SPECIFIC players disconnecting & reconnecting multiple times going back over 1 year

[DMdomination]

Alright, fair warning this is going to be a long post. I intend to attempt to detail all the information I have and explain all the troubleshooting that has been done already so as not to waste the time of people kind enough to try to help me.

I run two games, every week and have for about 2 years. In each game I have 5 players and in each game I have 1 player who has disconnects and usually reconnects two to five times during each game and usually 1 full disconnect. A few pieces of information:

1) It is always the same player
2) It happens when idle (taking a break), loading images, during combat (on their turn & other turns)........IE it happens during all sorts of activities
3) It still happens even when there are fewer than 5 players

I have been attempting to detect the source of the problem by troubleshooting. I have taken the following steps to try to narrow down the source of the problem and gathered the following information:

1) The players are not doing anything else like watching videos, playing other games, etc that would overload their computer.
2) The players have their DoS Flood Protection turned off
3) The players have all parental controls shut off
4) The players have their firewall off or exempting FG
5) Each player has independently connected to my server and left for work to allow a "single player, idle test" and were disconnected after approximately 30-60 minutes.
6) Players have checked the power settings and indicate their power settings are to never have the computer go idle/sleep/shut off.
7) Players have no other issues with other programs.
8) FG was run in administrator mode

This is the extent of the information i've gathered while troubleshooting. Sadly i'm at a dead end and I am unsure how else to even proceed to troubleshoot. The single thing i've noticed with one player that i'm sure if it's related is this:

1) The player and I are friends on battle.net and while he is away at work I notice i will get messages saying "Name is online" then he will go idle again then "name is online" it always reads that he is in the battle.net launcher but he is apparently going active/inactive somehow. As I said this may be related or unrelated but this is the only clue I have.

ANY help you can provide will be greatly appreciate. I will try to respond to any/all questions asap but I am in the midst of my work week so the responses make take a bit of time. Thank you in advance for all the help

[Speculi]

Maybe another thing to check could be, what kind of network connection is this player using to connect to their router? Wifi, LAN, D-LAN... if it isn't already the case, I would ask them to try to use a normal LAN cable connection. Also let them check all connectors, maybe one isn't properly plugged in?
Are you using any voice communication tool? Are they dropping out there as well?

Not sure how battle.net decides when someone is idle. But if they don't use battle.net or the computer for some minutes it might switch to idle, so that would be normal. It would be more suspicious if they went offline and online in battle.net now and then.

[JohnD]

That person's internet connection isn't stable.

[notrealdan]

Maybe have them ping your external IP address while playing (or 8.8.8.8 if your IP doesn’t respond to pings) and see if there’s some packet loss at the same time they drop off FG. On windows, they would do something like this in a command prompt:
ping -t 8.8.8.8
Replace 8.8.8.8 with your external IP.

[DMdomination]

He's hard wired in. We are using discord and there is no disruption in the voice com just FG.

[DMdomination]

Maybe have them ping your external IP address while playing (or 8.8.8.8 if your IP doesn’t respond to pings) and see if there’s some packet loss at the same time they drop off FG. On windows, they would do something like this in a command prompt:
ping -t 8.8.8.8
Replace 8.8.8.8 with your external IP.

https://imgur.com/vwaKcET

[LordEntrails]

Their is a function in Windows that idles network connection under certain conditions. It actually disables the network card. I've had to deal with this with FlexNet/FlexLm licensing software that attached to a MAC address of a specific network card.

We used to run a small executable that I think edited the registry settings. I don't see that mentioned here (and can't remember its name). But try one of the settings from the searhc results on this page; https://www.google.com/search?q=network+adapter+power+off&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS784US785&oq=network+adapter+power+off&aqs=chrome..69i57.4337j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

[DMdomination]

Their is a function in Windows that idles network connection under certain conditions. It actually disables the network card. I've had to deal with this with FlexNet/FlexLm licensing software that attached to a MAC address of a specific network card.

We used to run a small executable that I think edited the registry settings. I don't see that mentioned here (and can't remember its name). But try one of the settings from the searhc results on this page; https://www.google.com/search?q=network+adapter+power+off&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS784US785&oq=network+adapter+power+off&aqs=chrome..69i57.4337j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

So we made those changes last night and a typical game has 2 full disconnections and during our "solo player testing" we got disconnects about once an hour. We tested last night and got a few reconnections but no disconnections over the court of roughly 9 hours.

https://imgur.com/s8piSIl

I'm still concerned about the reconnections but it's definitely progress. Thank you Lord Entrails.

[Trenloe]

So we made those changes last night and a typical game has 2 full disconnections and during our "solo player testing" we got disconnects about once an hour. We tested last night and got a few reconnections but no disconnections over the court of roughly 9 hours.

https://imgur.com/s8piSIl

I'm still concerned about the reconnections but it's definitely progress. Thank you Lord Entrails.
When a FG client (player) loses connection to FG server (GM) it has a period (around 1 minute) where it tries to reconnect up to 5 times - if it can't reconnect then the FG client will exit back to the launch screen.

In this instance, the player is still getting a disconnect from the GM, but manages to reconnect in time. Is it progress, or was it just a better quality connection/environment at that time than normal? I suppose we don't really know, but the player is still disconnecting.

I would suggest that the player run the following command from a Windows Command Prompt: ping -t ww.xx.yy.zz where ww.xx.yy.zz is the external IP address of the GM FG server. The "-t" argument means the command will keep going forever - assuming the command shows a reply (and doesn't time out immediately) get the player to leave this running while you're playing - this will have two effects: 1) If the player disconnects and you don't see if the "ping" requests are timing out, then it's not an issue with the network connection itself - something else is causing FG to think it's losing the connection. 2) If the issue is with the connection itself dropping because of lack of activity, this might keep it up longer.

If the ping to the GMs external connection immediately shows "Request timed out." then it's not possible to ping your external IP address (some ISP might block this). In which case ask the player to use ping -t 8.8.8.8 - this IP address is a Google public DNS server, so is essentially checking the player's Internet connection and might keep their own Internet connection open, and might also give an idea if/when they have FG connection issues whether it is just to the GMs FG server or if it is to the Internet in general.

[LordEntrails]

Yea, if its still happening, its probably connection quality. For any one using wifi connection, have them download a "wifi analyzer" app to their phone and run it. Their are several apps with the same/similar name, but they all work fairly equally. They can then look at their network environment, and what it shows is that their wifi network will be on a various channel (4, 5, 6, 25, 52, 128, etc) and it will show what channel all their neighbors are on too. They can then go into their router and change the channel their network is on, they will get a better network connection.

[Trenloe]

5) Each player has independently connected to my server and left for work to allow a "single player, idle test" and were disconnected after approximately 30-60 minutes.
Following up on this. Reading this again, this suggests that all of the players would experience disconnections when doing a single player, idle test - so it’s not the same specific player experiencing the issue? Can you confirm?