Port Forwarding for Elvenar?

[Risen Malchiah]

For anyone with routers and familiar with the concept of port forwarding, are there settings that may facilitate Elvenar at all?

I play from 2 primary locations. 1 of them works fine as expected without issue. The other has some odd hiccups that showed up a few months ago.

In the problematic location, occasionally I will get stream errors and the odd thing about it is that it also knocks me offline completely. At first, I assumed this was an ISP issue and I was dealing with an intermittent connection, but if I'm not playing Elvenar, then this never happens. All other sites work just fine and I've never lost connection. BUT, whenever a stream error occurs in the game, my router resets and I temporarily lose internet. It always comes back in a minute or so, but it's really annoying and I suspect there's something about the game my router doesn't like.

Does this make sense at all? I'm hoping some port forwarding settings in the router will clear this issue up.

(I've used multiple browsers and this happens whether I use Chrome, Firefox, IE or Waterfox and clearing cache doesn't seem to matter. I've also done a speedtest and have no problems that I can detect. )

 

[Deleted User - 3932582]

For anyone with routers and familiar with the concept of port forwarding, are there settings that may facilitate Elvenar at all?

I play from 2 primary locations. 1 of them works fine as expected without issue. The other has some odd hiccups that showed up a few months ago.

In the problematic location, occasionally I will get stream errors and the odd thing about it is that it also knocks me offline completely. At first, I assumed this was an ISP issue and I was dealing with an intermittent connection, but if I'm not playing Elvenar, then this never happens. All other sites work just fine and I've never lost connection. BUT, whenever a stream error occurs in the game, my router resets and I temporarily lose internet. It always comes back in a minute or so, but it's really annoying and I suspect there's something about the game my router doesn't like.

Does this make sense at all? I'm hoping some port forwarding settings in the router will clear this issue up.

(I've used multiple browsers and this happens whether I use Chrome, Firefox, IE or Waterfox and clearing cache doesn't seem to matter. I've also done a speedtest and have no problems that I can detect. )

It's highly unlikely that port forwarding will solve your issues. If a particular application requires some port forwarding setup, it will simply not work - it won't experience random drops once in a while. And no network activity should make your router reset, period.

It might be a time to replace your router - these are the symptoms of it malfunctioning. I've had very similar issues not a long time ago, but these were most visible in streaming video. On a periodic basis, stream get suck, quality will go bad, and then will recover, and I couldn't figure out what was the reason.Turns out, router would reset randomly (takes a about a minute), but video is buffered so you don't see it right away. Then is stuttered, turned bad quality and then resumed (when router would come back online). After I found out, I replaced the router and the issue was gone.

I think your Elvenar behavior is a symptom of a problem rather than a cause. You lose connection due to router reset, and the game reports it.

 

[Risen Malchiah]

I think your Elvenar behavior is a symptom of a problem rather than a cause. You lose connection due to router reset, and the game reports it.

That's what my assumption has been as well but this has gone on for months and Elvenar is the only site I've ever had problems with. I never lose connection doing anything else and I use the internet quite a bit for hours at a time doing research on things and haven't had issues with pages not loading. It could still be what you're saying but it's becoming less likely. After this much time, I'm just as surprised as you are that it isn't something else that seems to be causing this and I'm mystified. I should play another online game for a few hours to test the connection.

Another possibility is that it is my laptop that is resetting the connection and not the router itself which isn't very old. (The router is one floor down so I dont physically see it reset, but it's only about 15 feet away and the wifi signal remains strong even when the internet is lost.) The TV signal and other people in the room never lose a connection at the same time.

This laptop is about 8 years old and I once played around with the Windows services on this computer and stripped it of various services that aren't essential to reduce the memory bloat of Windows to make Warcraft run better. It's possible Elvenar somehow uses one of the Windows services I disabled.

 

[Deleted User - 3932582]

Browsing web it is practically impossible to detect intermittent outages - for that, you need something that requires constant connection, and doesn't do much buffering or retries - something like VoIP or online games sensitive to lag. As I mentioned, even with streaming videos it can be hard to detect due to buffering.

But is it just a connection that is getting dropped, or a router is actually getting reset? If it's a router, then think about this - no regular network activity is supposed to trigger router reset. Period. Unless you're running specific exploits that router is vulnerable to, or you have a really crappy router and the network is flooded (again, not a regular situation). The only way to reboot a router would be via admin interface or a script running on the router itself. Your laptop, old or not, should not be able to do anything to trigger the reboot (except you logging into router and kicking it off).

Connection between your laptop and the router being dropped can happen for a million of reasons, especially if WiFi is getting involved. I've seen a network that would drop connections every time microwave was turned on

 

[Ashrem]

As Minmax said, You could load up a dozen tabs with research papers and read for three hours without realizing the modem had rebooted 3 or 4 times during that period.

Games like elvenar tend to involve constant small interactions with the server, once every few seconds at most. Browsing tends to be bursts of a larger amount of data once every few minutes or longer.

I'm sure there must be a local equivalent of the Canadian Internet Registry Authority's speed test, which if you sign up (free) allows you to test every few minutes for up to 12 hours. It still might not catch everything, but testing every five minutes for 12 hours is more likely to spot trouble than web browsing.

 

[Risen Malchiah]

But is it just a connection that is getting dropped, or a router is actually getting reset?

I don't believe it's an actual router reset, but the symptoms led me to think it was. The wifi signal to the router stays at full bars, but the yellow ! icon appears on the wifi icon in the taskbar. The info from there will indicate it's still connected to the router but will say "No internet access." That made me assume it was the router since it always came back about a minute later which is what I'd expect if the router was resetting. I've never actually checked if the router was resetting since I'm lazy and it's 1 floor below me.

I'm sure there must be a local equivalent of the Canadian Internet Registry Authority's speed test, which if you sign up (free) allows you to test every few minutes for up to 12 hours.

I downloaded a speed and latency test that logs every few seconds and let it run for about 8 hours. And miraculously now that I'm monitoring it, I haven't lost a connection or had any stream errors today. I will keep checking to try and catch the gremlin.

 

[Ashrem]

miraculously now that I'm monitoring it, I haven't lost a connection or had any stream errors today

This hints to me that it's possible your provider is breaking any connections that have been inactive for a certain period. I wouldn't have thought it was still a thing, but some ISPs used to do this to discourage people from running servers and to free up addresses is their space from people who left their computers on all day.