Looking for feedback on whether people perceive more or fewer connection problems

@p4block

basically anything that's not an actual proper internet connection to their home and PC.

I believe this applies to me.

As I live in a slightly remote part of my area; not many providers can reach all the way out here to my location,
so, at the moment my best option is Starlink.

With Starlink, I am accustomed to seeing moderately high pings (~150-200) when players connect with me in FAF,
but lately, these averages have increased.
I have noticed an average shift almost nearing 250 ping, per player.

This could also be due to the fact that Starlink is bringing in more traffic as time goes on, but, seems unlikely with infrastructure that costly;
Seems strange that it would be affected this drastically. (+66% in latency)

For comparison, my ping in other (competitive) games is quite low, averaging around 30-40 with the highest I've seen at around 80-100.
But then again, those games are hosted on larger, more dedicated servers, I imagine.

In FAF, about 70% of my matches go without incidence, I'd say.
With the other 30% of matches, I find someone hiccuping, and partially dropping connection.
And since my network is constantly swapping between Novax satellites, it's practically impossible to reconnect to said players.

This situation usually ends up with:
"Who's lagging the gam- STRYKER!"
-Geneva (2023)

That being said, whether my internet has anything to do with it or not, the overall number of connection problems, in my experience, has gone up in the last month or so.
Quite significantly, I might add.
That 30% connection issues I mentioned, that number used to be around 10% at most, in my case.

Hope my feedback helps in any fashion.

~ Strkyer

Can confirm Stryker is a lagging disconnecting PoS

@comradestryker Thanks for your insightful answer. Cool to see someone attempting to play on Starlink.

More notes: we're only interested on feedback with version 2023.11, problems before it existed are ddos-related mostly and there's nothing there to learn.

2023.11 (for now) goes back to our 2020ish "only Germany" for turn, despite being called "Global". This is due to the release being rushed.
We're working on a more finalized solution that covers everyone's usecases, we wanted to ship this ASAP to finally end the DDoS thing even if it meant some downgrades.

If you were playing in the US exclusively against US players this is pretty bad and explains the ping increase.

While before the connections may have been "7/10" most of the day but a "0/10" for 4 hours a day while the DDoS happened, we preferred to go back to a stable 5/10 as soon as possible.

I switched from (copper) cable to Fiber tonight and directly lost connection to 3 other players after about 12min ingame and had to leave!
This NEVER happens with my earlier cable connection. (50-200Mbit, German Telekom -> 600Mbit Fiber German Telekom).
Are any problems know with Internet connections due to Fiber?

@p4block
I switched from (copper) cable to Fiber tonight and directly lost connection to 3 other players after about 12min ingame and had to leave!
This NEVER happens with my earlier cable connection. (50-200Mbit, German Telekom -> 600Mbit Fiber German Telekom).
Are any problems know with Internet connections due to Fiber?

Been using fiber through WIFI connection to play FAF for couple years and had no troubles at all apart from router/setup related ones. Many other players I know also use fiber and never had this type of problems due to their connection type. Rather only the DDOS related ones.

Another thing is that you had this connection for just one day so honestly I don't think you should be jumping the gun and blaming the problem on it. Might have been just random hiccup, or after effects of the ddos/client changes. So I'd advise to report after few more games/days so you can be sure it wasn't just a single instance.

Playing router -> wifi -> router -> wifi -> PC and seems like everything got worse: in game disconnects, sometimes lobby doesn't even start (had 3 times in a row, only PC rebooting helped), game hangs right after start. I would say it's 100% chance that someone will have disconnect in game.

Playing router -> wifi -> PC, there were no problems with disconnections before. but now 1on1 2on2 and 3on3 in 7 out of 10 cases the connection breaks. and an error appears, something like “you will be able to connect after a certain number of minutes”
Internet Rostelecom ~200 Mbit/sec

2 guys above with 1 and 2 posts, all on connectivity, same writing style, from Russia. Suspicion level very high

Everything was fine, but at one point after updating FAF to version 11, it started to connect infinitely when connecting to games

hello guys, lately i have trouble with connection. before the ddos i never had connection issues or was never laggy but since the last week im struggling a bit about beeing laggy. Not everygame but 2 out of 10 games i'm the one that laggs or i loose the whole connection to other players so i or someone else have to leave. Im using an LAN-Cable with an provided speed over 15 mb in download and 10 mb in Upload.

