The Little Blog of Games

Wow, has it been two weeks since my last post already? Time seems to fly when you have a lot to do. I have been playing Eve some, but I’ve also spent a lot of time working on my pet game project, Heavens Reach.

The week after my encounter with a low sec pirate went without much action. I got so excited that I grabbed my Rifter and went on a prowl for few days. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything to engage during the two or three days out. Low sec solo PVP is truly dead.

Last week I got back into exploring again and run a few Sansha Ports when nothing good turned up. On the weekend I finally found a Sansha Gas Processing Site which was at least interesting to run.

My nefarious stealth bomber plans are also starting to come to fruition and I went on a shopping spree last night blowing some 50 million isk on ships and equipment.

I will also give a short update the game project so stay tuned if you’re interested in that.

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Well, last night things got just as exciting as I’ve been fearing. I was running a radar in the low sec system I’ve been scanning the past few days when the neighborhood friendly pirate decided to drop in for tea. Nothing is quite as refreshing as a red recon appearing on your overview just when you’d least like it. Results were surprising to say the least.

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This blog has been rather quiet for the past month or so. I’ve been tied up in other interests like the game project Heavens Reach, of which I talked about in an earlier post. For the past two or three weeks I’ve been trying to get Eve back on track, but I’ve had a dry season when it comes to interesting things in game. I’ve been out scanning most every night but my neighborhood has been really dead.

I’ve run a few high sec radars and mags, but those don’t do much for me nowadays. I did get a lucky T2 salvage drop from a mag site but the region has had a dearth of complexes to run. Luckily I finally found a corner of space that seems to hold something for me find a few days ago…

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The forced leave from Eve made me consider my interests and I’ve found my inner game designer once again. With Eve hogging my free time I’ve followed the game industry with a passing interest, but after the Dominion patch came out and I started getting the “socket closed” errors my interest was rekindled. I’ve started spinning game designs in my head again and actually done some work in the area too.

I’ve solved the “socket closed” problem, by the way. It was due to my ISP upgrading my line speed to 8Mbs which simply was too much for the line. Once they lowered the speed back to 2Mbs everything has been smooth as a baby bottom. That doesn’t mean that CCP is free of blame here. I still believe that something changed in the Dominion patch that made the connection protocol more fragile. My kind of line problems now get you disconnected where as before you would only have suffered from a lag spike.

But if you are still suffering from the problem you should look to your end of the connection and see if you can improve your situation by yourself. I can give some advice (although I cannot guarantee how helpful it will be) if you need it. All you need to do is ask.

Also here is a choice pick from the Dominion 1.1 patch notes (due out today):

CCP Tuxford can no longer shut down TQ on a whim.

It’s good to see that improvements are being made. =)

And now for something completely different…

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It has been a while since my last post but this is mostly due to Eve remaining unplayable for me. I’m still getting continuously disconnected and my ingame activities have been pretty much reduced to trading. Trading is still pretty fun, but it is not something to write so much about.

With Eve out of the question I’ve been faced with a perplexing question: what should I do with my free time?

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Well, I was too hasty to call the problem “fixed” with my bandaid streaming app solution. Last night I got a shitload of disconnects with or without Pling Plotter and Spotify running. I’m now leaning towards the issue being a very fragile connection protocol in Eve which results problems when everything is not great with you OS/router/ISP/CCP ISP.

I just found out that my ISP has been “upgrading” my connection from 2Mb to 8Mb in December and this may well have affected my Eve connection. It may just be a coincidence that Dominion came out just when my problems started. I’m still not convinced however. There just seems to be something fishy going on at the CCP end.

Here are some of my observations on the issue:

1. Running a streaming app (most effective seems to be Ping Plotter aimed at the Eve server) seems to alleviate the issue to some degree, although not completely fixing it.
2. Running two clients (playing with an alt on one machine) seems to aggravate the problem, causing very frequent disconnects.
3. The problem becomes evident most often when lots of data needs to be transferred between the client and the server. For example, working the market in station or jumping a gate in space.
4. There seems to be a very bad server enroute to the Eve server just a few hops in front of it. The server is named linx.redbus.telecity.net (or something similar. Can’t remember, but I do have Ping Plotter screens if needed). This server seems to have 70% packet loss (for pings at least).

Number 3 is pretty obvious; if there is a connection problem (like a server dropping too many packets) it will manifest itself when the client needs to sync itself with the server.

Number 1 would suggest that the problem is somewhere along the way to the Eve server. If keeping the connection alive by continuously sending pings upstream helps, it might be that a server on the route is having problems and drops stuff that it deems timed out (or something like that, I am not a network specialist).

