15 replies to this topic

[UselessDeadweight]

Hi guys. I'm having a problem since about the time of the last patch I'm hoping someone can shed some light on. I'm not blaming the patch, I'm just using it as a time reference; it might be the patch, it might have nothing to do with it.
Allright, here it goes:

We've all had mid-game disconnections in which you are in the middle of a heated battle one second and the next you are back at the mechlab, right? But this one is different: I remain in game, can move and shoot, but everything else seems frozen. Other mechs are running in place (pretty comical, actually) and I can't shutdown, overheat, target, cap or do anything else besides move and shoot while the world around me seems frozen in place. The game timer keeps ticking away and when it reaches 0 nothing happens. I have to press the esc key to quit the match.

I have contacted support but its likely I wont hear from them till Monday, so I'm writing here to see if anyone has experienced something similar, or has any input.

Best regards.

[nehebkau]

The game de-syncs. Had this happen a few times myself. Usually when there are very little mechs left and the dead players are all spectating.

[bullyj]

I have this happen occasionally, since the last patch it's happened twice. The first time it happened I hit escape and left the match. As soon as it went back to mechlab I hit rejoin and viola I was back in the action. It was the same for the second time, so from now on any time I see mechs running in place I'm gonna immediately disco and rejoin.

[Guppeeh]

Hey everyone,

I am fed up with MWO/PGI and the insulting support response in which they ask me to run dxdiag, pings, MODEM brand? etc. after I pointed out there is no way my PC set up/ISP can attributed to everyone else globally having the same lag/disconnect problem after the patch. This also after the DNS fiasco.

So instead of wasting more time and continuing to try to reason and justify my issue, I just gone ahead and opened up a case with Paypal to get a refund of my last MC purchase when the game worked. As evidence, I will send Paypal ALL of this captured evidence. I hate to do this because I love the game and have spent a lot of money but honestly, this "it's not our problem" just helped me quit this game. I will get back HOURS of my life so really no loss. Thanks PGI.

Guppeeh

[Naduk]

Guppeeh, on 22 July 2014 - 06:14 PM, said:

Hey everyone,

I am fed up with MWO/PGI and the insulting support response in which they ask me to run dxdiag, pings, MODEM brand? etc. after I pointed out there is no way my PC set up/ISP can attributed to everyone else globally having the same lag/disconnect problem after the patch. This also after the DNS fiasco.

So instead of wasting more time and continuing to try to reason and justify my issue, I just gone ahead and opened up a case with Paypal to get a refund of my last MC purchase when the game worked. As evidence, I will send Paypal ALL of this captured evidence. I hate to do this because I love the game and have spent a lot of money but honestly, this "it's not our problem" just helped me quit this game. I will get back HOURS of my life so really no loss. Thanks PGI.

Guppeeh

Thats a very thick headed way to respond to very standard IT problem solving
You CANNOT say the issue is not at your end
It may not be your fault but that does not mean its not on your end

They ask you these questions to help not just you but everybody
For example modem brand
If you have a pool of 10,000 people using you product
And 100 of those people are having the same issue and 60+ of those 100 all run a netgear X modem then your code may be issuing commands that the netgear modem very much disagrees with
So then a fix must be found to make that modem happy

Given there are thousands of choices for every single part of pc hardware and billions of possible configuration combinations and trillions of differences if software setups (even for identical hardware sets)
How else do you expect companys to gather data on what items are causing their products grief

Recent DNS issue is the perfect example
It effected loads of people and just as many had no idea there was an issue

If you do not help support, support cannot help you

[Shamous13]

Naduk, on 22 July 2014 - 07:09 PM, said:

Thats a very thick headed way to respond to very standard IT problem solving
You CANNOT say the issue is not at your end
It may not be your fault but that does not mean its not on your end

They ask you these questions to help not just you but everybody
For example modem brand
If you have a pool of 10,000 people using you product
And 100 of those people are having the same issue and 60+ of those 100 all run a netgear X modem then your code may be issuing commands that the netgear modem very much disagrees with
So then a fix must be found to make that modem happy

Given there are thousands of choices for every single part of pc hardware and billions of possible configuration combinations and trillions of differences if software setups (even for identical hardware sets)
How else do you expect companys to gather data on what items are causing their products grief

