Everything works fine.. then poof... nothing works.

[Brynnae]

Hey everyone. I live in Ottawa, use Bell sympatico, and have this same issue since about saturday. I've tried a bunch of things like all of you, been in frequent touch with Turbine tech support, and have yet to fully lick this problem, but I've gotten close. Three things have made a difference for limited amounts of time; minimizing all my graphics settings made a huge difference last night, and allowed me to play for good chunks of time before the issue caught up and I had to quit and log back in at which point I could play for awhile again. Today I tried a system restore to last wednesdays settings and things were perfect again!! Then after awhile the issue reared it's ugly head. Turbine suggested I try a selective startup and remove all my startup items and all my microsoft services. This made a huge difference! I went back and forth from full startup to selective to make sure, and it was a real change! So something in there, quite possibly some Bell Sympatico software, is buggering our data flow. I removed the Windows Firewall and Windows Security so far, but that made no change. Unfortunately my tech skills are old and rusty and I can't readily indetify half the stuff in there. Port forwarding seems like a great fix for now, how would I go about that?

[Brynnae]

WARNING! Sorry folks, mistyped something there: when doing the Selective Startup, under Services I disable everything EXCEPT microsoft services, just put a check in Hide MS Services and then disable all the rest. And don't load any of the Startup Items, just take the check out of the box for that on the first page. And if I forgot to mention it (which I did), this is all in the Microsoft Configuration Utility, or MSConfig used from the Run command box.

[Thalanthazar]

Three things have made a difference for limited amounts of time; minimizing all my graphics settings made a huge difference last night, and allowed me to play for good chunks of time before the issue caught up and I had to quit and log back in at which point I could play for awhile again. Today I tried a system restore to last wednesdays settings and things were perfect again!! Then after awhile the issue reared it's ugly head.

I would say that no game or windows-startup settings you would try would "fix" this problem. The moment the problems will appear is random (may get 15 minutes of play time or 30 seconds). But will be usually triggered by high activity (such as combat). I have this issue with another machine that was untouched (and not windows-updated) for a month.

Also, note that when experiencing this issue, the network stats box (top left greenish icon in the toolbar of DDO) displays 0% packet loss and appears normal (ping, etc.) until the freeze. After the freeze, that box is not updated anymore and still display the older, healthy, stats.
The connection is not "gracefully degraded", but abruptly cut-off. Note that in a browser, ddo.com seems unreachable for a short while after that.
At that moment, my other online TCP connections were unharmed.


If anybody using Videotron or other local provider could confirm they _dont have_ the issue, that would be a good argument to pinpoint Bell's fault here.

btw, thank you Turbine support to be investigating this issue with us. Just went VIP a few days ago and would be a shame to abort everything after a few days ;-)

EDIT: Of course, it is known that Bell is doing traffic shaping. Bittorrent will be limited to around 30k/s on evenings and will go back to full speed in off-hours. Pretty sure this is another level in their "bandwidth protection program"

[TheJMC17]

Well i fowarded the ports and everything is fine now, i've played an hour without a single problem.
If i get anything new from the e-mail support, i'll let you know.

[Longpig]

Well i fowarded the ports and everything is fine now, i've played an hour without a single problem.
If i get anything new from the e-mail support, i'll let you know.

Yeah port forwarding works great for me too. Unfortunately (and I don't really understand this but I'm not the one with the Comp Sci degree) it only works for one computer so my husband is SOL.

Oh and if someone could explain how to forward ports that would be great so I could tell my other friend with this issue... Wererogue has gone out and I have no clue how he did it. :V

[Missing_Minds]

Yeah port forwarding works great for me too. Unfortunately (and I don't really understand this but I'm not the one with the Comp Sci degree) it only works for one computer so my husband is SOL.

Oh and if someone could explain how to forward ports that would be great so I could tell my other friend with this issue... Wererogue has gone out and I have no clue how he did it. :V

No, your husband can be fine still as well. I did a bit more digging through Turbine's online help.

Normally, you don't need port forwarding because the client always sends to the server before the server tries to respond. In most NAT firewalls, this implicitly triggers a port forward from that server to your client.

