"failed To Join Session" Getting Really Old Now, Guys

[Padreic]

I asked months ago for more descriptive error messages. Eventually, the patch notes even said there were more descriptive error messages. I was excited to read that. I have yet to see one, however. My recommendation: find every instance of "Failed to join session" in your code, DE, and DELETE IT. It is useless. It tells us absolutely nothing about what actually went wrong, so you might as well just dump us back to the lobby with no error message at all (which also happens sometimes).

If you'd like to actually address the problem, maybe throw the raw error message at us instead of "failed to join session." Make some sort of debug mode an option for those of us who have some experience with this sort of thing and aren't intimidated by a TCP error code. You have a game that's nominally in beta, folks. LET US BETA TEST IT. You have a giant pool of testers, at least some of whom can give you valuable and insightful bug reports. All we're asking for is some information to go on. Help us to help you.

[taiiat]

your title isn't very constructive, and would probably be best to make it moreso.

 

but i agree with the general idea of this. don't throw away the easy to read text though, just also show raw errors in the same popup for debugging.

[Padreic]

The title isn't meant to be constructive; it's meant to explain the reason for the post. Sorry, but I stand by it. This has been going on since I started playing the game (last winter), and there has been little or no observable progress. It's extremely frustrating, considering the game is played in groups. So yes, it's gotten very, very old.

You can see by the scattershot suggestions for working around the issue that nobody has any idea why it happens. Open ports, change ping limit, use UPnP, don't use UPnP, change regions, use a VPN... These are the suggestions of people willing to try anything to ameliorate a problem whose cause is completely unknown. If we knew what was actually going on, we could at least formulate a reliable workaround. What we see instead is a series of best guesses, some of which seem to work some of the time for some people, but none of which is a real solution, and none of which gets the root problems any closer to being fixed by DE.

Edit: And, I should add, I have administrative control of my router, no strict NAT issues, ports properly forwarded, the in-game connection check comes up fine, etc... None of that seems to matter.

Edited October 21, 2014 by Padreic

[Cisor]

You can get failed when other people are behind strict NAT routers and I suspect there are a lot of people who are behind them. Nothing you or DE can really do about that.

[Padreic]

Actually, there is. Instead of saying "failed to join session," the game could attempt to UDP ping from each machine to the other (just as the connection check does), and report to the person behind the strict NAT that his connection is the problem. DE might not be able to auto-configure your router (outside of UPnP, of course), but they can at least let you know when it's a problem.

Edit: And another idea is to flag the people behind static NAT (via the game's connection check), and give us an option to not try to connect to people with that flag.

Edited October 21, 2014 by Padreic