EVE General Discussion

Thank you, Helios Anduath for that comprehensive explanatory post.


Thanks for taking the time to lay out, and linking the resources to help troubleshoot.


Dan

Other games working are not really an indicator of it being a problem at CCP's end, especially if you are outside of Europe. The reason being that with other games you tend to connect to more local servers so don't have potentially problematic international transit to deal with. Eve does seem to be a bit more susceptible to packet loss than some other games but on the flip side, it is more accepting of higher latency.

Yeah...I guess I lost THAT bet. Sprinkles or no sprinkles?

noticed that if you stand still in a pos you get socket closures more often, but overall its there.

It may not be your home network or your ISP's network that had an issue (or rather, there could be a minor issue that on its own does cause a problem) but it could be that you all ended up following a common route closer to the cluster and that had an issue resulting in a socket closed.

But without any diagnostics from you and your fleet members, we will never know...

Also, if you got as mad as you sound over a ship loss, please calm down and take a step back.

And how, prey tell, would you like CCP to fix an issue that is most likely out of their control and you are not providing any diagnostics?

Sockets closeds triggered by something on CCP's side usually result in lots of people being disconnected at once and they are usually transient issues with their ISP that get resolved quickly. These are picked up by their monitoring and CCP are good at acknowledging them and informing people that something has happened on the eve-status twitter.

Most of the time with more localised/smaller numbers of people disconnecting at once, it is something between them and CCP. For a single, one-off event affecting a few people, it could be anything from a route failing over at an intermediate network (either planned or as a result of a failure), a cable getting moved while someone is poking in a rack causing packet loss, or any number of other transient effects that cause a momentatry blip and then pass. These are not something that can't be fixed - they happen, that is the nature of the internet and is even more pronounced when you are using services in another country due to the number of intermediate networks you pass through. Getting upset over a one-off discconet really isn't helpful and if it really does annoy you that much, maybe online gaming isn't for you?

For individuals having issues at differnt times, from the people I have been helping at least, we are generally finding that there is either noticeable packet loss on a pingplotter or connecting through a VPN stabilises things. This shows it is not an issue on CCP's end but something somewhere on one of the many networks that your traffic passes through on it's merry way from you to CCP.

Could there be an underliying issue for some people at CCP's end? possibly but as long as people keep blaming every socket closed on CCP and fail to carry out any diagnostics it will not be found as there are so many false reports to sift through. In most cases it really is NOT a problem at CCP's end.

Now, if you want some help or to help work out what happened, please post a tracert to client.eveonline.com at a minimum or if the socket closeds keep happening, a screenshot of pingplotter to client.eveonline.com during a disconnect event.

Can't - my bad.

You can call BS as much as you want - it does not change the fundamental way that the Internet and networking in general function. Socket closeds happen because of packet loss, there are no two ways about it. Packet loss is a result of network issues.

A wireshark traffic capture from someone having recuring issues earlier was showing TCP retransmissions (so no acknowledgement received, showing that packets have been lost somewhere) right before a socket closed. If you don't know networking, you can generally think of it in terms of a 4-layer abstracted model. Eve runs up at the application layer. TCP stuff happens at the transport layer, this is below the application layer and handled by the network stack in your OS.

In contrast to your "knowledge", I can tell you that the only time I have had socket closeds is when my ISP had issues. Other than that, my playtime has not been affected by socket closeds at all. I can also tell you that a number of other people who were having socket closed problems was due to issues under their control - for example, one guy had a wifi problem that developed recently because of a change in local RF noise and a wifi adapter starting to die.

If stuff has started to happen in the last few months, have you looked at what local issues exist (e.g. have you actually done any diagnostics on your setup and connection to determine if you have some local hardware that is going dodgy or whether your ISP is having issues)? On a more global scale, some of the routers on the East Coast of the US have been having utilisation problems, there have been cable faults in the Australia and Asian Pacific regions. The data centre move on the 29th resulted in routes changing for people as CCP have added more peering so this is why some people have started having issues since then.

You still haven't posted a tracert or any other diags, or even said what if any diagnostics you have done. This tells me that you don't actually want to try to fix your issue is and instead just want to complain and unreasonably apportion blame without doing your homework.

You may be on different continents but you could quite easily share the same final routing as each other as you are comming to one common endpoint.

I will ask again incase you missed my previous requests for it - please post a screenshot of a tracert to client.eveonline.com at the bare minimum, or do you not want help?

OK, that is different to the potentially problematic route that some people are using from the other thread. CCP peer with over 23 different providers so there are a lot of potential inbound routes.

If you run a pingplotter to client.eveonline.com for a while, that will show if there is any packet loss along the route. If you get a socket closed during the capture, all the better.

Playing through a VPN is a good test as it can stabilise things by sending you over a different route.

If pingplotter really doesn't show anything and a few different VPNs don't help, then it is something to open a petition about.