Upstream data dies
By
Ardrea,
Posted on: 2009-07-26 20:41 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Oh geez, don't even blame NCSoft for this. It's your fault. Always is. Reasons to follow from others..........
I doubt that any of the regulars here will bust BillZ on this.
And he did say that he is betting it is a backbone or server side issue.
The backbone he speaks of is the path between the connection leaving his house and arriving at the game servers.
Bill just uses the correct jargon.
After all, he is our Tech Devil.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
I'm guessin' you're on Pinnacle, right Bill?
I didn't see this on Virtue, but I dunno if that helps ya or not.
Seems to be a few of this kinda thing going on tonight in the forums...
August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012
Saw it on Freedom last night, and tonight also.
More information:
I'm on East Coast, on Comcast.
Right there with ya Billz... been fighting this very thing all night and also rubberbanding quite often (even nearly mapserved a few times) on the two servers I play on, Virtue and Pinnacle. Seems I'm not the only one either, since a few in broadcast confirmed the same problems.
Btw, I'm on the East Coast and using Verizon FiOS.
hrrrm...
Mateo_06 is East Coast, on Comcast.
MrVacant is on the East Coast and using Verizon FiOS.
I'm outside Austin, TX on Suddenlink.
I believe Pinnacle is an east coast server. Yup, verified:
East coast:
* Freedom
* Infinity
* Liberty
* Pinnacle
* Triumph
* Victory
Bur Virtue is a west coast server.
I'll give it a day or two. If it doesn't clear itself up, I'll start grabbing traceroutes, netinfo, etc.
EDIT: Side note since I haven't been hanging in the tech forum lately...
When troubleshooting ANYTHING, a tech should ALWAYS assume the problem starts with the end user and their rig. 9 times out of 10, the problem is found there. I actually assumed the problem was on my end at first. That's why I bounced my modem and router and restarted my rig.
It wasn't until after I asked if anyone else was experiencing out of the norm lag/comm failures (and found many stating similar issues) that I began to think the problem was outside of my home/ISP.
Be well, people of CoH.
Update: Just logged back on and played for about 25-30 mins. Zero issues. Nothing but low cut grass in the netgraph. 149 ping. All seems clear at this time.
Be well, people of CoH.
Oh yeah. was buggin the heck out of me on victory eariler today
Combat Kangaroos, Justice Server. First 50's
Jirra Roo Plant/Storm/Stone/Musculature Controller
Combat Kangaroo Rifle/Energy/Mace/Spiritual Blaster
Kung Fu Kangaroo Martial Arts/Reflexes/Body/Spiritual Scrapper
Tribal Arc Shield/Elec/Mu/Spiritual Tanker
I wonder if these troubles are related to the reports from last night about frequent mapserve disconnects?
Definitely sounds like the oddity I've been chasing the last 2 nights on Freedom. I'm east of St. Louis MO (Illinois side) and have a local ISP that connects through Cogentco's upline. I was seeing a lot of moderately brief sharp yellow spikes or narrow blocks in the netgraph, a lot of packet resend. It was also impacting my teamate who is located in SC. I dont know his ISP although he was on the map with me, so also Freedom.
Same issue here mine started while pvping last night.
I'm in Oklahoma, At&t DSL (usually quite reliable)
did not experience any problems with vent at the time. And since i'm not very network savvy i ran a speed test when my netgraph started with these problems and it came up normal each time i did it.
Well, I'm all the way down in lovely Brisbane Australia, and I've had this happen a couple times too, so I'm guessing the problem is closer to the NCsoft servers, tube wise at least :P
Liberty for All
Balefor - 50 DM/EA
Summon VII - 50 Claws/Regen
Urteil - 50 Archery/Elec
Catwhoorg: What time of year should I plant my cabbages?
Castle: It doesn't matter if you have the Gold Watering Can.
This happened to me also Bill, Virtue shard, later in evening EST.
Luckily I wasn't doing anything critical but cleaning up old missions. I was tired anyway, gave me an excuse to hit the sack early.
Last night it got really bad for me as well.
Playing on Guardian, I'm in Oklahoma and have Cox communications.
Was on vent talking to a friend in Houston and one near L.A.
vent had no trouble, and neither did the friends. - they were on my team as well on Guardian.
