Many times when I login to the game, I'll be stuck in a state where none of my messages go through, I can't change ship, I can't view mission details, can't exit station, can't do anything basically. If I do try to do it, nothing happens for a while.

If I type something it mostly after a while does get processed but if I undock the game will many times just get stuck.
If I try to change a ship it'll also process after a while 99% of the time.
Trying to view mission details just doesn't work. Says getting mission details & keeps on going.

If I login outside of the station, I can't plot routes or warp

This is because of my poor connection.

Currently what I do is I always login & in either guild chat or a random channel/100 I type anything usually just a . & once I see that it's going through I'm good to go. It takes around 4 messages to be 100 sure I'm all set.

Now I know you can't help with my poor connection but Is it possible to have a message telling me that now I'm properly connected with the game servers & everything should work fine now so I don't have to spam random stuff on login?

Very rarely I get complaints about the . Spam in 100 & it's also annoying for me to do it all the time.

There's a *chance* we could implement this via plugins - Could you watch your missions list in particular? The game gets your available missions... twice, I think? The second one is what populates the escort, hive skirmish, and deneb missions, among others. If your game's chugging up to that point, then maybe we could make a plugin that counts mission list update events until that "trigger" is reached and notify you.

Another option is to automate that chat checking; when you send a chat message, you usually get that chat message back from the server, and if we check the delay that occurs and repeat until it goes below some threshold, the plugin could notify you that such threshold was reached and get your attention.

Just spitballing eyedeas, though knowing a bit more about what might be going on behind the scenes could help.

Ah so it isn't just me.
+1

Now I know you can't help with my poor connection but Is it possible to have a message telling me that now I'm properly connected with the game servers & everything should work fine now so I don't have to spam random stuff on login?

Packet loss can happen at any point in time, not just at login, and when it happens a "retransmission" has to occur. That can result in a delay. If several retransmissions are also lost, that delay can be longer.

You may notice the results of packet loss more during login, because more data is transmitted at that point in a connection (character data, sector-state, etc), and there are a number of "synchronous" operations that take place, like loading menus and downloading missions, which mandate the data be verified and arrive in the correct order. Some of those take longer to "recover" if there's a failure.

When flying around in space, the data flow is pretty "light" and the game goes out of its way to hide loss and network failures (if we didn't do that, almost everyone would have problems). So, your connection problems might be less noticeable at that point in time, but they may not be occurring less often.

I'm not sure what the best solution is, more investigation is needed..

We can probably add more informational awareness to the client about network problems. Maybe a progress-bar if something is "stuck", while a retransmission is happening. Maybe an asynchronous message in chat just raising awareness of network issues.

We can also do some further testing of the login and mission areas in our own lab environment with a high-loss network. We do that periodically, but still, bugs and regressions can happen.

Relevant Questions:

- What client platform are TJ and SIGTERM using that most commonly experiences the network problems?

- What specific in-game interfaces and moments-in-time (like login, docking, etc) tend to be the most problematic, and lead to the most "stalls" and other issues? If you can give us exact scenarios, that's helpful for reproducing specific problems in a lab environment.

I'm always on mobile playing using wifi. Android platform.

Stalls usually just happen 95% of the time unless my wifi is feeling speedy. Usually it's dumb & slow & sleepy....

Most problematic part of this is definitely undocking because if you get stuck in that & connection doesn't connect - I must kill the client & restart it.
Undocking is the only thing I think that makes me restart client to get the game working again.

Okay, could you please be more specific about exactly what you're experiencing, and when?

I know saying "undocking" may be obvious to you, but what exactly is on-screen when things stall?

Out of curiosity, have you tried without any plugins loaded?

Yes I've tried without plugins.

How to replicate my scenario -
Open game
Login
Select character
Enter game.
Tap on launch button.

If connection is not OK it'll show a mini window saying exiting station & then you will stay like that forever around 60% of the time.

Most problematic part of this is definitely undocking because if you get stuck in that & connection doesn't connect - I must kill the client & restart it.
Undocking is the only thing I think that makes me restart client to get the game working again.

