290447: Connection Issues

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: GrayFox.2601

GrayFox.2601

I submitted request #290447 to support earlier this afternoon. While the responses were admirably quick, the first within one and a half hours and the second in less than an hour, they are also somewhat…concerning.

In my initial notes, among other things, I mentioned I had run GW2 with the command line -diag and had the results, but also had no way to attach it to the ticket on the support site and asked how they wanted me to get that to them. The response was somewhat odd and is copied below:

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention today.
I would like to gather some information in regards to your computer and connection. To get this information, please do the following:
1. Navigate to your Guild Wars 2 folder.
2. Right-click on “Gw2.exe” and select “Create Shortcut.”
3. Right-click on “Gw2.exe – Shortcut” and select “Rename.”
4. Rename this file to “Guild Wars 2 Diagnostic.”
5. Right-click on “Guild Wars 2 Diagnostic” and select “Properties.”
6. Locate the “Target” line and add the following to the end " -diag" Your target line should look like this: “C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe” -diag
7. Click OK to save your changes.
8. Open “Guild Wars 2 Diagnostic” to start the test.
Once completed, please click “View Results” and copy and paste this into your ticket.
Once we receive it, we’ll have a better idea of how to resolve your issue.

Obviously, I already knew how to run the diagnostic report, had the results and this information was clearly listed in my notes. It just seemed weird to get the directions to do so again, especially worded in such a way that implied I hadn’t even heard of the procedure before. However, since it also told me how to get the info to them, I shrugged it off and simply sent the requested info.

But the reply I got to that one made it clear something was definitely wrong. Another part of my initial request included this info:

“…I connected directly through the modem, disabled all services and start-up programs and rebooted my pc before playing.”

And here is support’s second response (I cut off the end to save space):

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention today.
Please try using the instructions below to prevent background applications from automatically starting with Windows as this can often causes issues like the one you reported. Please note, this command will not uninstall any applications from your computer. All MSCONFIG does is prevent these applications from automatically starting when Windows boots up.
To do this:
1. Press and hold the Windows key and then hit the R key. This should bring up the Run dialog box.
2. Type “MSCONFIG” without the quotes, and click “OK.” This should open the System Configuration Utility.
3. Click on the “Services” tab and check the “Hide All Microsoft Services” check box near the bottom, then click the “Disable All” button. (You MUST click “Hide all Microsoft Services”)
4. Next go to the “Startup” tab and click the “Disable All” button.
5. Once these items are all disabled, click the “OK” button and you will get a prompt to restart your computer. Please restart your computer.

Obviously, I had already tried that. While I obviously can’t say this with certainty, I’d make an educated guess the Support member either did not understand or did not read my ticket and may not have even read the diagnostic info I gave them.

As a Support Analyst myself, I understand that when dealing with new issues, support has to start from square one because many problems end up being very easy to solve. Rebooting fixes more than you think. ;-) But I mentioned this was my third ticket on this issue and gave a detailed list of all error codes I had received and all troubleshooting steps I had tried.

I’m responding to the email, but considering what I got back the first two times, my hopes aren’t that high it will matter that much. Has anyone had a similar problem or is a forum moderator or dev able to help me resolve my issue? (request #290447)

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: GrayFox.2601

GrayFox.2601

…And I was right. It didn’t matter.

Thanks for getting back to us.
We’re sorry to hear that we haven’t been able to help you reach a resolution for the issue you’ve been experiencing. At this point, we have gone through all the resources and suggestions at our disposal. We regret that we are unable to continue troubleshooting this issue with you. We recommend that you contact your ISP or local professional for further assistance.
You may wish to review the official Guild Wars 2 Technical Support forum, where you will find a wealth of information and support provided by both players and ArenaNet Team members. You may find a resolution to the issue already has been posted on the forum or you could create a new forum post to request input about the problem.
You will find the Guild Wars 2 Technical Support Forum on this link:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech
Again, I am sorry that we cannot help you further, but if you have any other questions, please let us know.

