[PELICAN] disconnects. Your days are numbered !! *includes temp fix*

@Attenwood (don't know how to tag you lord subtleton, hope the quote notified you)

Alright, so I've posted the dreaded [PELICAN] disconnect issues in the various bug forums since persistence and nothing has really been done about it. I play from Australia and as such have accepted that high latency gaming is inevitable when playing on servers located in the US, especially those not hosted around Los Angeles. However this is the only game which has given me so much grief beyond lag. Grief, where my client stops working, and I get booted to the main screen with an error message that I can not even click to close. I have to ctrl+alt+del and then kill the process manually. Frustration!!!

This generally happened when we were playing SPO or Friends Online. The switch to multiplayer mode usually resolved these issues which is very strange because one would assume multiplayer mode would require more network traffic. But @Nataurz & @Peabo did some testing and found out that these [PELICAN] network errors & disconnects only happen when they are the only ones in the zone.

This helps explain why the errors mainly occur in SPO/FO. You are playing solo, so you have to host your own instance. When in multiplayer there is a good chance that when you zone into big cities there may be somebody in there and they are the ones hosting the instance. Further testing showed that when the host of the instance left, the instance would change ownership to the next person and just like clockwork the network congestion icon appears and the [PELICAN] disconnect followed shortly after.

Now, why does this only affect some people? I don't quite know the technical side of things, but I've understood that my own internet connection has a maximum of 100k/b upstream, however if I exceed about 50k/b, my downstream suffers. A buddy of mine said that it has to do with sending/receiving packets to acknowledge data has been sent *shrug*. Here is a post I found which further explains what I am talking about

Now that I know that I am being forced to host an instance, I ran some network monitoring tools to see how much data the SOTA client was sending when these PELICAN issues occured. Yep! My connection was being maxxed out at 100k/s+ which was then causing my network to choke. I installed a network limiter and made a rule for the SOTA client to restrict its upstream to 50k/s.

I've tested central brittany and surrounds about 5 times, and owlshead once. So far, ZERO pelicans!!!!

Moving forward.... please either limit the speeds at which we send data to the servers, or give us an option to cap our connection if we happen to be on one of these 'asymemetrical links'. I would rather not spend money on software to throttle my connection, but unless this gets patched in quickly, I will probably end up doing just that.


TLDR; If you are experiencing frequent PELICAN disconnects, this can possibly be fixed by limiting the amount of data your client sends out. I've tested this using Net Balancer which includes a 14 day free trial, and limited my SOTA client to transmit at about half of its potential max. (50k of 100k).

 

SotA once took out my cable modem for 20 minutes when i quit the game.

 

Should be an option then because I have 110Mbit/s up and no problem sharing, don't want my friends lagging more than they need to if I have understood how this works that is..

 

I've not been able to get NetBalancer or NetLimiter to do anything to SOTA.
Perhaps they are not compatible with Windows 10 but limiting the upload/download speeds does not affect the amount of data sent or received for me.

FYI

 

That is a great point. The problem around this game is that we are the ones hosting the instances rather than the servers at Portalarium. So if we capped our upload speeds like I have suggested, then if we are hosting an instance for others (group leader) then the lag will probably follow for everyone.

I am on Windows 10, 64bit. I'm using Netbalancer.

1. Double Click the icon in the system tray to load the main window
2. Right click on 'Shroud of the Avatar.exe' -> Create Rule
   
3. The only option I changed was 'Upload Priority'. Change that to 'Limited', and then you can set your limit in KB/s. As I suggested earlier, half of your maximum upload speed should be a good start. I first found out about this value while torrenting and noticed that when I uncapped my upload speed and shared as much as possible, my downloads would suffer immensely.

This should be enough, but if it still isn't working then it could be possible that you have used this program in the past (on your particular machine) ? If so then the trial will not allow you to create any rules and only work in a monitoring capacity.

 

I did it exactly like that.

I also experimented with other settings such as unlimited download and low upload settings and also ALL network traffic upload limited to 50kb with unlimited download.

I've attached one of my screenshots to the developer support.

P.S. they don't know why it is not working either.
Also NetLimiter had the same results as NetBalancer... no effect.

 

Initially did you only select the limiting option?
Also under edit > rules. The 'enabled' box is checked right???

I don't have much experience with this program, all I can think of is that a priority setting is overriding one rule for another. Otherwise it could be something to do with your network adapters, do you have multiple devices?

 

Wonder if QoS is another solution.

 

@Lesni

I notice in your images that you are trying to limit the "launcher", instead of the game itself. By default, the launcher runs in the background, acting as a torrent seeder for the current game files. If you go into the options of the launcher, you can un-check "Help Upload Game Data via P2P" and check-mark the "Close Launcher on Play" option to eliminate any network impact of running a torrent client while playing the game.

Your images also show down and up rates which are way way below 50 KBs.

 

Yes I am aware I have it also checked.
I did that to see if it could be limited also.
It had no effect on that either.
I"ve tried many different methods, none of them work to limit the data going out.

I already had the P2P sharing turned off.

Thanks