened during Darkrime Delves Part 3: Icebrood Saga.

BUMPING THIS: because DC issues are still happening. I get kicked out of the instance, and have to spend another hour or more to catch back up. What kind of bull is this? I added the ports they request and enabled GW2 through my firewall.

Hi Jeffrey, I've been having this issue happening to me, my friends, and tons of guildies for years. What did you need to see from our network connections or logs (if any exist) to start addressing this issue? We're dumping a lot of money playing this game, for such a game breaking feature to exist. Imagine doing 45 minutes to an hour of instance story line...only to disconnect due to some strange error? - Why isn't the feature to reconnect to Instance been ported over from GW1? - It solved a lot of problems back then. Why isn't such a nice feature available in a more modern iteration of the engine? Unfortunately, you won't get a response from Jeffrey, as he has not worked at ArenaNet for more than a year. Well that's a little more depressing. :( - But thank you for the heads up.

Hi Jeffrey, I've been having this issue happening to me, my friends, and tons of guildies for years. What did you need to see from our network connections or logs (if any exist) to start addressing this issue? We're dumping a lot of money playing this game, for such a game breaking feature to exist. Imagine doing 45 minutes to an hour of instance story line...only to disconnect due to some strange error? - Why isn't the feature to reconnect to Instance been ported over from GW1? - It solved a lot of problems back then. Why isn't such a nice feature available in a more modern iteration of the engine?

Can confirm. This has been happening for years. Since Launch of HoT until now. I guess they have shiny things in the Trading Post to distract us, so who cares about in game technical debt, that is literally game breaking.