Regular disconnect at 3:12-ish ET on Sundays

jbmonroe

I've been running traces for two weeks now, because I get a very regular disconnect at about 3:12 PM ET US on Sundays. I ran the traces at the behest of Cryptic support (who blamed a Return Time Out on my ISP, but I went back and said no, I don't think so--this isn't my first rodeo), and I've been running them each time there was a slowdown or disconnect. (Before I go any further, I'll say that my routing goes through CogentCo in Boston--and we know about some of the issues there.)

The IP address is 208.95.185.41. What's interesting is that the same address reports two different server names patchserver2.crypticstudios.com (the DNS resolution) and patchserverrebirth.crypticstudios.com (not the DNS resolution--there's no such DNS reference). That makes me think that what I'm seeing at 208.95.185.41 is a load balancer [or other virtual IP handler] that might be having an issue with sticky sessions.

I stay disconnected from the game even when I don't see RTOs in the tracert, so I'm pretty sure the problem is inside the Cryptic network--I recall seeing something on Facebook about "we're looking at issues with the Boston servers" but I've never seen any official statements here or in the patch notes.

Does anyone else with professional computer and network experience think my hypothesis is off-base?

forcemajeure

I can't recall enough Sundays playing at this time to tell if this is a 'regular' problem. There was a lag-out/disconnect/Can't connect to gameserver issue about from about 1 hour before this post to 1/2 hour ago (5pm-5:30pm EST).

I ran a Pingplotter trace to patchserver.crypticstudios.com. All the hops were fine with sub-50ms ping times, until the final 3:

te0-0-0-0.rcr11.b002133-1.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.46.130]

[38.111.40.114]

xboxpatchserver.crypticstudios.com [208.95.185.41]

Those 3 hops had near-100% packet loss on and off over a 15-minute period that I ran the trace. This is fairly consistent with various tracert's etc that I have run in the past... when the STO lag turns into server disconnects, the path is fine until one of the various bos01.atlas.cogentco connections, then it dies.

Not sure how that applies to your hypothesis vs. the other common one (Comcast is throttling STO connection), or the other other common one (Cogentco sucks), but that's my input.