Sporadic unreliable chat

[Yueh]

I've spent hours perusing the various ramblings on the EQ Tech support board to no avail so I thought I'd toss this one out here. I searched here and did notice a few posts back in May but things have become much worse since then :)

The newish world chat function seems to be somewhat (ok, VERY) flaky when run behind a NAT firewall. Sometimes I can hear one person in a chat group but not another even though they both show up in a /list. Other times I can hear everyone but no one can hear me. etc. etc. etc. Looking at Guygin's post a while back it sounds like the server only sends keep-alive packets every 15-20 minutes so I'll try upping my udp timeout to 25 min and see if that helps. I do, however, find it very odd that the keep alive strategy would be server initiated so I'm skeptical. Plus, unless it is a peer to peer system, why would I lose chat from one user but not another.

Also, very recently, post bazaar/newui/cross server chat, I'm starting to see the same issues with tells and guildchat. This is a lot more distressing. Sometimes I feel like Neo in The Matrix when they grow his mouth shut :D

Soooo anyhoo, has anyone else run into this issue and if so, can you make any suggestions on how to fix it and, more importantly, can you explain what networking strangeness is causing it in the first place? Enquiring minds want to know! TIA

[high_jeeves]

No problems here... Tells/guildchat and such is on the same port as normal EQ activities, so missing tells/guildchat would signal a deeper problem to me, like perhaps a general packet drop/loss issue.

--Jeeves

[Yueh]

You'd think that would make it just generally intermittant, not related to a specific player. Did they make some sort of fundamental change in the way chat works when they implemented the cross server chat traffic?

The only place I have been lately is the Bazaar though so possibliy I just need to get out more and avoid the packet spam :D

[Mr. Suspicious]

You'd think that would make it just generally intermittant, not related to a specific player. Did they make some sort of fundamental change in the way chat works when they implemented the cross server chat traffic?

Could be your internal network that's dropping packets (modem, NICs, cables, host or proxy server) or your ISP might drop packets. So no, a general packet drop/loss issue does not make it generally intermittant.

[Yueh]

Could be your internal network that's dropping packets (modem, NICs, cables, host or proxy server) or your ISP might drop packets. So no, a general packet drop/loss issue does not make it generally intermittant.

I was referring to the fact that I can either hear player A on a given chat channel or I cannot. If it was packet loss, I should hear them intermittantly. The client doesn't show any packet loss either. I'd put money on the fact that my NAT has something to do with it though. And, it could very well be, that there are two unrelated issues, one being the chat dropping people, and two being the tell, /gu thing.

Oh well, the experimentation continues :)

[LordCrush]

I had the problem that the chat-channels not the old channels eg. ooc shout gu worked about 1 to 5 mins. After that or after zoning all channels were gone. /list showed nothing. A trace showed that packets were send from the EQ-Client to the World-server (different Server than for ooc etc.), but nothing returned.

The problem was the UDP-NAT-Timeout of my router that was 30 sec.... Now i have 60 min timeout like the TCP-Timeout and i have no problems any more.

I know that is a different problem, but perhaps it helps a little