Guild Wars 2

After spending a week sending emails to ncsoft support, and finally resolving the issue after trying something that was only mentioned on some forgotten forum post on a forgotten website, I couldn’t help but share my thoughts about that experience with the world.

About the issue: this post (which for some reason isn’t stickied, section 7.3) mentions at least 8 different possibilities, many of them are same as the ones ncsoft support were trying to rule out. The end result was enabling default DMZ server and selecting this pc as the receiver on my router – netgear d6300.

UPDATE 2013-01-12

Netgear D6300 comes with “Disable IGMP Proxying” ticked by default. The option is described as “The IGMP Proxying function lets a LAN PC to receive the multicast traffic it is interested in from the Internet.” Unticking that, i.e. allowing it, seems to be sufficient in my case. The rant below is still valid, instead of going into error state, the game should popup a message saying “failed to receive <something>”, moreover launcher should have a tool in it to test for this and other similar issues. A week to develop is nothing compared to years of frustration.

I’m glad I found a remedy, but this workaround is a security risk, and as such is a really bad workaround. Of course ncsoft support cannot do anything else about it. Because to resolve this something would have to be done about the 2 underlying issues – the server sending something to my computer which the router filters out causing the game to go in error state (1), and the game showing black screen and no helpful info when it goes in the error state (2).

1) There are 2 possibilities, given X is anywhere between 1 and 20 minutes: the first is that
the router stops forwarding replies from server to client after X minutes; and the second is that the server sends something after X minutes which router fails to forward correctly. As this doesn’t happen in any other installed game or app and restarting the game temporarily fixes the issue, I’m suspecting the second is more likely.

2) Regardless of what the issue may be in (1), going into error state and not rendering the world is not a good way to handle a wide array of failures. The client already
has a mechanism to generate and send a log file when some other errors happen, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve also seen a the popups saying “login server cannot be contacted”. Surely using either of those 2 error handling strategies is more helpful for the end users and for the support team than the pitch black screen.

Thank you for reading if you got this far.

If you use DMZ it bypasses the SPI on the router which is causing issues for some, but you are left naked to the internet and must rely on software firewall.

Replace the Netgear 6300’s firmware with DD-WRT is an alternative.

Netgear d6300 modem/router is not on DD-WRT official supported list (possibly because it is sort of new), nearest match is r6300, which is just a router. Thanks for the tip though Kirito-sama.

Hi Phoenixx.5210

I bought the D6300 on the 4th of Jan and started to get this problem too.
I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure it out until i read your post about it.
I realized now that it started happening the same time i got the D6300
Have you got any suggestions to play or Advice?

Thanks

Hi xiao, make sure “Disable IGMP Proxying” is unchecked in Advanced → WAN Settings.

Hi Phoenixx.5210

I have been playing for a few hours having the disabled, I have not had a black screen yet.
Which is a good sign but still to early to say.
As some days i can even play a full fractals without a black screen some days it will black screen in 2 mins being in game..

But right now it looks hopeful by un-checking Disable IGMP Proxying

I starting getting a black screen after opening guild wars 2 after my laptop got dropped on the ground. Hardware damage could be your problem if nothing else is working i guess…