Forums » Bugs

all of a sudden, a lot of captcha, and a lot of crashing

Oct 04, 2018 urshurak link
i'm not saying the two are related, but it is an odd congruence...

1) It would seem that, as of late, i'm getting a lot of captcha requests-- almost every time i log on and, seriously, while i'm flying and fighting bots?!? I understand the need for the verification, but I think "checking to see if i'm present" while i'm trying to fight 6 bots at once is a little disruptive to the gameplay experience. I thought the captcha verification was tied to station camping and stationary spybot ships...no?

2) It would also seem that the game is suddenly crashing....hard...a lot-- the game will freeze and I'll still be able to close the window (not running fullscreen), but the engine sound effect will persist such that i have to log out and/or reboot to make it stop.

I running Ubuntu 16.04.
Oct 04, 2018 Pizzasgood link
Regarding 1), are you leaving the game running for long periods of time while you're not playing? That can trigger the anti-bot measures, and it doesn't necessarily go away when you do resume playing (presumably so that people can't just pop onto their bot account and play for a bit to reset it).

Treat the game like your lights or water faucet -- turn it off when not in use.
Oct 04, 2018 raybondo link
urshurak, is the bug reporter opening when VO crashes? Or does VO only freeze and not crash?
What are your hardware specs and what Vendetta video driver are you using? Like the newer OpenGL 4 with dynamic lights and shadows? And are you using multi-threaded rendering? Find out by viewing your errors.log file and find "Using multithreaded rendering." or "Using single threaded rendering." near the beginning of the file.

When you get a captcha, open a support ticket and report exactly what time and character it happened on and we will investigate.
Oct 04, 2018 urshurak link
Pizza: yes, you might call me, "King of AFK", so, mah bad there :P

no bug reporter, just freezes.

EVGA 750i FTW MB
E8400 Wolfdale OC'd @ 4.02Ghz
8Gb RAM
nVidia GT 730
16.04 LTS

...from errors.log:

[Thu Oct 4 14:18:04 2018] Found driver: "OpenGL 4 GKGL driver". Type 5, Version 142.0. Load @0x024467a0
[Thu Oct 4 14:18:04 2018] Instantiate address: 0x7fa9a429daf0
[Thu Oct 4 14:18:04 2018] Found driver: "OpenGL Reference GKGL driver". Type 5, Version 142.0. Load @0x0244e910
[Thu Oct 4 14:18:04 2018] Instantiate address: 0x7fa9a177e210
Using multithreaded rendering.
Using 4 physics worker threads. and g_do_mp = 1
using other arch.

...

in general, my settings in-game are pretty low for better performance, so, no background, no space junk, bilinear mapping, etc., and in a 1280x960 window.
Oct 05, 2018 Whistler link
Oct 05, 2018 urshurak link
Whistler, yes, i am aware, as represented by the statement in the original post, "I understand the need for the verification".

I was mainly bringing it up because, although i have fielded a few random captcha requests in the past, they were infrequent and always while i was in-station and had been sitting for a while. This was not only the first time that i had to do one right after logging in (which seems redundant), but then had one pop up within the next 30 min while i was flying and fighting bots after only being in the sector for 10-15min. it was not long after that that the game locked up and i was forced to reboot, yet, after restarting my machine and logging back in, i experienced a similar string of events, including having to do a captcha right after logging in _and_ having one pop up during a fight with bots after only being back on for less than 30min.

Oh, and, btw, I just checked and I have to captcha-prove all of my characters every time I log in which is, quite frankly, starting to get a bit annoying. If this shouldn't be happening, i'll submit a ticket with a list of all six characters, but if this is the new norm, I'm not really seeing how this is necessary. Like I said, I understand the need to mitigate spotter-bots and sectors that are open for technically troublesome amounts of time, but can't the captcha requests be regulated to query all characters that are present in a station-sector that has been open beyond (x) amount of time? ...or ships that are stationary beyond (x) amount of time?
Oct 05, 2018 incarnate link
The current CAPTCHA flagging behaviour exists for a reason. I'm not going to explain all the reasons why we implemented things the way we did, but it is entirely by design, and not by accident.

Basically, if you want to sit AFK for long periods, do it within a single station. Your radar visibility will get zeroed in that sector (for awhile), but you'll be fine otherwise. It still isn't the greatest thing for the server (it keeps the sector online needlessly), but you won't have any negative ramifications.

If you experience frequent CAPTCHA requests, you can ask to have your account un-flagged. However, at that point it's on you to change your behaviour, so you stop behaving like a bot.

So.. let's just keep this Bug post focused on the actual crash issue.

Have you clocked your CPU down to stock, just to see if that impacts your stability? I ask for a reason.. I'm not against overclocking or anything, and I know OC'd hardware can be entirely stable; but at the same time, some can be a little "borderline", and when an application suddenly makes use of a lot more cores and is more effective at load distribution, this can drive up CPU temperature. We recently made changes exactly like this, over the last two weeks, so Vendetta Online may actually be more "CPU-intensive" for you than it was previously.

I've also had at least one CPU, in my history of machine building, that was wonderfully OC'd for some years, until it suddenly wasn't stable any more at that speed, despite no apparent change in cooling, temperatures or efficacy.

Since it's a pretty easy thing to try, and you've been rebooting anyway.. seems worth a shot?
Oct 07, 2018 urshurak link
So, in an effort to follow up on this (and remain focused on the actual crash issue), i did some work on my end and, to spare the gory details, i'm fairly certain the freezing/sound persisting crash was simply the result of some broken packages. After running Synaptic and doing an update, i haven't had any issues. BTW, i did this _before_ 1.8.476

I might add that while, yes, OC'ing a machine can always be risky at any point in time, not only was this MB designed for over-clocking with this chip as the "top end" benchmark, I've kept it throttled-down to a very stable speed that keeps heat low.