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Server Problems
startrek414347
Member Posts: 60 Arc User
"Connection to the server timed out. Please try again later."
The server must remain connected at all times; or we can't complete any story episodes, Daily Patrols, Daily Progress events, or so on without errors or having to log back in.
For example, I was viewing a "Scorpion's Lair" cutscene which follows our battle against the Borg Kingdom's leader (the Mirror Universe's own Harry Kim); & the server disconnected during that cutscene. When I logged back in, I couldn't interact with my team & collect from the Borg King the codes my Beta team needed to deactivate the Borg Unicomplex's shields.
Why is the server disconnecting time & again, even while any player is active?
The server must remain connected at all times; or we can't complete any story episodes, Daily Patrols, Daily Progress events, or so on without errors or having to log back in.
For example, I was viewing a "Scorpion's Lair" cutscene which follows our battle against the Borg Kingdom's leader (the Mirror Universe's own Harry Kim); & the server disconnected during that cutscene. When I logged back in, I couldn't interact with my team & collect from the Borg King the codes my Beta team needed to deactivate the Borg Unicomplex's shields.
Why is the server disconnecting time & again, even while any player is active?
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Comments
Second, the problem may not be on Cryptic's end. It could be on the user's end, it could be the ISP, it could be any number of nodes you're passing through to connect to the STO servers. Its not like you are direct hardwired into the server like a LAN connection.
It can get annoying, but the fact of the matter is there may very well be nothing wrong with the game itself, but something between you and the Server which Cryptic has no control over whatsoever.
I don't understand why the problem persists even as we speak. I thought shutting my computer down, restarting it, &/or resetting our router would fix it; but the problem refuses to end one iota. It seems we're connected to the Internet just fine, but the server is disconnecting & thus interrupting my missions on the program for no reason at all.
like rattler said it could one of countless things between you and servers, it's not a direct line connection and MMOs (which STO is) are one of the most connection intensive things there is. I've had pretty much 0 connection issues, that suggests it's not on Cryptic's end (server malfunctions are not selective on which players they happen), that said it doesn't mean it's in your end either it could be anywhere between Cryptic's servers and your location.
Think of the Internet as city streets. Say... New York or Seattle for example. Your house is your Computer. Your destination is the STO servers. The streets between you and your destination is the internet. Driving from your house to your destination can have varying travel times because of things outside your control, like stop lights, traffic, and emergency responder activity. If there's an accident at the intersection of... say 56th and Pacific Ave, that's not on you or your destination. Its on the way if that intersection is on your path. Or if you happen to hit every red light along the way. Its not your fault or your destination's fault.
Star, as an example there was an incident about a year or two ago when we all hit massive lag - rubberbanding, slow framerates, random disconnects, the whole thing. Turned out that the ISP that serves Cryptic's server farm in MA had set up protective software that mistook typical MMO traffic for a DDoS attack, and slowed all packets so that if it were an attack a human could deal with it. Tolerable for, say, a one-way data transfer or emails, but MMOs can't work that way. Took a long time for them to get that straightened out, because it wasn't us, and it wasn't Cryptic, it was the last node upstream of Cryptic that was the problem.
Sometimes you have to reroute traffic.
Point is, rerouting can also make the signal take longer, especially if other nodes also have that anti-DDoS software that thinks you're a bot attack. And when it was Cryptic's own ISP, there was no alternate routing.
Not had issues here in where I am in the UK, since last Thursday. Everything has been tickety-boo.
Although I don't think the past few days problems are to do with routing or traffic getting to Cryptic. The log in problems last night (now cleared up) and rubber banding (Intermittent) seem to be more directly from Cryptics servers this time around rather then traffic traveling to and from Cryptic.
The login problems, of course, are with the login server, which has needed younger hamsters for a while now.
Not sure where you head they uninstalled the software. Everything I have seen says they didn't uninstall but rather rerouted. Not that it really mattes. What matters is it was fixed for players.
Then why wasn't it fixed for me?
In my experience this will precede, "Connection to the server timed out. Please try again later," unless it's in the middle of a loading screen..
The game is clearly designed to tell us when the server is not responding just not why the server is not responding via an error code. For some reason. Perhaps the software isn't designed to do so.
But if that's the case, do the people responsible for maintaining the server disassemble and check everything soldered and every connection until they happen upon the failure? I think not.
The players not getting an error code of some kind when this occurs is probably an oversight. It's too bad, too, because 4000 eyes on the lookout for "Intermittent Condition X" is far better than 4 (these numbers are for example purposes only).
Make no mistake it is an intermittent condition. It just seems to happen often enough to be of interest.
The thing about an intermittent condition, in nearly all fields of endeavor, is that it will hide when someone goes looking for it until its cause is completely broken.
It sucks, but that's the reality of the situation.
In fact, it is. Entirely.
It is, however, their money to waste or invest as they see fit. Nothing you, I, or anyone else says will change their minds.
Well if the physical servers are what's at fault then yes it is Cryptic's fault, it's their hardware, but if it's one the billions of things between servers and your PC, then no as they could be literally nothing Cryptic could do about it.
This point has already been made and I was responding to a statement regarding "poopy" servers presumably owned by Cryptic.
It's gratifying to know that we are in agreement on this issue.