To recap, these suggestions include:

1st ticket

- disabling all services, startup programs, restarting the pc, making sure your anti-virus and firewall are disabled and trying to run the game

2nd ticket (because the ticketing system got revamped)

- trying to run the game with the command line -clientport 80

3rd ticket

- running the -diag command line and sending support the output
- being told again to disable all services, startup programs, restart the pc, make sure my anti-virus and firewall are disabled and to try to run the game (which I had just done again before submitting this ticket)

Personal Knowledge/Community Based/Support Document Troubleshooting

- bypassing my router
- running the game with the command line options -repair and -verify seperately
- deleting and forcing the game to reinstall the local.dat file in C:\Users\****\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2
- connecting through my router, but setting my pc to a static IP and port forwarding ports 80, 443, 6112 and 6600 to my pc

Really? That’s it? You’re allowed to just give up? You didn’t even want the Game Advisor report this time around. I have tried to be polite through this entire process and have followed all steps given to me, despite the fact that you revamped the entire support system in the middle of it by deleting our accounts and existing tickets and all replies I have received appear to be pre-written and copy/pasted with the only personal touch being the name at the end.

And in the end, you refer me to the Support Forum, where I can easily see many other people are having the exact same issue with no resolution. Since it’s your site, I’m sure you can see that as well. The only constant I see when browsing the threads in the support forum is that other people mention they were told, after going through their own extensive troubleshooting experience with Support, that the problem must be with their ISP. Since the GW2 community consists of players around the world, it is much more likely to be an issue with the GW2 servers than with all of our ISPs.

I’m sorry to have to ask this, as I know there are good people on the GW2 team, but are we that unimportant to you? If you have a problem with your servers and are fixing it, just be honest, let us know you know about the problem and the status and timeframe of the fix. While not an immediate solution, we would at least know you are working on the problem. But please don’t give us the run around until we give up or you eventually say the problem is our ISP.

…I just don’t get it.

(edited by GrayFox.2601)

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: GrayFox.2601

GrayFox.2601

Maybe I was unclear about my intentions, probably due to my confusion over Support’s responses, but I still want to get my connection issues resolved. The Request/Ticket Support group may have given up, but I haven’t.

If any devs or players could assist me, it would be much appreciated. I have invested a great deal of time, energy and money in GW1 and GW2 and I would like to continue playing and be able to enjoy that experience. I know there has to be more that I can do aside from what I have already tried, I just don’t know what it is.

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: GrayFox.2601

GrayFox.2601

New update on my ticket. It deepens the mystery even further. Honestly, this has become more of an enigma than the Living Story, at least so far…

Thank you for contacting us about the disconnection issue that you experienced.

Please understand that connection issues can occur anywhere along the network path between your computer and our servers. This is the nature of the Internet in general, where any point in the path can suffer congestion that causes lag or intermittent loss of connectivity. I sympathize with your frustration about these issues but we have reviewed recent information about the game and we are not able to identify any issues with our service. Support is not able to address losses resulting from issues beyond our control.

If you continue to experience lag or connectivity issues, please let us know and we’ll escalate your ticket to our Technical Support Team for further investigation.

Regards

I’m genuinely confused here. When I click on the Support tab from the GW2 main page and then click “Submit a request”…aren’t I already submitting a ticket to the Technical Support Team? If not, what team did my connection issue get routed to?

And while it is true that there are many hops from my computer to the GW2 servers, there are hundreds of reports similar to my own in the Tech Support and Game Bug forums (thread creators and the people in the threads who say they have the same issue) and this makes it pretty likely that the problem isn’t all of our computers, modems, ISPs or the internet as a whole, but the GW2 servers. There are simply too many reports from too many locations around the country and globe for it to be anything else.

I will follow this as far as it needs to go, which means requesting an escalation to the Technical Support Team, as both my wife and I have too much time and energy invested in GW to make giving up a reasonable alternative. But it feels like I’m spinning my wheels here.

Can a dev or moderator please shed some light on this issue for me?

(edited by GrayFox.2601)

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: GrayFox.2601

GrayFox.2601

Changing the title of this post in an attempt to make it more accurate

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: SolarNova.1052

SolarNova.1052

Welcome to GW2 :P

Anet’s tech support department is woefully below standard. Even this forum barely gets any attention by the Anet employees, and when they do post its inevitably a cut and paste job and or has generic trouble shooting steps that don’t help.

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290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Gaile Gray

Gaile Gray

ArenaNet Communications Manager

Next

GrayFox — I’ve asked a TS team member to take a look! (And our apologies for the delay.)

I don’t believe you have done this, but I cannot tell. If you truly have submitted three separate tickets for the same issue, please stop doing that immediately. Go to the first ticket (the lower number) for any updates you want to provide and do not submit additional tickets. Thank you.

Also, I amended the title, because I feel it was inaccurate and somewhat aggressive. With a ticket number and a subject-based title, the team will have an easier means of addressing your issue.

