Hardware & Technical Sudden & Unexpected Internet loss

How often have you had sudden loss of Internet access in the past week

  • Never

    Votes: 121 66.5%
  • Once

    Votes: 24 13.2%
  • Twice

    Votes: 13 7.1%
  • Three times

    Votes: 13 7.1%
  • My internet drops all the time, it sucks

    Votes: 11 6.0%

  • Total voters
    182
I think the answer lies in your question 'my BT Homehub'

on cable here and hardly ever have any problems
I have BT (cable not available here) and, at the risk of tempting fate, it's fast and reliable.
Best to get an engineer out if the hub light keeps flashing. Could be interference on the line or summit.
 

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Although my internet connection is solid, the speed is awful. Used to have a connection that dropped all the time but the BT engineer came out and we had a loose connection out in the street. He also tried to boost the speed and the result was 1.6 which given I live in the middle of Stirling is awful.
 
No failure in the last 7 days, but a few annoying times last month and year. Unexpected internet loss is something really needed to care about, there are lots of people affected out there. In fact I'm sure there is people who have them, but don't notice it. If you are just looking at some webs and you stop to read something your internet connection could fail and reconnect before clicking another link. This would not be noticeable, but if you are playing a multiplayer game you sure will know about it.
 
Genuine internet loss is rare.

Im sorry mate I have to call balls on this one. Perhaps you are very lucky where you live, but out here in the country side in the UK I live at the very edge of the 7km distance from the exchange, on a good day I can get 1meg, on a bad I wont get a speed higher than 28k.

On a normal day I loose the connection 7-10 times, on a bad day I wont have a connection for a week.

I have had numerous engineers at my home, they have replaced 2kms of cable but to no avail.

This is more common than you think. I know people in London who have similar issues.

So disconnects are a real problem for someone like me, as I might get sync back with in a minute but sometimes it can take an hour.

So you are a lucky person, but please dont make sweeping judgements about how your experience has been.
 
So disconnects are a real problem for someone like me, as I might get sync back with in a minute but sometimes it can take an hour.

Single player mode!? ;) No but seriously, with a connection THAT bad I wouldn't even want to try and play in a multiplayer universe!

I take it you either don't have any 3G service there, or have already tried it as a replacement? I have a friend in the boonies who uses it as it's way more reliable than her broadband.
 
It seems to me to be a question of a) how reliable is your ISP, and then based on the fact that everyone's isp seems to be crap at some time, how dose the system deal with folks who loose connection - for what ever reason.

This is not the first multi player game to have this issue, and they all seem to have figured a way to deal with it. From my days in EQ (oh yeah I was there back at the beginning) if you lost connectivity your char just sat where it was for a bit before fading out. If you were in a fight you died. Oh, and you could not log back in until either a) your char was dead or b) it had timed out properly.

I am sure that something along those lines will be employed. If you 'loose' connectivity during a fight - you are going to be dead. This will be the only way to realistically deal with people who log when loosing a fight. If an AI was to take over - well think of the tech issues of getting an AI who would fight just like you, that you would be pleased at and those you are fighting would be too. Not too probable if you ask me.

If you loose connectivity when you are just flying from a to b, then your ship will simply log itself out after x number of seconds of no connectivity.

Not that I know, but that sounds most probable to me.

DB. No, not that DB, this DB. :D
 
Genuine internet loss is rare.

Real life getting in the way is common. If the doorbell rings (or the phone, or a child cries or, or, or the list is endless), I do not want to turn around and find the character I have been building for months has had his ship blown to smithereens by some pirate who was not even on the scanner, and I loose a pile of value in fees of various types. Elite by its very nature is a game where checkpoint cannot sensibly happen all the time: if you only checkpoint when you dock, you may have 30 minutes or an hour to worry about. How many of us will ever feel comfortable that we will be able to sit there for 30 minutes without an interruption of any type?

But we need to make sure that any system designed to minimise problems when real life gets in the way. So, in particular, we cannot llow a pretend doorbell ring to stop you being frazzled by the bunch of pirates bearing down on you. I believe we need some sort of system where you can effectively do a pause (how we articulate this in game terms - a jump into hyperspace, a cloaking device, or whatever, hardly matters now), but where you must spend some time setting the pause up. So a period of time when the ship is under some sort of unsophisticated AI control, where those pirates bearing down on you have plenty of time to finish you off, but if you go into pause with a clear scanner, you expect to get there. Then, at least, we should be able to support most, but not all, real life interruptions.

Wouldn't a log in/out feature work like this. If you are not flagged in combat you logout, your ship is despawned after 10 seconds.. You come back from feeding the cat and log back in where you previously were. Voila!
 
Never...now I'm on Infinity.

When I was on ADSL (also with BT) my net connection was sometimes fairly unreliable due to the quite old and ill-maintained copper lines going approx. 3km back to the exchange.
 
I would presume this is to try and gauge the amount of accidental disconnects vs deliberately DC'ing to prevent death, in that case i think the important question is not if your connection fails regularly its how quickly do you get it back.

someone Dc'ing deliberately to gain advantage is going to be back right away, while someone cut off by an isp outage will usually be offline for a few hours.

if someone disconnects and is back on right away there should be a penalty in my view, but if you don't get back online for a few hours it should be treated as a genuine disconnect - this will give people with responsibility the ability to drop the game at a seconds notice without worry of loosing out.

saying that set a max monthly cap on disconnects of this type to avoid it being used as an exploit and treat people who disconnect at every sign of combat as cheats who get a penalty for doing so.

