OK ... This is now a problem

[MarkAusten]

I'm sorry but to people getting these errors it is probably a problem on your side. I have yet to experience an error after the fleet carrier update, and I regularly travel between systems that have the maximum amount of carriers and daily traffic in the tens of thousands.

That doesn't follow. Many commanders have experienced the issue and many have not. Some, like myself, have experienced it a lot in the beginning and not any more. Since I've not changed my system at all, that would indicate that the problem lies outside of my network but there's a whole heap of infrastructure between my network and the FDev servers that could be causing the issue.

My guess is that it's a combination of the server load and connectivity.

 

[MarkAusten]

I wonder if it could also be a form of DDOS problem?

For those systems that are full there must be a fair number of commanders (hundreds? Thousands?) trying to get in, each one repeatedly clicking the mouse on the "set carrier destination" icon.

If the code to process each click is not fast enough then the requests all mount up effective blocking the system.

Fanciful?

Not sure, but I'll bet it doesn't help.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

My guess is that it's a combination of the server load and connectivity

And CMDR activity. CMDRs all doing the same activity are the ones having the same issues. People not trying to sell LTDs (or similar) seem to be fine.

 

[LumberTubs]

The problems I experienced last night (on Xbox) were while shuttling poll data around low traffic systems (god, elections are boring. i should've supported a faction type that triggers wars every time).

 

[Offworld2049]

And CMDR activity. CMDRs all doing the same activity are the ones having the same issues. People not trying to sell LTDs (or similar) seem to be fine.

Trading and mining is a perfectly permissable game mechanic. Right now, some of the software handling that is flawed in some way for a specific portion of the community. Your argument isn't valid, because it can be applied to most errors in the issue tracker. As soon as a cmdr does anything to interact with the game, an error could occur - however slight. If they don't they won't get any errors. But then they're not playing the game, are they?

Right now you can pat yourself on the back as much as you like for opting out of a popular activity and tell us about your trouble free life in Colonia, but it really isn't helpful for the ones affected by the error. That's just guilting players for a specific playstyle when you yourself don't engage in it or agree with it. If your specific game style should happen to encount a game breaking error you wouldn't want to hear that it is your own fault and the way to solve it is to play in another way.

Even if we could take your advice, most of us can't. We simply cannot leave a specific system.

 

[DaveB]

Things like this are always a combination of factors. Unfortunately, as all engineers know, "Tolerances accumulate unidirectionally".

Folks like me who have a fast PC, gigabit fibre and a solid hardwired connection to it are still seeing lag - but it's not enough to cause timeouts and disconnects. I've got a tiny ping to the ED servers, no port-forwarding issues and no packet loss. No lag is being introduced by my network hardware or local configurations - I have enough logging to be certain of that and the expertise and experience to correctly interpret those logs. That leaves infrastructure between us or the ED server environment as the only two sources of the lag that I am seeing. Since I am seeing no detectable problems accessing other services that make use of AWS servers, including a couple that are more bandwidth-heavy than ED, the only place left to be the source of what I'm seeing is the ED server environment.

Now, what I'm seeing is not enough to cause game-breaking problems for me, but I have no other issues to contend with. Another user who may have even a small other issue - that normally wouldn't even be noticeable, let alone game-breaking - might now get pushed over the edge by it and the lag I'm seeing might turn into timeouts and disconnects for them.

It's all too easy to tell folks "the problem is on your end" when that's only one of the causes and it hasn't changed, so why is it causing a problem now?

If changes to the ED server environment makes the game more sensitive to such things, to the point that players are losing connection when they were perfectly fine before, then that is still indicative of a problem ED-side even though a particular user may be able to partially address it (or, more precisely MASK it) by upgrades at their end.

 

[Northpin]

I'm pretty sure it is maxed out

Maxed out is something about 124-127 carriers. At least that was the number of carriers in Diso during beta.
But it may depend on the number of bodies in the system.

In live i stopped counting them - they're just too many

 

[ZAKALWEINC8876]

I'm sorry but to people getting these errors it is probably a problem on your side. I have yet to experience an error after the fleet carrier update, and I regularly travel between systems that have the maximum amount of carriers and daily traffic in the tens of thousands.