@m20yaroslav said in Looking for feedback on whether people perceive more or less connection problems:

Everything was fine, but at one point after updating FAF to version 11, it started to connect infinitely when connecting to games

Can you please provide us with an ice adapter log and/or client log. Thank you very much.
And maybe you can tell us how you connect to your internet and what your provider is.

Not sure why the title of the post is "perceive" as the issue is real, especially for me, where it was almost like the (nvidia driver issue stutter)from a few years ago...

My connections were MASSIVELY improved when I realized this:

was checked on. It even clearly states that it cause issue for some players, but there is no explanation as to why. So what happens is folks like myself do what we can: complain on the forums or reach out to devs.

Is there any chance we could get a quick write-up when there is such a large change on what to do? I still have to explain to people what the "ICE coturns" are, even though there is only one option now, because it is not really well perceived.

I would recommend that when the client is updated some kind of message like the one for game patches in a lobby is displayed.

That option defaulted to off for all players when it was introduced. So if it was on it just means that you had toggled it on some point in the past.

Both these and the coturn selection are intended more so as advanced troubleshooting options for advanced users, otherwise the defaults are what work.

@sheikah said in Looking for feedback on whether people perceive more or less connection problems:

That option defaulted to off for all players when it was introduced. So if it was on it just means that you had toggled it on some point in the past.

Both these and the coturn selection are intended more so as advanced troubleshooting options for advanced users, otherwise the defaults are what work.

Right, but why have it at all? What is the point?

Internet service providers do weird things like shared ipv4 addresses between multiple customers and other fucked up stuff. So while IPv4 is in general more stable, there might be cases where ipv6 is the only option.

In case you also wanted any feedback from non-wireless/vpn connections:

Using a wired non-VPN UK based internet connection that at the time of testing was running around 250 mbps, my first 1v1 game started fine, the next 3 all loaded the FA exe but resulted in a connection failure (despite at least one of them showing 2/2 connected - I didnt have the loading screen up for the other failures to see if they also reached 2/2). Of these 3 failures, 1 resulted in an error to me saying I was the cause.
This was done around the time of posting (i.e. when FAF is busier).

Previously (i.e. before the DDOS issues) connection issues in 1v1 games were rare for me (they'd be rare in 3v3s as well).

client.log ice-adapter.log advanced-ice-adapter.log

Edit: Just had another game attempt to start and stay stuck for a while at the 2/2 connected loading screen, so that makes 1 success out of 5 attempts.

@brutus5000 said in Looking for feedback on whether people perceive more or less connection problems:

Internet service providers do weird things like shared ipv4 addresses between multiple customers and other fucked up stuff. So while IPv4 is in general more stable, there might be cases where ipv6 is the only option.

Ah, okay. I thought it was some FAF-unique thing. That helps.

@p4block I am playing over 4G (AT) which always worked pretty well. Most I had was a bad con to a couple of Australian players. However, since a couple of days I have trouble connecting to certain players which makes it kinda hard to play tmm and bigger lobbies. Refaf doesnt really help either.

@brutus5000 said in Looking for feedback on whether people perceive more or less connection problems:

Internet service providers do weird things like shared ipv4 addresses between multiple customers and other fucked up stuff. So while IPv4 is in general more stable, there might be cases where ipv6 is the only option.

Technically speaking: IPv6 should be more stable, in theory that is of course.

Imagine that 2 peers whom both are behind CGNAT do get a server reflexive, or peer reflexive connection. Holes have been punched, connections are made, all is good. But then one of the CGNATs do some of these "fucked up stuff" like dropping the connection from their routing table, or whatever crazy thing (remember, thousands of folks share the same public IPv4 Address, and there are only 65535 ports to go around for them). Now the connection is lost. New holes need to be punched, the STUN server needs to get busy again for coordination, etc.

On the other hand, if both peers connect using IPv6, they get a direct end-to-end connection which needs only be routed, where the likeliness to mess it up is really slim. There are possibly only 2 router firewalls involved, which can make complications.

My experience with the enabled IPv6 support is actually very positive.
I made some logging modifications to the java ice adapter to see whenever I had an IPv6 connection realized with other peers.

I would actually suggest to make that option the default, and users would need to actively opt-out.
I think the world is now ready for IPv6.