It's not a straight path from my computer to the servers like I have my own personal line (don't we all wish we could) but a series of nodes and jumps to get there. Like snail mail now, when I want to log into the server farm Cryptic uses, I send a request which goes from my rig to a data center close by which gets read and then passed to another data center closer to the servers, Data Center 1 sends my request to Data Center 2, then Center 3 to 4, and down the line until I make it to the servers. Then the server sends responses back along the same route just like snail mail does, save this is digital and occurring at lightspeed.
Next, the internet is still largely wired meaning most signals are still carried largely by physical cable. There is very little wireless stuff with the internet at the moment. There is going to be on average hundreds, potentially thousands of miles of cable between your rig and the servers along the route it takes. All it takes is one issue at a data center or one bad cable along the route your rig takes to communicate with the servers and it's a bad time had by all. If you suspect this is going on you can try to route your connection a different way if you know how to do that, and it might help and it might not depending on where the issue is. Matter of fact I remember a user on here several years back talking about having issues only to find out a bunch of squirrels had been chewing on lines several miles up the road from him and one built a nest inside a junction box. With lag alone alot of the times it's not your rig or their servers, but something between. That's not to say that it can't be your rig or their servers, just that by law of probability it's usually something between.
Now far as your rig goes, depending on the specs of your rig, connection you have, router and equipment you're using, it can absolutely be your rig and setup. There are others in this thread that can vouch for me on this because they've seen it too, but there are some people who simply do not have as powerful of a setup as they think they do, and sometimes they're playing on an outdated potato that's lucky to still be functioning. Note that I am NOT saying your rig is a potato, I am simply making the point. If you want to play the game but are using older hardware, you can often reduce lag by turning down the graphics and other heavier settings. I'm running on a i9-10900k and 2080 Super with 32gb of DDR4 RAM and running the game off a Solid State Drive and can easily run STO on max settings. However I usually leave the graphics ticked one notch below max for a little bit of extra performance.
For some easy things you can to reduce the possibility of lag on your end here is some of what I would recommend.
1: Make sure you're using a hardwired ethernet connection where possible. Ethernet is faster than WiFi and can deliver consistent high speeds when wireless may not be able to. Both have their place, but if you want consistency the ethernet is still king.
2: Make sure you don't have your router close to a microwave as sometimes the frequency of the microwave can drown out the router if they're on similar frequencies. This can also effect phones.
3: Make sure your router is sitting up higher off the ground so there are less objects the signal needs to pass through. Much like cell towers are often higher up for better signal distribution, this works with the wireless capabilities of routers as well. You don't need to have it nailed to your ceiling, but I would recommend at least 3-4 feet off the ground.
4: Make sure your more resource intensive processes like STO are running off a SSD or M.2 drive instead of ye old HDD. SSD and M.2 especially are far faster than a HDD will ever be and can read and write much faster.
Lastly, if Cryptic has anything to let folks know, someone will say something. It may be a dev popping on, Kael popping on to say something, they might post something and have one of us relay it here. Point being, when they know what's up and can resolve it, the rest of us will know something too.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
The description the op described has not ever happened to me, in a cut scene, and disconnect in the scene or just after the scene ends, kinda sounds bandwidth to me, maybe there are lots of other devices running off their router while playing.
And? No one is claiming it isn't real. We're trying to say that thing isn't a simple either/or, where the problem is either on Cryptic's servers or your PC but rather it could be in countless things between your PC and the servers.
Whatever the cause may be it is not unreasonable to deduce that the notification system in place is telling someone to start with the server. It doesn't say "CONNECTION ERROR."
Additionally, there is a trend with these concerns going back years in which many players have reported that other internet connected games/applications run smoothly while Star Trek: Online does not. Coincidence? Possibly. Feel free to consult Mr. Garak for his take on coincidences.
I prefer something written by Doyle in the late 19th Century: "...when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." ~The Sign of Four
So we must ask at least two questions:
1. Has the impossible been eliminated?
2. This forum, and others, have seen numerous similar reports from many players across many differing systems and levels of internet connectivity pointing to the behavior of one internet connected game over a span of years. Should we just ignore a clue of that magnitude?
Speaking entirely for myself, I don't think the impossible has been eliminated at this time and I don't subscribe to the idea that the design, construction, and methodology of the internet is working against us, but only when it comes to Star Trek: Online and I don't understand why so many of us want to carry on in the manner of a false dilemma. This is not necessarily an "Either/Or" proposition. Two things can be true at the same time.
Maybe, and this may just be the craziest of notions... Maybe we'd all be in a better position by coordinating our investigative efforts instead of just shutting each other down for whatever reason.
Sorry, I didn't intend for this to turn into one of those self-gratifying TED Talks. I shall proceed to nail my foot to the deck.
I was absolutely being sarcastic lol
I had a hunch, but I didn't want to assume.
To put in other less sarcastic words, the game knows only that it's not getting a response from the server, it won't nor cannot know why that response isn't coming, the whole thing is utterly binary either the server is responding or it's not, the game cannot know why there's no response only that there isn't one.
It's a valid point, and understandable considering the clouds under which Star Trek: Online was initially developed that a full set of back end tools were not included.
You are close on my assumption, though it is not quite a perfect bullseye; I assume that the software would provide more details to a sysadmin account than to a plain customer account.
If it does not then it would seem that the game, the customers, and Cryptic Studios would all benefit from more Cryptic staff playing the public facing version of the game far more regularly, perhaps three or four exclusively, for the purpose of hunting down and communicating this and other concerns to the proper departments. I know that some of them do play the public facing version and good on them for doing so.