How long are you waiting for the client to recover? Please be specific. In fact, if you can test it while also looking at a clock, to give us time in minutes, that'd be helpful. Particularly if you can also provide exactly when it occurred.

We have not been able to reproduce this at all, as of yet, even with high latencies and packet loss. The "Launching" screen can show for a longer period of time, but not "forever": it eventually recovers.

I need to understand whether what you are reporting is:

A) Some serious bug we haven't been able to reproduce yet.

OR

B) A mixture of a slow/lossy connection, insufficient "displayed status" information on the reconnection process, and perhaps some player-impatience?

I waited for around 5 mins for client to recover & it didn't recover. Maybe it needed 7 mins or something. I don't think I've ever waited over 5 mins for client to recover.....

So perhaps there is some player-impatience involved provided in your worst case it took client more than 5 mins to recover.

Have you tried enabling "compatibility mode" under Options, Advanced, Network?

Yes. There's still stalls but shorter. I haven't yet fully tested it but I have it on.....

Okay, please continue to provide detailed feedback about how things are working, now that you have Compatibility Mode enabled.

Please be as specific as possible about any issues. So, if there are "stalls" that you're experiencing, exactly what activity triggers them, and how long do they last? Etc

This appears to be a pretty unusual and interesting network issue. It may not exactly be a "bug" in the game, per-se, but rather a bizarre set of dynamic changes to your network capabilities that are fluctuating in peculiar ways. We can probably make things more "automatically" robust to these conditions, once we have a better idea of what is happening.

- Do you have multiple WiFi access points on your network, or just one?

- What kind of internet service are you using? Cellular? Cable? Whatever details you're comfortable sharing publicly.

- Do you use a VPN or similar service that may be changing your network connection in unusual ways? Or, worse, changing things "sometimes"?

I have just a single wifi connection.

I never play on cell data & I never connected cable to my phone. It's plain wifi.

I don't use VPN while playing.

Since I enabled compatibility mode I've not experienced a permanent stall but again I haven't tested too much about a permanent stall.

I can surely notice in compatibility mode the wait time is very less.....

I need to talk to my isp about this as well to see if they can fix the issue with my connection being

I'll add more stuff as I find it

Rn stalls only happen during login. Never else. Otherwise I just get lots of resets & red ping & I just log off because if I can't pvp I get sad....

I never play on cell data & I never connected cable to my phone. It's plain wifi.

Is it "plain wifi" installed in your general building, or is it a personal wifi-router or access point that you directly own and control?

Like, for instance:

- Some places have "municipal" wifi available to their town. Or "building" wifi in their apartment complex.
- Others have some kind of personal home non-wireless internet connection (cable, DSL, fiber, ethernet) and then their own wifi-router that relays that internet connection.

Rn stalls only happen during login. Never else. Otherwise I just get lots of resets & red ping & I just log off because if I can't pvp I get sad....

Well, the "stall" situation we can improve. The pings and resets and such.. maybe not so much. There's a good chance that that's either local connectivity issues (wifi) or problems over the "greater internet".

Personal router. We don't have a common building wifi system over here.

I tested the stall part on launch & with compatibility mode I didn't face a permanent stall as of yet.

Can you please retry the game again, with Compatibility Mode disabled (back to defaults) and see if the launch time problems are still present for you?

We recently fixed some problems on Weds, which might relate to what you were seeing. Thanks.

I'll try

Can you give us any feedback on this? Have you been able to successfully play, without "hanging during launch" with the Compatibility Mode disabled? (MTU Discovery set to "automatic")

After my testing I haven't found any permanent stalls when using launch right after login.

It takes time & then after around a minute it will proceed always. But also have noticed that even tho it's proceeded, game still needs 30 seconds or so to fully connect.

But yea even after being very rude to the startup, it did not hang & I was able to continue playing.

Very good :)

Okay, thanks for the feedback.

Just to specifically confirm, you did disable the "Compatibility Mode" in Options and set MTU Discovery back to "Automatic", correct?

That's super important for determining what happened here, and what the effects were.

We're still looking to try and improve some aspects of this, but debugging this is an important step.