SotA causing complete PC freeze/lockup

Issue still persisting (first noticed two releases ago)
Play for a while, game freezes up and takes entire computer with it - have to hard reset.

This started to happen around the same time that the memory usage for the game started consuming 7-10gb (instead of the 2-3gb it used on average for the first two years I played, around R63 QA.)

It does not happen all the time, or consistently enough to diagnose something specific within the game causing it. I crashed at the guild meeting. I crashed moving a rug in my house with nobody else in the scene. I crashed walking across Desolis. It seems most of my crashes have been in towns, and going out and 'fighting stuff' for hours can be completely okay.

Its frustrating because Shroud is the only application that causes this behavior, other games do not cause it nor other intensive activities like video editing etc. Only Sota. Nothing has changed on my end hardware or software wise, and I've tried reinstalling, tried different launchers, etc. This still happens.

Is anyone else having a similar issue? I'm dubious about there being a system issue on my end since the only thing that I'm having a problem with, is Sota, and I would imagine that I'd see symptoms elsewhere if I had some sort of significant hardware issue.

 

I've had weird behavior over time with overclocked cpu/memory and overheated video cards. They worked fine for years but then started having issues.

Can you run memtest86 for an entire day without issues?

Also, if you're on Windows, the windows event viewer can sometimes clue you in on what's going on. This led me to finding out my video card was overheating.

 

i started having problems on linux with patch 900 (somewhat early in r62). @Raven Swiftbow started having problems on windows a few releases ago, too. these may or may not be related to eachother or to yours.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/known-hung-graphics-driver.153235/
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/black-screen-issues.155230/

 

Out of interest, I'm not getting a blue screen, or black screen, or anything else.
The game simply freezes (looks like a screenshot) and I can't tab out of the game and everything on my second monitor freezes and I have no cursor.
The only way to recover from this state is via power button.

Ive spoken to another player experiencing the same issue except in his case after a couple of minutes, the game will crash but his system will recover.
Its been suggested to me that this has something to do with garbage collection post-crash; historic behavior game would crash for me, and after a few seconds, I could relaunch it - but that was before the game decided it needed to use 3x the memory a few patches ago. So it may very well be that this is just the same "sota has reached critical mass" crash I've experienced all along, except now instead of just the game closing, its dumping too much data and freezing up the system. This of course is idle speculation.

At this point I don't know what if anything *I* can do on my end, I'm hesitant to start spending a bunch of money buying and swapping out hardware "just in case" it might fix the problem, when I'm not having any problems whatsoever with any other application apart from this game. It seems easier to just not play until it gets rectified but its been a few releases now so I'd like to help provide information if possible toward a fix.