battle.net issues

[zfear]

hey guys me and my mates wanted to have a flash back and play some diablo 1 together. We have all updated and can connect to battle.net. In the channel we all list 2 green bars but as soon as one of us creates a game and we try to connect it says " cannot connect latencey to user is to high" this also happens when i try to connect to games created by other users which are not my friends games. all my mates live in melbourne australia and are using the US west portal.

Any help would be great

thanx
zfear

[Jarulf]

hey guys me and my mates wanted to have a flash back and play some diablo 1 together. We have all updated and can connect to battle.net. In the channel we all list 2 green bars but as soon as one of us creates a game and we try to connect it says " cannot connect latencey to user is to high" this also happens when i try to connect to games created by other users which are not my friends games. all my mates live in melbourne australia and are using the US west portal.

Any help would be great

thanx
        zfear
[right][snapback]82671[/snapback][/right]

The latency seen in chat is from you to the bnet chat servers (whichever you connect to, there are a few different portal to connect to). When you start a game, the latency that matters is between you and the other players in the game, which can be very different, since the game does not involve the chat servers. I would say that if two people both have good latency to the same chat server, they should most likely have good latency to each other as well- This does not seem to be your case though.

I can think of a few cases, you are using different ISPs, that for some reason have good connections to USA and the bnet portal there, but have crappy connections between themselves. Game connection, which I think is UDP packets on differnet ports, for some reason is handled worse by your (or intermediate) ISP (No idea if that is even a possibility).

For connection to other peoples games, you really don't know were they are located so the latency is hard to predict. Since you seem to have this problem to basically any game, there is a possibility it is some problem on your end with your ISP (or yourself and your computer for some reason). Do you manage to get into games at all? If not, perhaps there is some block on the way that your computer doesn't "see" in that it just send packets out but never get replies. I really am not as technically skilled so I can't help you more, it was just some thoughts.

[Toverkol]

my experience is that there is now way to tell whether there will be latency between you and a certain game, except that when your connection to bnet server is already bad you can forget having good connection to antoher player.

This said, somehow every now and then connection can be made between every duo of players with latency problems. Let all the players in your game reconnect to bnet when you come across latency, and try again with those people freshly connected. You might have to repeat this about 3 or 4 times maximum, but it will work most of the time.

Another problem that can occur, which shows up as latency, is if you are behind a firewall or router, in that case the right conenction should be put open, i'm not really in to that kind of stuff, but i know it can cause problems.

[[vL]Kp]

Also make sure nobody runs Diablo on Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 2003. All three experience UDP thread death, which Blizzard has never fixed despite having been informed of the problem many years ago. It took them over 2 years just to fix it in Starcraft, and their fix is really an incorrect workaround. UDP thread death will completely disable your multiplayer ingame support when it strikes. This means you fall from any game you're in, no one can join games you host, and you cannot join any new games. The only cure is to restart your UDP thread and hope that it doesn't die again.

[Munkay]

Also make sure nobody runs Diablo on Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows 2003.  All three experience UDP thread death, which Blizzard has never fixed despite having been informed of the problem many years ago.  It took them over 2 years just to fix it in Starcraft, and their fix is really an incorrect workaround.  UDP thread death will completely disable your multiplayer ingame support when it strikes.  This means you fall from any game you're in, no one can join games you host, and you cannot join any new games.  The only cure is to restart your UDP thread and hope that it doesn't die again.

Pardon the dumb question, but could you please explain what a UDP thread is? I've tried to google it, but there seems to be a disturbance in my google-fu force today. :blush:

Cheers,

Munk

[[vL]Kp]

UDP threads are the individual components of a UDP cloth, of course! ;)

It's not surprising that you had trouble locating it on Google, actually. "UDP thread" is the designation assigned to the thread of execution within Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft II: BNE which is responsible for receiving UDP datagrams off the network and storing them for other thread(s) to retrieve. If you aren't a network programmer, you may not understand the prior sentence, but you don't really need to understand it. :) The non-technical summary version of my prior post is that part of Blizzard's code may suddenly stop working if certain events occur. When that code stops working, the aforementioned consequences befall the gamer.

Think of it as having a neighbor who insists on using a really bad hearing aid: randomly, his hearing aid will fail and he'll lose the ability to hear you, which pretty effectively ends any conversations that might have been going on. Same principle here: Diablo may suddenly lose its ability to hear other players.

[Munkay]

UDP threads are the individual components of a UDP cloth, of course! ;)

It's not surprising that you had trouble locating it on Google, actually.  "UDP thread" is the designation assigned to the thread of execution within Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft II: BNE which is responsible for receiving UDP datagrams off the network and storing them for other thread(s) to retrieve.  If you aren't a network programmer, you may not understand the prior sentence, but you don't really need to understand it. :)  The non-technical summary version of my prior post is that part of Blizzard's code may suddenly stop working if certain events occur.  When that code stops working, the aforementioned consequences befall the gamer.

Think of it as having a neighbor who insists on using a really bad hearing aid: randomly, his hearing aid will fail and he'll lose the ability to hear you, which pretty effectively ends any conversations that might have been going on.  Same principle here: Diablo may suddenly lose its ability to hear other players.

Much appreciated! Now if I can only find enough threads to make a flashy Blizzard inspired UDP thread sweater, I'll be the coolest kid on the block! ;)

Cheers,

Munk