Recent DNS issue is the perfect example
It effected loads of people and just as many had no idea there was an issue

If you do not help support, support cannot help you

This a x10000 by providing them the info that they have requested it will help them track the problem down.

we've see issues caused by all sorts of third party software. start by checking to make sure that your firewall isn't blocking MWO, check to see what you have running in the back ground. Make sure all of your drivers and software are up to date, if your running in DX9 mode then see below. Clean out your computer with a can of compressed air. people have had over heating components cause issues like this. download msi afterburner and watch your video card temps and fan speed. it could be your fans aren't ramping up quick enough to deal with the load. check your cpu temp you might need to replace the thermal past (it doesn't last forever)

Also as silly as it sounds check your hardware power settings? check the power settings for your network adapter and other hardware? their was a Microsoft update that changed the settings to power saving mode. it did some wonky stuff to my wife's laptop. Go in to Device manager, Right click on your network adapter, select properties, go to power management tab, and turn off "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power". also check all of the settings for your other hardware ie graph card . The power settings have fixed a few different problems. good old Microsoft strikes again.

if your running this game on a laptop then get a good cooling pad and turn off turbo boost, turbo boost cause issues with MWO. their was a post about it a year or so ago. How I read that is it starts to shut down cores to boost 1 core causing overall performance in mwo to drop drastically, this has helped others having fps issues

Quote

Actually, you do need to install Directx 9c. Vista/7/8 comes with DX 10/11 and a base version of dx9. The issue is that MS does not include all the latest modules for dx 9c, nor are the DX10/11 backward compatible. Even a fresh XP install will require DX 9c installation for those updated modules.

DX 10/11 and DX 9c are located in their own subfolders, they do not overwrite each other. Programs and games are set to locate the necessary files from their respective location.

MWO currently utilizes ONLY dx9c files, thus the need to install dx 9c with either the dxsetup.exe (small file that downloads everything from MS) or the redistribution file (large file but useful if installing on several machines or need to reinstall to replace possible corrupted files).

http://www.microsoft...ls.aspx?id=8109

Or

http://www.microsoft...ails.aspx?id=35

You will notice that it supports more than just XP.

Most games that come on a CD/DVD will also have a setup to install the updated modules by using one of the paths. For other games that are download only, they direct you to MS to download (using that site's bandwidth instead of their own) and perform the installation, from a trusted source ( hehe Microsoft..: )

Start with this and let us know how you make out.

Edited by Shamous13, 23 July 2014 - 05:09 AM.

[nehebkau]

OP,
Troubleshooting follows the rule of Percentages, or low hanging fruit. You rule out the most common troubles first then make your way down the chain in descending order of, how likely something is causing the problem. Part of that is gathering all the information on what setup you have and doing some routine maintenance.

This problem is caused when some type of de-sync happens. Usually if you are quick-enough you can rejoin. Sometimes the whole match just dies. I see this when there are only a few people playing and everyone is still spectating. I've seen this prior to the last few patches -- probably because I am often one of the last mechs.

[Shamoth]

I can't disagree that support need some feedback from customers but im wondering one thing.
Why earlier i had none problems with MWO and suddenly after patch my PC/ISP/router is totally different/strange for MWO.
Just like they added next to Rejoin option those extra features allowing for de-sync, dc, ctd and finally bsod... never ever, even in beta haven't had those issues... so definitely there is something really wrong in patch if with 1 feature comes 4 bugs.

[nehebkau]

Shamoth, on 24 July 2014 - 01:29 AM, said:

I can't disagree that support need some feedback from customers but im wondering one thing.
Why earlier i had none problems with MWO and suddenly after patch my PC/ISP/router is totally different/strange for MWO.
Just like they added next to Rejoin option those extra features allowing for de-sync, dc, ctd and finally bsod... never ever, even in beta haven't had those issues... so definitely there is something really wrong in patch if with 1 feature comes 4 bugs.

Here is just a small list of the things that could be causing your problems, I could make an even larger list but what would be the point?