50-Magnitude Zero Nrg/Nrg Blaster
50-Phoss Fire/Fire Blaster
50-Phantasy Mirage Ill/Rad Controller
50-Bronze Girl Earth/Storm Controller
50-Infernel Zero Fire/Dev Blaster
50-Joni Sunlight Bots/Traps MM
50-Cherry Phrost Ice/EM Blaster
50-Nuku Frost-Empathy/Radiation Tank
Thanks for the info, folks. Since it was all clean at 2am CST, let's report back if we have a repeat tonight. If I do, I'll post up some better data points than I have now.
Be well, people of CoH.
I'll play Freedom, Pinnacle and Virtue and report back later tonight.
August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012
THIS is why I have a difficult time believing NCSoft could figure out how to fix any issues, they can not even reply from the correct Tech Support department after posting a ticket for the right game....LOL
I understand the questions the tech is asking is standard procedure but c'mon.
I'm going to move forward and answer the questions and see where it gets me. I hope they don't throw it back at me in the form of contact your ISP.
Good Luck all!
I play on Freedom too, and will add to the comments tonight if that's ok =)
You do realize that that NCSoft has one tech support group in North America handling all NCSoft North American games, right?
The tech clicked on the wrong pulldown for which game he was responding about. Oh... the horror.
EDIT: I'm not stating that their support is the end all be all of correct answers and quick resolutions. If it was, this forum wouldn't be as active as it is. But generally, when the end user stays on them, the root cause of a problem is usually found.
And as stated earlier, 9 out of 10 times, it won't be their issue.
Be well, people of CoH.
Well, you obviously got someone that is Tier 1 support. Yes, they copy/pasted the wrong text since it is obvious that this is not Guild Wars.
Keep after them, politely answer their questions, but if they keep up with the Guild Wars stuff, politely point out that the game the problem was reported on was City of Villains, not Guild Wars, and that you would appreciate it if they would escalate your ticket to someone that knows how to work with City of Heroes/City of Villains or to the next level of support.
I used to do Tier 3 phone and email based Tech Support, and I know that many companies have scripts written for many of the Tier 1 support staff but the Tier 1 staff doesn't always follow the script path they are supposed to. Heck, I spent 2 weeks figuring out how to fix a badly messed up install for one of our products, built a step by step walkthrough with screenshots on our support website for the techs to use and emphasized at the very top of the page and every third step that each step must be followed exactly or they'd have to start all over again. Guess what, 90% of the time they skipped steps and had to repeat the processes. Or they'd have the customer so irritated that they had to escalate them to my group, and within just a few minutes we'd have them working correctly just by following each step. The worst part was that even after showing them where they messed up, and why it was necessary to follow the steps exactly, they'd pull the same shortcut crap the next time, botch it up worse, and have to escalate it to us again.
Nothing irritates me more than knowing that the correct steps are written down for techs to follow and then they are either too lazy or (in some cases) not intelligent enough to follow the proper chain of steps or deciding they know more than the people that wrote the steps and just skipping willy-nilly through things.
The thing is, stay polite in your conversations with them. Don't give them any reason to cut you off for being rude with them.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
[ QUOTE ]
I'll play Freedom, Pinnacle and Virtue and report back later tonight.
[/ QUOTE ]
Ok, I was on all three for the past couple hours, and I never had any issues. Not one. The graph looked great, frames were excellent, no lag, only one rubber band on Pinnacle (which I thought odd, but acceptable)
So... I'm living right? Naw... Surely that's not it. I wouldn't feel so badly today if I were.
/stupid frail body... sigh.
//they don't have any NOS parts for it anymore. 
///need a new neck, shoulder, back, etc.
August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012
Same here, houtex. Been on and off Pinnacle for several hours. No issues. Guess it was something out in backbone land that got repaired last night.
Be well, people of CoH.
Yeah no evidence of yellow resends tonight. I did get kicked from the network maintenance at the top of the server page, but that (as noted) cleared up in about 15 min. All in all server looked pretty good tonight. Glad to see them taking care of maintenance before 2xp lagfest.
All is well on Virtue, too... no problems at all, except the usual minor lag near WW and AE buildings.
Netgraph shows a sudden series of retransmits occurring, no input gets through to server, downstream remains clean.
Outcome: Enemies still attack and damage me without issue while I'm left unable to fight back in anyway.
This goes on for about 20 seconds each time. Happens around once every 15 minutes or so.
Cable modem bounced. Router bounced. Same issue.
Anyone else seeing this?
Scanning system now for bad things, but as it is never used for anything but gaming, I'm betting that this is a backbone or server side issue.
Be well, people of CoH.