Number 2 might suggest that the problem is client side. Maybe the client can’t handle the already bad connection when it gets really loaded?

Number 4 actually just gives more credence to my suspicion that the problem lies somewhere close to CCP.

I’m beginning to suspect that the problem is a conjunction of several issues. Firstly I think the connectivity in Eve is fragile and can’t really handle any problems with the connection. Some people have reported that raising the timeout values on TCP and UDP requests helps with the problem. To me this sounds like the client/server is making too quick assumptions on a lost connection due to packet loss (or whatever).

Then there is the bad server sitting right in front of CCP’s server. This might actually be the cause of the problem. With a sensitive connection handler the packet loss from the bad upstream server could result in dropped connections.

I think maybe my ISP reworking my Internet connection may have resulted in my connection getting rerouted through the bad server and thus ushering me to the unhappy church of the “Socket Closed”.

I really don’t know what I can do about this. Probably not much as it is clearly a server very close to CCP. The only thing I know is that if I don’t find some kind of solution soon I won’t be continuing my subscriptions as the game is really unplayable with the continuous disconnects. =(

I’ve had some serious problems with Eve ever since the Dominion came out. The game has kept on continuously disconnecting me with random intervals. I know that sounds funny, but the problem is very peculiar.

I have played a lot with my trading alt and for her life has been very difficult the past weeks. With her I usually log on for maybe half an hour to an hour at a time to check my orders and maybe haul a quick run between my two hubs. And between 5 to 10 minutes of logging in the client would sort of freeze (everything keeps on working client side, but the client gets no response from the server) before giving the “socket closed” error and rebooting.

This of course made playing totally impossible. I would have to relog for maybe 3 or 4 times just to go through my orders. But when I decided to try some exploration with my main, everything seemed to work fine. No disconnects whatsoever. I was really perplexed by this until I read a forum post in the socket closed  issue thread that got me thinking.

I had already gotten ready for submitting a bug report about the whole thing, getting Ping Plotter running and having the logserver log everything. Only I had not been able to reproduce the error. Every time I had the required software ready for a complete bug report the game would run for more than 15 minutes without a hike and I would get bored of waiting for the bug to manifest itself.

And then someone on the forums said that running a streaming application while playing seemed to fix the problem. I immediately knew that this was true. Running Ping Plotter in the background I couldn’t reproduce the bug and when playing with my main I almost always have Spotify playing in the background. No problems.

I can’t say for 100% certainty that this is a fix for the issue (and I sure can’t say what the problem is if this can be the cure), but so far I’ve only had “socket closed” disconnects when I’ve deliberately played the game without a streaming app running. I know, it is weird.

TL;DR

If you are experiencing the “socket closed” error try running a streaming app (net radio, pinger etc.) while playing and see if that helps you. If you can fix the problem this way, please let me know. I think we may have to inform CCP somehow if this is truly the case.

Getting the “SOCKET CLOSED” error? Run a streaming app in the background.

It’s again been a while since my last post, but this time it is not so much real life that’s intruding as I have spent a lot of time working on Eve. Sort of.

I’ve been improving my market search tool and I must say I’m now very happy with the results. In-game time has mostly consisted of running my traders through the hoops to get the maximum profit from the advances in my market analysis.

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Dominion came then. Things looked nice last night as I logged in to take a peek, but I guess the true changes will only begin to manifest themselves in the weeks to come.

The new sovereignty mechanics are the most prominently paraded changes in this patch but it will take a month or two before the borders start to move in New Eden. The UI got some love and of course there are the new planet and moon graphics to be praised or criticized. Some ships got hit by the nerf bat (forum crying ensues) while others got buffed (“but not enough”, says Joe Podpilot so more crying ensues).

However, the probably most profound change to New Eden has mostly been ignored except by the chosen few whose interests lie more in the lieu of spreadsheets. The uproar from the Market Discussion forum is already spilling to the other areas but I suspect most still don’t quite grasp what is going on. The threads asking “WTF is going on with T2 production?” seem to be popping up all over the MD and Science and Industry forums.

So let me introduce you to our new friend the Technetium.

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Another quiet week has passed and again I must apologize for the lack of posting. It seems to be difficult to muster the energy for writing a serious post when even game time seems strained. It must be this incessant darkness that dominates this part of the globe during winter months. Since returning from California’s abundant sunshine I have seen the sun peek through the clouds for a few hours on maybe three or four days. And that is three weeks I’m talking about.

Clearly something must be done to remedy the situation. I think some bright flashes from exploding ships might just do the trick…

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