Their game is broken

When you downloaded the patch you got a corrupt file

You have encountered network errors when downloading

you have a slightly corrupt piece of cache or ram that occasionally throws errors

The developers wrote some code after spending a bunch of time at the Craft Beer market

Something you did on your system corrupted game files

You pressed Alt F4

your system shut down unexpectedly

You ran a piece of software that unintentionally damaged files

Something you did on your system corrupted files

Your system shut down unexpectedly

You installed an unfriendly piece of software

Something on your system corrupted something on your registry

Your system shut down unexpectedly

You installed an unfriendly piece of software

A program crashed while accessing the registry

Some piece of hardware on your system is starting to fail producing intermittent errors

You have a power supply that is starting to go and only fails under heavy loads

You have ram that is starting to fail under heavy loads

you have a component on your mainboard that is starting to fail under heavy loads

Your video card is starting to fail

Your hard-drive is starting to fail

An un-related piece of software did an update which is affecting MWO

You did a windows update

you did a driver update

you did a 3rd party software update

What most people realize is that a modern computer can still operate, sometimes without difficulties, when one of its components is starting to fail. In electronics sometimes things just stop working (like when you let the magic smoke out of integrated circuits) and other things take this long, slow, slide into the abyss.

Let me explain a troubleshooting problem I was having. I couldn't play MWO, I kept getting corrupted files and the errors associated with it. I had another program that was also crashing, Bitcoin QT -- the block-chain (A very big datafile) was always getting corrupted.

I hadn't seen a BSOD on a heck of a long time and, had no problems with the other software I run, some of it pretty intense rendering and IDE. I was battling each of these separately, had contacted tech support for both in an attempt to fix the problem. Then, those atrophied sections of my brain that I used to use when i was doing tech-support woke up from their long dormant sleep when I started replying to the generic troubleshooting questions that MWO support was asking. It said: "dude, you know this crap! First step, check your system from top to bottom. It is more likely that your individual system has a failure then the entire application -- otherwise every user everywhere would have the same problem as you."

I Checked everything -- doing as low level system checks as I could. Know what I found? One 4k block of memory in the 4th DIMM slot on my mainboard was failing. That block, on the upper end of the 32 GB range would only get accessed when there was a large amount of IO Caching. So, when BitcoinQT was downloading that giant (40 gb) block chain,..corruption... When MWO was downloading ... zap corruption. I replaced that DIMM and Bitcoin QT ran without errors, MWO ran without errors.

I am telling you this so that you realize, that by the odds its something on your system, Probability says that it's something unrelated that has happened on your system. That's not to say it couldn't be the game but ... probability wins in tech support and that is why you get the canned questions.

Earlier today I was having horribad connection problems 2 desyncs and rubber-banding in MWO but I could browse, e-mail and upload my code just fine. I had a power failure last night but things seemed to reset themselves fine. Following the troubleshooting probability profile, I did, at first, a soft reset then a hard reset of my router and the problems went away.

Edited by nehebkau, 24 July 2014 - 04:42 PM.

[Shamoth]

Im not just another average PC user so I know what u mean ;]
But since last patch there is maybe 99,9% probability that something in my house causes those problems.

Router reflashed, wiped, configured, tested by other 3 machines for 48h on heavy load and in mean time I was also testing my ISP/connection stability to Canada.
Each memory module tested separately with memtest.
CPU and memory tested with prime and linx.
DPC latency tested and overall memory/bus system to exclude mobo/chipset/wrong memory/bus configuration.
GPU tested with furmark and gpgpu.
RAID10 forced to resync.
HDDs checked for badblocks/relocations.
Each partition scanned twice to repair file system then to recover if something is lost.
Run some AVs to make sure that OS is clean.
Done some registry cleaning and optimizations.
And last thing to do was to push PSU to rig limits by setting GPU and CPU to consume excessive amount of power.
Did I miss something during step by step verification?

Since patch I wasn't updating system/drivers and I use like 4 month old drivers since there are no never one with WHQL certificate.
Additionally after last patch excessive gpu/cpu usage in mechlab makes me wonder since during battles there is less load and heat on those components.
Im running MWO on average rig and aiming to achive stable 60fps so there is no fancy gfx options turned on, just higher textures for crisp view and higher terrain/objects detail so I wont see some weird terrain/objects clipping...
Run twice mwo repair tool without any errors so there is no corruption to client.
Run Crysis3 on settings that squeeze more juice from my rig than MWO and no problems.

