Good thought. I too recall that happening in the past where an auto-update to a firewall inadvertently change some firewall settings and caused a group of players to have challenges with a game.


I also recall once when an auto-update to a driver, reset the checksum offload switch on a small number of computers and caused huge LD challenges for only a small group of players with a specific hardware/driver/auto-update setup and for a while the challenge was blamed on the game company.


Then there was a time when an auto-update to a video driver caused a huge problem with a specific video card. The challenge initially looked like an LD issue when it really was the video card problems leading to horrible FPS and cascading into problems on the main buss and slowing/compromising communication leading to apparent packet loss and finally closing the game. And again until tech info was analyzed the group with the problem assumed the problem was the game company.


Etc. . .

Etc. . .


If players had posted a dxdiag report you would have the info about their firewalls, their anti-virus, etc. . . . and would be able to see if there was a common thread in that area.

 

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Tech info. Very nice of you.


So it does seem to be a node/hub.


It happened in another game I was playing (at Blizzard) where an internet node was having trouble. The node was the property of some communications company that was not affiliated with any players ISPs nor the game company’s ISP.


To get the company who was responsible for the problem node to fix the challenge it took a combination of players submitting trace reports to their own ISPs, trace reports which the ISPs forwarded to the company responsible for the faulty node, and the game company complaining. The game company alone (Blizzard) filing complaints did not seem to get as much attention as when multiple ISPs started complaining (and multiple ISPs did not start complaining until multiple players began complaining, and submitting trace reports, to their own ISPs).


Edit: as I recall some of the suggestions given by Blizzard were:

1) Contact your ISPs tech department. The tech people know what a trace is for, how to read one and who to forward it to. The CS people do not really know how to read a trace or how to forward it to the proper tech department of the company responsible for the node/hub.

2) Do not say you are having trouble playing a game. If you mention the word “game” to your ISP you fall to low priority. Say you were having trouble over the net and found via a trace that your trouble is in xxxxxx. Only if they specifically ask should you mention the trouble is with a game.

3) Ask if you can send them your trace. Often they will give you an email to a tech person so you can send them the trace. Sometimes they will ask you to load trace software and run a trace while you are on the phone with them.

 

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Yeah it was with the french network Telia routing to Schipol, Amerstdam.

Ywain Server Maintenance - 04/11
Posted by Kai Schober | 2012 Apr 10 14:28 -0400 GMT

We will bring down the Ywain server tomorrow, Wednesday April 11th, at 2pm EDT (8pm CEST) for hardware maintenance.
At this time we expect the server to be back online no later than 8pm EDT (2am CEST).

Since this is a Ywain-only maintenance the scheduled Relic Raid test on Pendragon will take place as planned and the Dark Age of Camelot development team invites you to log into the test server tomorrow from 2:30pm EDT (8:30pm CEST) on and help us test the new relic changes.

See you in the frontiers!

 

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As this is a EA hardware maintenance I don't think it will have any fix on the current issue to be honest.

To fix the issue I found it would mean they would have to move all of Ywain's data to a new data centre to cause data to be rerouted. That seems a bit to extreme for EA to do and too costly to happen.

The easiest way is for EA and other game developers (Like Riot Games and Runescape who are also having issues with this) to put pressure on Verizon to sort their nodes out.