Was a change made to the server?

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Hav3n
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Was a change made to the server?

Post by Hav3n »

Sometime in the past few weeks my reliably consistent 50 ping connection has completely tanked. Sometimes I get 50, then it spikes up over 100, maybe 150. But its not even consistent, I get rubber banding now and stuff jitters to the point of rendering the gameplay useless. Nearly crash helicopters because commands aren't registered for 1/2 to 1 full second by the time connection recovers.

Anyways, did some change get made to the server? I asked about it in game and Cheese mentioned that something had happened or something.

Just wondering. Kind of the end of the road for playing other than the occasional joining for a few minutes before leaving in frustration. Unplayable in current condition for my connection. Nothing has changed on my end in the past several weeks.
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Trench
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Re: Was a change made to the server?

Post by Trench »

The only "recent event" I'm aware of is when the game server host took down their network for maintenance on April 28 midnight, and we had issues starting an hour before the maintenance window and for the two days afterwards. We opened a support case with them and they claimed to have stabilized the network as of April 30, and I've not seen any evidence to the contrary.

During the problem period we could see /everyone's/ ping spiking (not just a few people) and there was frequent total loss of connection for half the players and then soon after all players. Enough to make it unplayable the night of the 27th, and then again on the 28th. But I'm not seeing anything like that still happening since the 30th.

That kind of thing has definitely happened to me before too, and comparing a traceroute from when I was having the problem to a traceroute from before the problem started showed me that my ISP was sending me on a longer trip than it needed to. That's still where I would recommend looking first, since "no change at your end" doesn't mean the ISPs aren't still changing things and/or having issues.

It definitely doesn't have to be something that "affects all players". Users coming from different geographic regions take different routes to get to the same server, so there can definitely be something that "only affects connections coming from the Southwest" or "only affects connections crossing the Atlantic", etc. Meaning the issue you see in your traceroute, depending upon where it is, might affect just you (if its close to you and no one else) or might affect multiple players coming in that same way (if it's further away from you).

No magic answers. It's like saying "why does it suddenly take me 20 minutes longer to get to work?" Since you're pretty sure your car isn't slower, then the next logical thing could be to look at the congestion or the route you're being forced to take because of construction or similar.

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zanshin1
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Re: Was a change made to the server?

Post by zanshin1 »

Just move the server to Chicago, tyvm!
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Trench
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Re: Was a change made to the server?

Post by Trench »

Yeah, that was the crappy part when mine was slow, in that being close to the server didn't help. I'm in DFW, the server is in DFW, but for what should have been less than a 20 mile trip my ISP was shipping the traffic to Michigan and back or some such silliness. But I guess we have an NSA listening post up there somewhere, and they wanted to monitor things for a while...

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Hav3n
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Re: Was a change made to the server?

Post by Hav3n »

Thanks for the insight Trench. I'll read up elsewhere here where I remember you walking someone (Thongers?) about tracing the connection.

NSA "hard drive" is within sight of my brother's house in Utah.

Image

I work in Maryland and drive by the NSA HQ on my way home.

Allahu Akbar. ;)
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