Gaile Gray
Communications Manager
Guild & Fansite Relations; In-Game Events
ArenaNet

(edited by Gaile Gray.6029)

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: vahngard.7306

vahngard.7306

Gaile Gray, not to jump onto GrayFox’s problem..but I’m having sort of the same issues with support, whether or not this will be seen is whatever, but I would love to get back into the game I just had to purchase again! (request #301286)

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Gaile Gray

Previous

Gaile Gray

ArenaNet Communications Manager

Next

Gaile Gray, not to jump onto GrayFox’s problem..but I’m having sort of the same issues with support, whether or not this will be seen is whatever, but I would love to get back into the game I just had to purchase again! (request #301286)

If you have submitted a ticket, please give at least 3 days for a response. If you need help after that time, please post in the Account Issue Sub-Forum, in the “Tickets for Review” sticky thread. Thanks!

I’ll leave this thread open, but please do not post here with other issues. I want Technical Support to be able to post, but other topics should be posted in separate threads. Thank you for understanding!

Gaile Gray
Communications Manager
Guild & Fansite Relations; In-Game Events
ArenaNet

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Gaile Gray

Previous

Gaile Gray

ArenaNet Communications Manager

Next

Someone from Technical Support will take a look at this situation, but I wanted to add a few notes:

As far as I can tell, and from what I’ve learned in checking around, we aren’t having issues with our servers. Connectivity issues can have a dozen different sources, as stated in the ticket. Where once we would help try to diagnose issues with someone’s system through Game Advisor and other reports, at the present time we are not able to accept attachments to tickets (for security reasons). This means that we cannot offer to review someone’s system report to see where their router may be misconfigured, or where their drivers may require updating. So we’ve eliminated the issue on our end, and we’re not in a position to offer detailed research into systemic issues on the customer’s end.

The source of the connection issues can be related to a user’s personal computer, ISP, Internet backbone(s) leading to our data center, etc. It would be great to be able to offer analysis into outside issues, but as explained above, we cannot do that right now. We hope to be able to go above and beyond in the future, as we have in the past, to try to help with issues related to non-ArenaNet and non-Guild Wars 2 systems. Right now, we need to stop with our own systems, and from everything I can learn, there are no issues with those.

Last word: Yes, you see several forum threads about this. There are more than 3 million GW2 accounts, so it’s not surprising to see that some folks have connection issues. Those issues appear to be individual in nature, and not an indication of a server issue — either game world or log-in. Please review the responses that you get, understand our limitations as far as offering help for external issues, and follow the advice in the responses because you may find your solution through the ideas that are shared there.

Gaile Gray
Communications Manager
Guild & Fansite Relations; In-Game Events
ArenaNet

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: GrayFox.2601

GrayFox.2601

Sorry, there was a little bit of confusion on the tickets, so I’m going back in my notes and email to make sure I list it right this time.

I opened Incident: 130904-002031 on 9/4/13 where I received the initial “disable all services and startup programs” instructions. I waited awhile to see if the issues got any better and, when they didn’t, I tried to update the ticket.

I opened Incident: 131016-001618 on 10/16/13 when I found I couldn’t update my first ticket because it had been closed. I did mention the older ticket and copy/pasted what had been suggested and the results. The response was to create the /clientport80 command line option in a shortcut and try that.

On 10/23/13 the support system was revamped and all existing tickets and support logins were deleted.

On 1/23/13 I opened my most recent ticket, request #290447. To my knowledge, that is the only one that currently exists because the other two were deleted. Again, I did mention my two previous tickets.

And while my main concern is the connection issues and the affect they are having on both my wife and my ability to play the game, I am also confused by the responses I received from support in my latest ticket/request.

I was told to do something I had clearly stated I already tried, I was told nothing else could be done after only a few troubleshooting attempts and then I was told my ticket could be forwarded to the Technical Support Team for further investigation (after being told nothing else could be done, btw), which seems to mean that technical support had not yet been involved. I did respond asking them to forward it.

Really, I’m as confused by the responses I have gotten from support as I am by the connection issues.

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Desaita.3792

Desaita.3792

Not to further harass but I’m experiencing similar problems as GrayFox. I haven’t been able to play for 3 weeks now I only submitted one ticket and well 10 days later I’m still waiting for a response. Because I didn’t get one at all.

