Neocron Sync's and Crashes - A Guide to help reduce them

[Odimara Orca]

@NST can we remove any non constructive posts and moderate this thread as I don't fancy it turning into a slanging match.

@Odimara Orca okay so you an Sysadmin for the VM infrastructure of a hospital with 6000 employees - good for you.

Seeing as you claim to know a thing our two about networking, perhaps you can provide some insight as to why certain ISP's provided hardware cause or contribute to game instability?

I mean it's not that I have gone out of my way and tested three routers, 2 from VM and one purchased at my own cost and proved the units from VM cause sync's and crashes.

I enjoy playing Neocron, Neocron does not like my hardware so I either stop playing, moan about it or do something to try and resolve the problems whilst sharing my findings with the community.

I would never advise a person to change their ISP for a game, but at the end of the day sometimes you get what you pay for, if you are gaming, as William Antrim quite rightly states - you would not skimp on a graphics card so why skimp on a router or ISP?

I can't be bothered doing an analysis when the issues are obviously server side.

My ISP used to be goverment subsedised about 20 years ago then was privatized. As a side effect it's the biggest one in my country with the largest infrastructure.

I'm not from Kongo. The Infrastructure here is pretty good.

And yet NC connection quality is worse then it was whem we had the player spike post-patch.

No changes in my Setup.

It's certainly more likely (like a 1000%) to be something Serverside than my Router.

Just look at how many people have issues.

And the answer is seriously to tell each and every one of them to get a new router or ISP?

If that many people have Issues (which intensified again over the last months) it's so obviously serverside it isn't even funny.

[DIS]

And the answer is seriously to tell each and every one of them to get a new router or ISP?

I didn't suggest that a player should change their ISP or router, however my findings were pretty conclusive, two routers (different models though two from the ISP are same model they have different internals from what I found) provided by my ISP have issues with Neocron, they only have issues with Neocron and no other game that I am aware of. Now my thoughts on this were perhaps the routers were losing UDP packets while connecting to Neocron.

So, with the first router I complained to my ISP, they sent me a replacement unit... a newer version, the first router was internally a Netgear router with the custom firmware the ISP uses, the second had different internals but was the same model number. Knowing from online research a lot of customers have complained about this router dropping packets and getting poor network speeds I was already aware that the router was not the best.

The second replacement made by a different OEM was slightly better, but still suffered from syncs while zoning also if in the zone for over 20 minutes, chat drop outs, random syncs during combat, regular crashing..

So I purchased a new router and tried it. Instantly the above issues were resolved, the syncs stopped.. okay they still happen but are very rare now, general game stability increased.

ISP upgraded my connection to 200Mb around 12 months later and provided a new router, dual band.. all singing and dancing... tested this router with NC, issues less frequent than the original two units but returned, switched back to my own router which I purchased and the problems stopped instantly.

This clearly proves that some routers are causing issues with the game, I am not saying its the fault of the router.. Neocron is an old game and the Internet has changed over the years, the routers are clearly not configured for the type of data neocron requires or they are just plain trash.

A lot of ISP's here in the UK also traffic shape depending on your internet package, that means reduced priority of UDP packets and throttling down speeds... I am certain this all add's to the problem.

I have now explained my findings twice, if you don't want to take the advice Odimara Orca they by all means that is up to you, however if this thread can help just one player improve their connection then it was worth posting.

[William Antrim]

.... however if this thread can help just one player improve their connection then it was worth posting.

o/

That's me then!

[Mozencrath]

Thanks Dis!

Can I add some stuff Ive found?

I am in the US East coast, ping is 130 to 137, QoS will add 10 to 20ms onto your ping so I recommend disabling that if you have high ping and dont have a bottleneck at home with up/download speeds (if you do use all your bandwidth while playing NC I would recommend leaving QoS on for example someone on your router is downloading torrents while you are playing NC)

Also, the biggest thing I have found that cuts down on syncs/crashes is adjusting the MTU size within your router. This is easy to do by simply going to your routers configuration page in your web browser. All routers are set at 1,500 MTU size. I have had excellent results lowering that to 1,200 but I think you can go down even to 1,000 or 900. Before changing MTU size,I was getting stuck at syncs probably 2 or 3 times per day and having to crash the client. After lowering the MTU, that problem dropped to about 2 times per week at most.

[Kragar]

Since the games release 15 years ago I have had Sync issues which happens when I change zone.

During this time have had numerous hardware setups and cannot change router because
it comes with the Cable and have no issues with any other game. Only had ( not recent )
issues when some game been in beta and until they fixed the disconnect issues.

Generally my game doesn't crash and sync issues very seldom happens while in zone.

Currently I desync pretty much every time I change zone except if I have visited the zone
very recently. Popping into a sewer and killing some mobs and returning does not cause
desync but if Im abit longer in the sewer I desync and have to relog in again.

I get the following error message.

Worldclient: Request for new world failed.

My guess is that the client / server communication is too fast and something glitches
the loading of the clients zone info, unless the zone info is very recent.

Really would hope to find a solution for this, any current players have similar disconnects
when zoning?

[Sidhardha]

I remember having sync issues in original Neocron, but pretty much never had them in 2.2-2.3.

The only issue i had not being able to get out of appartment since clicking on elevator button did nothing so had to relog, but no issues with zone changes.