DDO Connection Drops. Advice?

[WizarDru]

Hi, all.

I've been playing DDO for a couple of months now, on and off. It's worked just fine. On Friday, I got a new Alienware Aurora PC. So far, so good. I hooked it up, downloaded the latest DDO client and installed it. I logged in to Khyber, selected my character and all was good.

...at first.

I didn't really spend any time checking anything until trying to play with some friends yesterday. They invited me to a party and we voice-chatted while they were on a mission in Three-Barrel Cove. Since it was on sale, I went into the DDO Store, got points and then bought it. So far, so good.

Then...I suddenly can't see information on items in my inventory. I close the window and attempt to move...and can't. I can look around and the game isn't frozen...but I'm stuck. Then I notice the 'Connection status' icon has gone from Green to Yellow...and then to Red. I can't chat with anyone and can't move. The game is still running, animations playing and so on...but I'm dead in the water. Then, after about 15-30 seconds, the link goes back to Green. Two or three voice-chat messages come through on top of each other, slightly sped-up. I suddenly do about 10 queued-up actions. And then things stay normal for a while.

I head to Three-Barrel Cove...and as soon as I appear in the tavern, I walk over to the spirit-binder. All good. Then I turn to exit the tavern....and it happens again. I exit the game several times and reload...same problem. I can play fine for a while, but periodically I drop to 'red' and then get stuck. I quit out as this makes the game unplayable for me.

I have made no changes to my router...and the game ran fine with my older PC. I have turned off the windows firewall. I notice that the connection status never shows any packet loss, afaict. I haven't done a study if the traffic speed drops dramatically or not, though I'm going to check.

The new PC has the latest drivers for the dual Radeon 5870s I'm using in crossfire mode. I am on Verizon FIOS, using an Actiontec MI424WR router over an ethernet cabled connection. The motherboard, afaik, is Intel-based, not Nforce. I am running Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium.

Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this problem? I'm getting a second PC today, hopefully, and will test it on that one, as well. For comparison testing, a friend also got this exact same PC and isn't seeing this issues at his location. But he's got a different network setup at home.

[WizarDru]

Another data point:

I just tried now and saw the actual numbers on the status icon:


When I start: Latency is 31ms, Loss 0%, Sent 290-520Bps, Recvd is 774-1250 Bps.

When I went Yellow, the numbers were: Latency 30 ms, Lost 0%, Sent 19 Bps, Recvd: 0 Bps.


So it looks like SOMETHING is blocking the traffic or prevent it from being sent....and then about 30 seconds later, it catches up (in this case I watched as I did an Otto's Irresistble Dance in about three seconds and saw about forty 'MISS' text blocks appear as four creatures attacked me in those same three seconds.

[WizarDru]

I have found the problem.

It turns out my Verizon FIOS router, an actiontec MI424WR, was providing the same IP address via DHCP to two systems on my home network. But for some reason not reporting that to either one of them, causing periodic drop-outs. I set my IP address to statically and that appears to have fixed it.