Unbearable disconnection

Hi,

I've been playing FAF for over 12 years now, I've never seen so many connection issue. This has been going on for now about 1 or 2 months, and I'm sure that one of the last FAF update messed up something ! Problems happens in the game, but even when waiting in lobby for players to join. I'm not sure it is it related to the ICE adapter, or the different regions servers, but switching from GLobal to US, or Germany, Finland, etc does not make any difference.

In short, my dear people from FAF -> You have a problem

note: This is not only a problem for me a lot of other players are complaining of this recurring issue.

@personne Unfortunately, the majority of FAF infrastructure has been under near-constant DDOS attacks since the end of September/beginning of October. A lot of measures have been taken to mitigate those attacks, but they're still happening & not all are able to be dealt with. The hardest hit systems now are the Coturn servers, which are used to assist with making connections between players when a stable P2P connection can't be established. At this time, there's only 1 Cotrun (labeled Global) that is having better success than the others because it's a 3rd party service with some additional protections.

With all that said, here are the current best suggestions for helping with connection issues:

In the FAF client, go to the top left menu > Settings:

1. General > Write ICE Log File > check,
2. Forged Alliance Forever > Use FAF Debugger when starting Forged Alliance > check > click "Get the latest version of the debugger",
3. Allow the ICE adapter to use IPv6 > unchecked,
4. Preferred Coturns for ICE > select only Global,

Next, quit the client (check Task Manager). Once it's completely closed, open the client again & play.

The next time you join a game & have connection issues, please click the Reply button at the bottom between the (View) icon & the "Mark unread" button. Next, go to client > top left menu > Show logs folder > logs > sort by Date Modified, then drag/drop these files into the Reply message window so those that can help (not me) have that data to look at:

1. client.log file (the Text Document file without the date),
2. ice-adapter.log & advanced-ice-adapter.log (both in a separate folder)

@MostLostNoob @Personne - I'm in the same boat, long time FAFer and it's never been this bad.

What can we do to help? Is it a resourcing issue or something technical preventing us from getting additional DDOS protection on other Cotrun servers?

I'm a bit worried that if the current issues persist people will genuinely be turned off and just play another game. Today we had to re 3 times before we had a decent game going without a drop out between 2+ players in the first 5 mins of gameplay.

@mr-rashy-pants said in Unbearable disconnection:

I'm a bit worried that if the current issues persist people will genuinely be turned off and just play another game. Today we had to re 3 times before we had a decent game going without a drop out between 2+ players in the first 5 mins of gameplay.

This is already the case and there is nothing we can do about it.

@Brutus5000 wachu mean? There's definitely something we can do about it! FAF community has survived this long, and I think it's really important we find a fix for this issue to prevent a mass exodus event.

Brutus, from what you know is this a technical issue or resourcing? I'm certain FAF servers aren't the first to be hit with DDOS - there are surely some measures we can take?

You assume we didn't do anything. Quite the opposite is true. We hide our main server ip behind cloudflare whereas possible. We even shifted protocols from raw TCP to HTTP to use Cloudflare DDoS protection.
We use load balancers where it is not possible.
On the coturns we ban ips that use to many connections.

We have implemented everything I can think of. There is not much more we can do. And it doesn't help.
And everyday I see people complaining about new ways how connection break that worked before.

In addition to that, finding ways to break things is significantly easier in general. When the DDoS attack started, it made the game unplayable for everyone. After all the back-end changes to counter it, at least the majority of players can play again.

I know it is extremely frustrating when a connection drops. It would be helpful to follow MostLostNoob's guide to share some logs with us.

This can help determine if your issue is not DDoS-related and ensure all information is available.