* Port 80 - TCP
* Ports 9000-9010UDP - Server Port
* Ports 2900-2910UDP - Server Port
* These ports need to be opened out-bound

When configuring port forwarding explicitly, you need to specify the CLIENT's port. By default, the client lets the operating system choose its port. If you edit your UserPreferences.ini (My Documents\Dungeons and Dragons Online\UserPreferences.ini), you'll see a section titled [Net].



There's an entry there for UserSpecifiedPort, which defaults to 0. Set that value to something else (like 9000), and then forward that port to your computer (either by port forwarding or by a trigger).

http://na6.salesforce.com/_ui/selfse...00000L4s5&ps=1

So it seems to me, you can change the port you'll need forwarded for you husband's ddo client, allowing him to have a port forward as well.

Hopeful Mirthgar will be able to shed a little more light on this when he (she?) has time. I know I wouldn't mind a little more info on it myself. I would have thought more ports would have been used rather than just one.

edit: oh yeah, setting up routers... if you feel adventurous you could go through this to figure it out. This is as far as I'll go in that area though.
http://www.portforward.com/

[frenchfrog]

I changed nothing, and the game have doing well for about the last 45 minutes. Could 9:30-10:00 PM be the end of the peak hours and thus the end of the severe throttling?

[Longpig]

I changed nothing, and the game have doing well for about the last 45 minutes. Could 9:30-10:00 PM be the end of the peak hours and thus the end of the severe throttling?

I don't think so... we were trying to play at that time last night and it was awful.

[Thalanthazar]

Same here, changed nothing since yesterday (didnt even reboot) and its fine now, (45 minutes). Tried all the places where it crashed systematically before. Sunday and monday, it was buggy all evening.

Fingers crossed Bell fixed the thing on their end. But too soon to draw any conclusion.

[wererogue]

No, your husband can be fine still as well. I did a bit more digging through Turbine's online help.

Genius! Hopefully that'll work nicely.

So, to summarise: the steps for bell customers (we have the white router - I understand there are others, which might be different):

* Use your browser to open your router's configuration at http://192.168.2.1/
* Click "Application Support" at the top-right
* Click "Enable Application Support" just below the top, in the centre
* Click "Add a new user-defined application", just below the list on the left
* Fill in:
** Application Name: DDO or similar
** Protocol: UDP
** Port or range: From: 9000 To: 9013
* Click "Add Definition"
* Fill in:
** Protocol: UDP
** Port or range: From: 9000 To: 9013
* Click "Add Definition"
* Click "Back"
* Select your DDO computer from the drop-down list (1)
* Find your DDO application in the list on the left, and click "Add"
* Click "Done"

If you have more than one computer to play DDO with, you need to choose a port for each (I'm using 8888) and create a second application profile using just Port: From: 8888 To: 8888 (only one definition). Then edit "My Documents\Dungeons and Dragons Online\UserPreferences.ini" and scroll down to/search for UserSpecifiedPort, and change the 0 to your chosen port.

Edit: Maybe wall o' text was for nothing, if it's fixed now? Happy either way.

[Missing_Minds]

Were, is that the standard IP for your routers in Canada?

in the states it is 192.168.0.1.

[Otolycus]

It seems to work for me and my friends tonight =D

[TheJMC17]

Missing_Minds, it's supposed to be 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.0.2 if you have two computers behind a router.
At least that's what i use to forward ports, even in canada.


[EDIT] I dont know about you guys but tonight i cant play, even with all the ports fowarded.
It's not just limited to DDO, my internet in overall is very slow, around 30kb when i should have 556kb and i got nothing open that uses internet.

I can barely manage to log in the game, and when i reach the world, it's frozen, i cant move or do anything at all and my connection shows as broken though there is 0% loss
It started by not allowing me to join the party chat server.. then completly froze.

[Thalanthazar]

I dont know about you guys but tonight i cant play, even with all the ports fowarded.
It's not just limited to DDO, my internet in overall is very slow, around 30kb when i should have 556kb and i got nothing open that uses internet.

All OK for me here. 100% efficiency.

You are sure you didnt break something with your port forwarding? If your local address on the network changed since yesterday, and all your ports are still forwarded to the previous address, all your connections will fail.