The problem is "mainly" on console, in a few cases it is indeed possibly a problem at their end, but i think it is without doubt that too many FCs in a system are to blame.

I winged up with two other CMDRs on PS last night, two of us in Celaeno (no problems, only about 20 FCs ish), one in a totally packed system selling LTDs at a high price.

It took the CMDR trying to sell LTDs over an hour to manage to jump out of the system. Then voila, he had no multi coloured snakes, jumped to Celaeno and we all went hunting
o7

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

Trading and mining is a perfectly permissable game mechanic. Right now, some of the software handling that is flawed in some way for a specific portion of the community. Your argument isn't valid, because it can be applied to most errors in the issue tracker. As soon as a cmdr does anything to interact with the game, an error could occur - however slight. If they don't they won't get any errors. But then they're not playing the game, are they?

Right now you can pat yourself on the back as much as you like for opting out of a popular activity and tell us about your trouble free life in Colonia, but it really isn't helpful for the ones affected by the error. That's just guilting players for a specific playstyle when you yourself don't engage in it or agree with it. If your specific game style should happen to encount a game breaking error you wouldn't want to hear that it is your own fault and the way to solve it is to play in another way.

Even if we could take your advice, most of us can't. We simply cannot leave a specific system.

Yes, I think you have misunderstood the purpose of my post.

I'm in no way patting myself on the back or criticising the way others are playing. I'm not blaming anyone for creating the problem, What I'm trying to do, by process of elimination, is to understand what is happening and why. I used to work on a technical helpline for Sony. We would find the cause of the problem by eliminating issues to finally arrive at a deduction. It wasn't meant as a way to criticise what people were watching on their TV's, it was a way of trying to resolve the issue. I am simply stating 'facts'.

It would appear to me that most people having Adder Errors are:

On X-Bone first, then PS4, then PC.
Are involved in some activity around mining or the selling of goods from that gameplay.
In heavily populated areas where other CMDRS are doing the same thing.

That I don't suffer these issues is not a glib, gleeful, blaming statement, it is an elimination of something that might be causing it. I'm not blaming CMDRs for mining too much, for selling so much, for being in the most populated areas. I'm stating that these seems to be common factors in the creation of Adder errors. I'm not suggesting for a minute that you should have to change your activity to play the game, I'm suggesting that if we look at the situation, the common factors then we might assist FD in resolving them.

Edit:spelling

 

[zimms]

I'm sorry but to people getting these errors it is probably a problem on your side. I have yet to experience an error after the fleet carrier update, and I regularly travel between systems that have the maximum amount of carriers and daily traffic in the tens of thousands.

Lol...

All of a sudden numerous players start experiencing the same errors, regularly. What a coincidence form them to all have messed it up themselves at the same time.

 

[Offworld2049]

Yes, I think you have misunderstood the purpose of my post.

I'm in no way patting myself on the back or criticising the way others are playing. I'm not blaming anyone for creating the problem, What I'm trying to do, by process of elimination, is to understand what is happening and why. I used to work on a technical helpline for Sony. We would find the cause of the problem by eliminating issues to finally arrive at a deduction. It wasn't meant as a way to criticise what people were watching on their TV's, it was a way of trying to resolve the issue. I am simply stating 'facts'.

It would appear to me that most people having Adder Errors are:

On X-Bone first, then PS4, then PC.
Are involved in some activity around mining or the selling of goods from that gameplay.
In heavily populated areas where other CMDRS are doing the same thing.

That I don't suffer these issues is not a glib, gleeful, blaming statement, it is an elimination of something that might be causing it. I'm not blaming CMDRs for mining too much, for selling so much, for being in the most populated areas. I'm stating that these seems to be common factors in the creation of Adder errors. I'm not suggesting for a minute that you should have to change your activity to play the game, I'm suggesting that if we look at the situation, the common factors then we might assist FD in resolving them.

Edit:spelling

Alright. I hear you. Makes sense when you put it this way.

Thank you for clarifying!

I agree that the more specific we can be about what's causing the problem in real factual terms, the sooner we can have this fixed. Irrefutably it seems to be a factor that player congestion (and thus to your point, players performing a certain action) seems to be a factor.