From what I have observed there is old problem form early beta back, probably with sound engine that somehow affected net engine, or caused sound card to conflict with network adapter. Those two components fight heavily for resources and bus times when on one line so I usually check what bus is used by integrated network adapter and put sound card on other one, so basically there can't be any resource conflict... My sound card can withstand more samples than average sound card but still I experience dc or de-sync during/after heavy fire exchange, a lot of 3d samples fly around, and occasionally BSoD that I haven't seen earlier before that don't mention about any file/driver, just drops error code and some hash code...

So in my case, solution for troubles with mwo client is to keep away from heavy fights or don't get nuked with alphas from few mechs ;]

[nehebkau]

Shamoth, on 24 July 2014 - 05:58 PM, said:

From what I have observed there is old problem form early beta back, probably with sound engine that somehow affected net engine, or caused sound card to conflict with network adapter.

You can't imagine how many times I have traced problems in one part of a game down to the sound systems. I believe in one thread I suggested that someone try running the game with their sound card disabled. Honestly, I think the people who do the sound cards spend more time down at the pub then other HW manufacturers.

[Shamoth]

nehebkau, on 25 July 2014 - 05:26 AM, said:

You can't imagine how many times I have traced problems in one part of a game down to the sound systems. I believe in one thread I suggested that someone try running the game with their sound card disabled. Honestly, I think the people who do the sound cards spend more time down at the pub then other HW manufacturers.

Well its not 100% sound card engineers fault. Lately sound engine in each game is crap, it is in game because game need sounds and is usually added at end of development but nothing above than that and no one cares for optimizations in this area. GFX is more important because devs assume that most of players are deaf and play by what they see. In my case I have learned playing by 3d sound positioning in CS while Aureal Vortex 2 was still alive and was kicking competition backside. When it died I have never after heard so excellent 3d positioning on headphones nor speakers.


So far setting s_maxchannels = 32 causes less troubles so its something with sound buffer or huge sound samples that require a lot of bus bandwidth and most PCI soundcards or PCIe soundcards sharing same bus with network adapter causes resource conflicts since network adapters are also hungry for bus access.

[Team Chevy86]

This isn't new. It's been happening awhile now and I've seen several posts relating to it. I made a topic in the patch support on June 19th, but it was doing it before that. Read on my wayward son:

http://mwomercs.com/...83#entry3484083
http://mwomercs.com/...830-sudden-lag/
http://mwomercs.com/...-address-these/

Edited by Team Chevy86, 26 July 2014 - 08:05 AM.

[Galenthor Kerensky]

I have had the game shut down on me mid match 7 times so far today, and after the 5th time I ran the patcher... would love to know why this is happening... heat could be a partial blame, but I can't control the heat in this place, just survive it... I have a 16 inch fan blowing directly into the tower wiuth the side panel off to make sure that it gets into the tower... it's not just on my end, the main part of the problem has to be on theirs; since the heat is somewhat a constant here... and my comp is less than a year old, so it's not my tech

[nehebkau]

Galenthor Kerensky, on 28 July 2014 - 11:07 AM, said:

I have had the game shut down on me mid match 7 times so far today, and after the 5th time I ran the patcher... would love to know why this is happening... heat could be a partial blame, but I can't control the heat in this place, just survive it... I have a 16 inch fan blowing directly into the tower wiuth the side panel off to make sure that it gets into the tower... it's not just on my end, the main part of the problem has to be on theirs; since the heat is somewhat a constant here... and my comp is less than a year old, so it's not my tech

Please describe "shut down" Did the game fault and windows come up with an error window? Did your computer BSOD? Did the game just lock up? Ya' gotta be precise

[Team Chevy86]

nehebkau, on 28 July 2014 - 04:14 PM, said:

Please describe "shut down" Did the game fault and windows come up with an error window? Did your computer BSOD? Did the game just lock up? Ya' gotta be precise

If he's having the same problem as me, nothing. No errors. No crash. I simply cannot connect. It says "Disconnected from game server" when it boots you back to the mechlab. Its happening again to me right now. 8 of my mechs are apparently "In Game" and I can't rejoin.
Getting really sick of this ****

Edited by Team Chevy86, 03 August 2014 - 08:07 PM.