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Desaita.3792

Desaita.3792

Something I noticed today is I have recieved multiple emails saying my account has been banned due to buying gold or something. Which I haven’t except through the guildwars legal BLTP. I have looked up these emails and learned they are “phishing” but is there a possibility that someone could have tampered with my account even if I didnt select the links in these emails?

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: SolarNova.1052

SolarNova.1052

Always ignore those emails. I get them all the time from Blizzard for WoW, Diablo, StarCraft… from Anet for GW2, from other gaming devs for games like Everquest, yet most of those games i don’t play.

If u get an email like that, NEVER follow the given links, simply log onto ur account how u normal would to check its status, if its normal then you know the email is fake.

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290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Gaile Gray

Previous

Gaile Gray

ArenaNet Communications Manager

Next

Hi GrayFox. Thanks for waiting while I discussed this with TS. I know — truly know! — this is a frustrating issue. And the last thing you want to hear is “It’s not us.” However, I learned that the issue does not lie within our service, and the team looked into the matter as recently as yesterday. Their notes:

“From what information we have here, this isn’t something we can resolve because it’s packet loss on a connecting data center, not the Guild Wars 2 server itself. If we could obtain a Ping Plotter report we could at best show the player where it’s coming from visually but even then, we would be referring them to their ISP…”

We once were able to accept attachments. We intend to be able to accept attachments in the future, but that is some time away. (We are, naturally, taking a very conservative course with our new ticket system — implemented last fall — and that has resulted in our disabling attachments until rigorous security measures are in place on the part of the provider.)

But basically, even without those attachments, the team can tell that you are experiencing issues outside our services, and we cannot assist with resolving them.

I apologize again for the unclear responses that you received. We’ll do our best to mitigate that situation for future tickets. In the end, since you seem technically savvy, I’d suggest a discussion with your ISP that involves one of the tech folks reviewing whatever reports they have you run. They may find the issue is not something they can solve, as we did, but that’s the next point of contact (or a repeated point of contact given what we’ve shared here). Due to the nature of their service, I hope the ISP can point to the exact issue and help you resolve it.

Gaile Gray
Communications Manager
Guild & Fansite Relations; In-Game Events
ArenaNet

(edited by Gaile Gray.6029)

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Gaile Gray

Previous

Gaile Gray

ArenaNet Communications Manager

Always ignore those emails. I get them all the time from Blizzard for WoW, Diablo, StarCraft… from Anet for GW2, from other gaming devs for games like Everquest, yet most of those games i don’t play.

If u get an email like that, NEVER follow the given links, simply log onto ur account how u normal would to check its status, if its normal then you know the email is fake.

Yes, ignore! For samples of phishing mails, see this thread, which I try to keep updated: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/A-Note-about-Phishing-Emails-1/first#post2074388

For discussion, use this link: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/e-Mail-from-ArenaNet-Please-read-merged/first#post1807876

Gaile Gray
Communications Manager
Guild & Fansite Relations; In-Game Events
ArenaNet

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: Sparhawk.7836

Sparhawk.7836

Im also having exactly the same issues and have followed all support instructions. If i run a repair this alows me access to the game for approx an hout or two i then get kicked out. The thing i dont understand is that it is our probelm with our pc or connection how come it efects nothing else on my pc including other online games. Using the net or anything else computer/online related why is it only effecting fuild wars 2 login

290447: Connection Issues

in Account & Technical Support

Posted by: GrayFox.2601

GrayFox.2601

As my previous post says, support offered to forward my ticket to the Technical Support Team for further investigation and I accepted. The response I received was, except for the first 4 words which were “As we previously stated..”, the EXACT SAME as the response I received on 1/24/14 (copied in my 2nd post in this thread) stating that there was nothing else support could do for me.

If there was nothing else support could do for me and my ticket had already been to the Technical Support Team…why did they offer to send it there? Why offer me false hope and blatantly waste my time like that?

I’m sorry, but there just doesn’t seem to be any good reason for this.

Gaile, you’re the only Arenanet representative that has actually responded in a manner that makes me trust you are actually listening. I have also seen a lot of similar posts lately, not just about connection issues, but about the quality of service players are getting from the technical support group.

Is it worth it, at this point, to ask them for whatever information they have that may help with this issue, even if they themselves can’t do anything further? You seemed to be able to get more out of them than I was (and I do thank you for that ) so I’m not very optimistic they would be able to provide anything useful or would even understand my request. Really, should I even bother submitting tickets in the future for any other problems if these are representative of the kinds of responses I can expect?