 

[galahad2069]

Right now you can pat yourself on the back as much as you like for opting out of a popular activity and tell us about your trouble free life in Colonia, but it really isn't helpful for the ones affected by the error.

Especially that the "np in Colonia" statement is not even true. We've just returned from a quick engineer-unlocking trip to Colonia, and sometimes I experienced the same problems there. And I'm on a gigabit fibre myself, and despite my pretty high-end(ish) rig I even had strange FPS drops sometimes (all the way down to 70-ish levels from the normal 144+) around Jacques, with only a handful of other CMDR's in the instance.

 

[Offworld2049]

Especially that the "np in Colonia" statement is not even true. We've just returned from a quick engineer-unlocking trip to Colonia, and sometimes I experienced the same problems there. And I'm on a gigabit fibre myself, and despite my pretty high-end(ish) rig I even had strange FPS drops sometimes (all the way down to 70-ish levels from the normal 144+) around Jacques, with only a handful of other CMDR's in the instance.

Hm, was there a recent server update? Like the weekly maintenance that perhaps featured some change that precipitated this. We've always had Mauve Adders, but they were never this lengthy, consistent and debilitating. Interesting to hear that lag and connectivity issues seem to be worse in other places too.

 

[galahad2069]

Hm, was there a recent server update? Like the weekly maintenance that perhaps featured some change that precipitated this. We've always had Mauve Adders, but they were never this lengthy, consistent and debilitating. Interesting to hear that lag and connectivity issues seem to be worse in other places too.

Well it was obviously after the carrier update itself (we would never have made it to Colonia without a carrier), but I'm not sure which one of the subsequent patches did it happen after.

Elite: Dangerous updates are very similar to acute exacerbations of COPD: the netcode gets critically ill after each and every update, and while the subsequent obligatory quick bugfix patches help it recover to a certain extent, it never reaches its former health level. It just gets gradually worse over time.

 

[Offworld2049]

Elite: Dangerous updates are very similar to acute exacerbations of COPD: the netcode gets critically ill after each and every update, and while the subsequent obligatory quick bugfix patches help it recover to a certain extent, it never reaches its former health level. It just gets gradually worse over time.

I was sort of hoping that wasn't the case because if it is it points to far bigger problems with the underlying infrastructure and code base than just some random glitch caused by a temporary traffic surge. Will be interesting to see if the most badly affected players will be able to jump out of the affected systems once the LTD prices drop causing at least a certain dispersal among cmdrs willing to pursue other activities.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

Especially that the "np in Colonia" statement is not even true.

Not true for you, I’m not lying in what I’ve stated, it’s true for me. I have nothing invested in making up stuff. In the circumstances I describe, I have no problems. That is a fact. That you might have problems in similar circumstances doesn’t make my experience wrong.

I note also that I’m in solo, not open.

Are the Adder errors happening across solo and open alike?

 

[MarkAusten]

Whilst the problem does only seem to appear in congested systems, it is by no means the single point of failure since I and other commanders have been jumping in and out of congested systems for days with having the problem.

It seems to be congested system coupled with other, currently undetermined, factors that cause this error to appear. I've suggested a DDOS style problem with commanders hammering the "set carrier destination" icon as a possible contributory factor and I've no doubt that there will be other possible factors as well.

Suffice it to say that there is no one cause for this, just one obvious factor, which is the congestion.

 

[MarkAusten]

Not true for you, I’m not lying in what I’ve stated, it’s true for me. I have nothing invested in making up stuff. In the circumstances I describe, I have no problems. That is a fact. That you might have problems in similar circumstances doesn’t make my experience wrong.

I note also that I’m in solo, not open.

Are the Adder errors happening across solo and open alike?

I've had it in Solo although not recently but I'm in the bubble not Colonia.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

I've had it in Solo although not recently but I'm in the bubble not Colonia.

Ok and was you trying offload a stack of LTDs or similar? Was the system you were in carrier heavy?

 

[MarkAusten]

Ok and was you trying offload a stack of LTDs or similar? Was the system you were in carrier heavy?

The system was packed full of carriers, took about 30 minutes to get a spot, and I had a cargo hold full, but of Tritium not LTDs. Again it has happened to me before with this commodity but not recently.