Reoccuring connection problems for Americans

[mr_blastman]

Last night was a very bad night for many American players. We were unable to join lobbies most of the evening and when we could we were often disconnected from those lobbies after several seconds to several minutes. This was not an issue several months ago nor even a year ago.

Something has changed.

I know FAF has switched hosting servers but I am not sure where the issue lies. I suspect that European ISPs Hetzner and Telia both are having equipment issues with their routers and are dropping traffic from the USA that has to route through them to reach the FAF server.

It would be nice if FAF admin could take this issue seriously and look into the problem. I am not alone and saw many other American players complaining of the same issue last night.

We appreciate all the work you do for us. Thanks.

[Geosearchef]

I did see those complaints in chat as well. You said last night, does that occur frequently?

There sadly isn"t a lot we can do, the FAF server seems to be fine and we're both located in Europe, so we do not have a way of testing.

You said you were disconnected from the game. Do you know due to what? Did you loose connection to the FAF server when you were disconnected? That would mean the server noticed you loosing connection and told everbody to disconnect from you.

[mr_blastman]

I was never disconnected from a live game once it had begun, but there was frequent pausing and lag.

I suspect the problem lies with Hetzner and Telia routers that are between the faf server and America. My ISP was routing through Telia which was having huge problems in January but then they started routing around them and through Hetzner. Now Hetzner is dropping packets. I emailed them last night and they refused to believe they were the issue because by the time they investigated the problem had resolved. I sent them traceroute evidence that their routers were suspect.

If anyone else has issues, please run a traceroute to the faf servers in the dos box cmd prompt. How?

Start -> type in "cmd" then press enter.
A black box comes up.
Type into box: "tracert www.faforever.com" and hit enter
Copy/paste contents or screenshot, then email results to:

[email protected]

Put in your subject: "severe routing issue through your network" or something similar, especially if you notice something like below:

"8 107 ms 100 ms 100 ms ae0-3356.lon10.core-backbone.com [212.113.8.42]
9 121 ms 128 ms 123 ms ae10-2021.fra20.core-backbone.com [80.255.14.6]
10 151 ms * 159 ms core-backbone.hetzner.com [80.255.15.122]
11 192 ms 158 ms 156 ms core21.fsn1.hetzner.com [213.239.224.241]
12 149 ms * 150 ms ex9k1.dc1.fsn1.hetzner.com [213.239.245.230]
13 * 156 ms 157 ms faforever.com [116.202.155.226]
"

Notice the asterisks appearing on hop 10 and 12 which are potentially indicative of packet loss on the hetzner equipment. There's more to reading a tracert, but if you see this, email them please. The more of us who complain might prompt them to fix their stuff.

[Geosearchef]

You having problems is in game is a symptom of issues with your internet connection/an internet backbone.

FA is a peer to peer game. There is no server. Traffic is sent between you and your peers, so unless your traffic is proxied, it never passes the FAF server

[mr_blastman]

Problems again tonight.

Geo, I think you misunderstand. The issue is not in the game, the issue is being able to join lobbies and stay in them before the game launches. That is dependent on the FAF server, as I understand. If we can't connect to aeolus and the faf game browser, we can't join games.

And that I can't do and I'm sure many others can't as well, right now.

[RedX]

Even the lobby is peer to peer. I'm American and I had no issues tonight. Start up a running ping to the FAF server and to, say, Google. Post the results here after you get d/ced.

[Geosearchef]

I saw some more complaints in discord tonight.

I talked about p2p due to you mentioning in game lag and stuttering.
About joining, yes, the lobby is peer to peer but if you disconnect from the server the server will tell all other ice adapters in the game to disconnect from you.

[mr_blastman]

Faf is hosed again tonight for many Americans. Once again, german ISP Hetzner is the culprit.

[armacham01]

American here. It was a little slow to show the list of games (it said: "there are no open games" for about 60 seconds) but I'm in now. I had no trouble joining a game. What is the problem?

[Uveso]

I am using Hetzner since Nov.1999 for Teamspeak server and web hosting.
( i am living 448 km apart from hetzner.)

Code: Select all

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  [Uveso router address]
  2     5 ms     5 ms     5 ms  [Uveso IP address]
  3     6 ms     6 ms     5 ms  145.254.4.129
  4    16 ms     6 ms     6 ms  188.111.129.20
  5    10 ms    11 ms    10 ms  145.254.2.179
  6    10 ms    10 ms    10 ms  145.254.2.179
  7    10 ms     9 ms    10 ms  decix2-gw.hetzner.de [80.81.193.164]
  8    14 ms    15 ms    14 ms  core24.fsn1.hetzner.com [213.239.203.150]
  9    14 ms    14 ms    14 ms  ex9k1.dc1.fsn1.hetzner.com [213.239.245.234]
10    14 ms    14 ms    14 ms  116.202.155.226