I would dispute the assertion that genuine outages always last hours. My connection is usually fairly solid if relatively slow, but every now and then... sometimes I lose connection for a couple of minutes and it spontaneously returns while I'm trying to troubleshoot the problem or a quick reset of the router will fix it, other times it is down for hours. Why should someone be penalised if they get back to the game swiftly after resolving whatever issue, but not get penalised if their problem rakes longer to resolve. Surely the cheating player that disconnects to avoid combat would just wait the requisite amount of time to avoid the penalty.

Having said that, anyone that does disconnect at the slightest whiff of combat is going to find it very hard to make much progress.

The only fair way is to treat every disconnection as a bit of bad luck. If your ship isn't mass locked, it should just fade out after a sort period and maybe you return to the same point or where you last jumped to, if you are mass locked the countdown to fade out doesn't start until you leave mass lock, if someone decides to attack you in that time you will probably get killed. If the 'death penalties' aren't too extreme, it will be annoying but won't ruin your entire game.
 
I agree I like the after 60 seconds fade out rule. Although my broadband is shocking I've played many MMOs over the years achieved highest levels many times on many games, raided etc. I never play pvp as then when I disconnect there isn't much of a problem I just fade out.

Could be a socket in a raid though. But my disconnects happen during the winter when its raining mostly. Once it's good and dry we are good for a while. The reconnect then is a fee seconds normally.
 
The question is a bit confusing there :p
I've had no issues for the last 6 months, before that I had 3 weeks of it re-syncing every day for no reason :mad:
 
I hardly have any dropouts, but I do have them... guess everyone does once in a while for different reasons. I still voted NEVER

I think Elite Dangerous, like many other games will only realize after a couple of seconds that there is something "wrong" (connection timeout between host and client).
I wrote in that other thread - the players ship should just jump into it's own hyperspace pocket upon connection loss. Trying to log out in deep space will just spin up the emergency jump (Instant with no masslock)

More details here: http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showpost.php?p=69590&postcount=25
 
If you are in a middle of a fight and your internet drops, or you drop it, or you go off to answer the door, then you must be left vulnerable.

It's tough. But that's the only workable way. Otherwise as soon as you start losing a fight you pull the plug and that's cheating.
 
One aspect i've started to notice these last few years when looking around at the various Internet Provider options, is that is becoming harder to find 'unlimited' bandwidth use deals.

The UK has been very good for this in the past, but i know in the usa this can be a real issue, and it's started to creep into the basic deals here also, so having unlimited internet is slowly becoming a 'premium' option and will have an effect on games that require online as part of the focus.

It's also something game devs will have very little control over, and if the IP business goes the way of many other industries (energy companies etc), we will see much less service for our money and will be expected to pay constantly more for good access. Capitalism at it's best ;)
 
One aspect i've started to notice these last few years when looking around at the various Internet Provider options, is that is becoming harder to find 'unlimited' bandwidth use deals.

The UK has been very good for this in the past, but i know in the usa this can be a real issue, and it's started to creep into the basic deals here also, so having unlimited internet is slowly becoming a 'premium' option and will have an effect on games that require online as part of the focus.

You need to hop over the pond! Here they sell it by speed not volume. I have 50 Meg up, 25 Meg down fiber in my house! :D

Fios rocks!

DB
 
60 Meg here in the UK with no download limit (good job with 3 kids ) Works well except that the cable from the box to the house failed a year or so ago. They patched me in to next door otherwise I would have been down for weeks. Very rarely have an outtage.
Always been grateful I used to have to do cabling, because the quality of engineers has been very variable. One of them connected my feed from the road to the box on the house wall to my next door neighbour's cable rather than mine. Fortunately I was watching and put him straight, but since I live in a detached house it didn't build confidence. Another asked me if I knew which box on the main road I was linked into??? Have to say though the last engineer I saw when things still were not working properly, listened to the symptoms, disappeared for 10 minutes, came back and everything worked perfectly and has done since.
 
Internet loss is quite rare here, but it does happen every now and then (once every two to three months or so) - usually at the worst possible moment.

The player just has to manage their life better.
So, are you married and do you have kids who want to sit on your lap and tell you stuff when you are playing (or even control the game a bit every now and then)? Or are you one of those bad fathers who tells the family that you are now going to enter your private lair and your wife better take care of the kids and keep them away from you?

About the doorbell thing: I agree completely. If people haven't told me they might be coming, I will not open the door unnecessarily.
 
So, are you married and do you have kids who want to sit on your lap and tell you stuff when you are playing (or even control the game a bit every now and then)? Or are you one of those bad fathers who tells the family that you are now going to enter your private lair and your wife better take care of the kids and keep them away from you?

About the doorbell thing: I agree completely. If people haven't told me they might be coming, I will not open the door unnecessarily.

Yes. I am married.
Wife suffers depression quite badly.
Is currently 31 weeks pregnant (and that is going badly for her. Bubba is good)
2 year old little man who is a delightful little man, but still needs his cuddles.

As for me leaving the kid to the wife .... it's the other way around. I'm the one up at 6:00am. I'm the one up at 1:00m to tuck him back in.
But IRL problems are not relevant to either the game or this discussion.

Also I live 8 km drive from my ADSL exchange, in rural australia.

Having worked for an ISP back in the days when 56k dial up ruled, what was known then was that almost all problems with connectivity were caused by terrible qaulity end user equipment. I suspect the same problem remains. I don't run a consumer level router, as a router. I have a (must be 7 years old now) netcomm ADSL modem in bridge mode and a thinkpad laptop running (recently upgraded) PFsense as a firewall. It's always working.
 
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