[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

@Odinsfury.8360 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Ringlin.1863 said:While I appreciate that devs are trying to make the problem reproducible, that hasn't been a productive path so far. Why not apply this fix, which builds on an existing mechanic, and an existing feature of GW1?

I'd assume that this is not nearly so simple as it sounds, because otherwise it kind of is the obvious thing to do.

It might not be the easiest thing to do, but at least it's something to do.

A feature like that would likely consume significant development resource meaning they'd have to push other engine changes (not content changes, that's most likely a different team). Would have knock on effects on other development pushing back other bug fixes or even the next expansion by however long it takes. I doubt there's much of GW1 in GW2, so it's not like restoring some old functionality, it's probably a whole new feature that may not sit well with the server infrastructure. The change also brings high risk of unexpected consequences I'd imagine, necessitating lots of testing. It's the kind of thing they should have built in to the game day 1.

Based on the number of posts complaining, and the amount of developer presence, I'd assume it's not affecting enough of us to be considered critical. I'd be stunned if they told us they had even a single resource looking at this full time.

If we want a fix/workaround quick then we'd have to start hoping the issue became chronic and start affecting everyone. I'm not mean enough to wish that on other people unfortunately :D

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

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!

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

@"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.

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

@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.

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

@"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. :(

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

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.

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

@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.

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

@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

[Storyline Disconnects - [Merged]]

I'm having the same issue as zaXan, except it happens on skippable ones as well. Can't get through the last story.

No update from Arena.net in a month, that's absolutely appalling. Also no mention on known issues page, which doesn't make me confident.