DescentBB

Lately I've been having a hard time staying connected in a game. I join up, my screen freezes, unfreezes and then maybe I can play a few seconds and then I get disconnected. I have also noted high pings, around 350, in the game screen. Today I watched the screen for awhile and observed the pings to be going from about 115 to over 450 and back. About every six seconds the ping would change. I have cox cable and a linksys befsr41 router with win xp pro. I turned off my firewall and virus checker, reloaded d3 and I don't have any hacked versions of d3. I have no problem surfing the net, downloading and uploading files... just playing d3. Could a bad cable drop be the cause of this? I had one cable guy who said the drop was bad. I had another one come out thereafter who replaced a barrel connector outside. I'm not getting periodically disconneced from my service after the second guy came out. I went to dslreports and my up and download speeds are where they're supposed to be. What could be causing this? Never had this problem before about 3 weeks ago. Could this be net congestion, something to do with PXO, file corruption in xp or d3, or what? Also, is it just me or are there less folks playing d3?

Run a recent virus scanner, ad-aware and search & destroy. 51% probability that will fix it.. Oh, and make sure nothing else steals CPU power/bandwidth (sysinternals.com has some tools for analysis). If all fails, use pingplotter.com to check for the wacky node in the route to the server.

When you load windows, goto your command prompt and run netstat. That'll tell you what apps are trying to get online.

Pingplotter is your friend.

Download it.

Run it.

See where the trouble is.

Don't forget, other programs hammering your connect while you play will result in the behaviour you see.

Don't trust the D3 ping times in the games list as they are rounded up to the next 50ms and are very poorly measured. Use PingPlotter and trace every second to one of your common servers.

And stop downloading porn J/K!

Pingplotter can help you identify where and what the problem is, just ping some PXO servers and other places, you should be able to find out whats wrong pretty quickly that way, then you can contact your ISP and have them fix it.

Codger wrote: I have cox cable and a linksys befsr41 router with win xp pro.

ROTFLMAO @ BUBBAHO!

I had the same problem with my cox cable, codger and there is nothing you can do to fix it. Basically the problem is that the cox gateway is mega overloaded! The gateway is even configured to channel all server ping packets through only when there is a break in the traffic (Hence any ping plots you make are extremely inaccurate.) That's how overloaded it is

Your best bet is to look for a stable connection, like DSL

BTW if you get dogged by bubba for connection hax accusations just ignore him

Bummer.

Don't forget, if the network problem exists outside of your ISPs network then you are screwed.

But from what Xeon says - you are screwed anyway.

Thanks for the input guys.

Stable connection like DSL? MYTH!

I recently had the oppertunity to compare my DSL modem to my brothers cable modem, here are the differences I was able to find.

First hop latency on my DSL modem is 24-36 MS, ~ 28 average
First hop latency on my brothers cable is 6-8 MS, ~ 7 average.

My brother pings roughly the same to my default gateway as I do, but from a 'over the wires' distance of nearly 1000 miles. Being closer to chicago my brothers pings are on average 40-60 MS lower then mine (I have to bounce through MSP first).

As far as connection stability, my brothers cable modem is definately superior to this DSL modem. Probably related to range of course, his cable modem only has to go 250 feet to the CO, my DSL is reaching 20,000 feet. The cable has better bandwidth at 235k/sec and latency stability vs my DSL at 48-54k/sec. Cable modems can be more stable the DSL modems, its something that you have to look on in a case by case basis.

-Krom