At least 1 player disconnects in team games, making them unplayable

3/4 matches have a player on the other team drop tonight.
Same as last night. Never seen it this bad.

Also our team needs to re-invite after every game.

this, me and my mate have been trying to get a game for an hour now and all the time at least one of us disconnects for seemingly no reason at all, It is just impossible to get a team game right now. We have given up now :frowning:

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I have network logs and screen recordings collected where I queue with one other player(wantless in the recordings) for 2v2’s and 4v4’s. We favorite arabia and ban black forest & two islands .

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1crMEvf5s-f0rUzRK9UMgA9-jW9gkVsc1?usp=sharing

The folder titled i_crashed contains my network log and recording when I failed to get past the loading screen. From Wantless’s end he saw the game saying I resigned upon him loading in. Upon hearing that I had resigned we waited a few minutes to see if I’d ever get past the loading screen but I was stuck and had to alt+f4 as seen in the video

The folder titled wantless_crashed contains my network log and recording from my perspective when he failed to load in. He says he got a matchmaking failed player left the party message and he never hit loading screen.

Wantless was host both times in these scenarios

Observations, (small sample size):
Once we find a combo of either me hosting or wantless hosting or the game letting us in, subsequent searches for 2v2’s and 4v4’s no longer fail as long as neither of us restart. We haven’t seen this instant drop issue queuing only for 2v2’s.

The errors that cause an instant drop seem to differ every time. A few days ago I saw this error when my game failed to load in:


When that happened wantless saw that I resigned instantly too.

It hasn’t crashed with me as a host. I don’t know if that’s a pattern as we haven’t queued enough times with that to be sure.

We didn’t have issues before patch 40220

Possible differences
One thing that maybe is different from other people’s network setup is I have my laptop plugged into another pc via ethernet cable and I share connection between both machines. My laptop is connected to wifi and I use the laptop to play aoe2de.

I also have a second, wide screen monitor plugged into my laptop when playing

Thank you guys for looking into this! LMK if there’s any other info that’d be useful

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Another one where I “Lost Connection to server, attempting to reconnect”

By video do you mean the recorded games? Would posting the replay alongside the log help?

these would be the first match attempted to get played after starting the game

in each case, someone else dropped or failed to load or the game failed to start for anyone
team games were much more stable in march/april. it seems the bugs came in later patches

Hello everyone! We’ve created a new tool that we’re using to collect additional logging information about the issues you’re experiencing.

What is the Enhanced Logging Build?

Steam users can now access a new Steam Beta branch called the Enhanced Logging Build. This branch will allow you to play with users on the main game branch, but will generate advanced networking logs to help our team diagnose critical crashes and disconnects in your games—even if it’s someone else experiencing the firsthand issues in your match.

Some important notes of warning:

  • DUE TO THE ENHANCED LOGGING, THERE WILL BE AN EXPECTED PERFORMANCE HIT WHEN PLAYING ON THE BUILD. This is not a bug, as it is a result of the logging that is occurring behind-the-scenes.
  • DUE TO THE ADDITIONAL RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS OF THE BUILD, DO NOT REPORT BUGS OR ISSUES WHEN PLAYING ON THE ENHANCED LOGGING BUILD. Due to the additional factors, we cannot action issues reported when playing on the build.
  • CHANGE TO THE MAIN GAME BRANCH WHEN YOU’RE DONE GENERATING LOGS. This will ensure you play properly, can report issues, and enjoy everything the game has to offer!

Accessing the Logging Build

Here’s how to access the special branch:

  1. Launch Steam.
  2. Right click Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition in your library and select Properties…
  3. Select the BETAS tab.
  4. Enter the following beta access code: 4YH2SkfG7CK5yanvrXE9qj8b
  5. Click CHECK CODE
  6. To utilize the build, select the enhanced_logging branch from the drop-down list. Your game will download a very small update (~35 MB).

What to Report

Once you or another user experiences a disconnect, you will want to close out the game and find the logs generated while you were playing. They can be found here:

  • File Location: C:\Users\LOCALUSER\Games\Age of Empires 2 DE\logs

    (Note that the LOCALUSER part of the path is replaced by your specific user account. If you changed the default installation directory of your Steam client, the logs folder may also be created in a different location.)

You will want to obtain the log file associated with the session where you experienced the connectivity problem. If you closed your game, this is typically the last session, as denoted by the date and time of the log in the folder:

  • Log Example: 2020.09.02-15.08.09.txt
  • The first set of numbers is the date (2020.09.02 = YYYY.MM.DD = September 2nd, 2020)
  • The second set is the time the file was created (15.08.09 = HH.MM.SS = 3:08pm and 9 seconds)

Logs are saved at the END of a session when the client is terminated, and will usually be the last log file in the folder if you look for it immediately following a disconnect or crash.

Transmitting Logs & Important Information

Now that you have the log, please upload it to a file hosting service that can support the file. Make sure you also list it as public so it can be accessed by the Test team!

You can then share the link to the file as a reply, which should also include answers to the following questions:

  • WHAT TYPE of match of you playing? Is it a team game? 1v1? Ranked queue or custom lobby?

  • WHEN did the disconnect occur? When loading into a ranked game? When matchmaking? During the match?

  • Was it your FIRST match of the day? Was this your first match since launching the client? Your second? Third?

  • WHAT STEPS did you take leading up to the disconnect? Describe what happened leading up to the disconnect. Any information is helpful.

If you also have a video recording of the incident, please feel free to include it in your report!

Thank you!

As always, thank you all for helping us track down these issues! This information and the additional logging provided by this new tool should help the team dig into and fix these issues, so I look forward to seeing what you provide!

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I’m giving this a go soon & will report back. Thanks

Actually, the team would prefer if you use the new process, as it will generate more advanced network logs with more helpful information.

Thank you!

will give this a go later, i get frequent disconnects.

I do know what i have to do in game usually to cause it. It seems to happen most for me just when i chat. the delay between sending type chat and having it display (sending off for censoring) is about 1/4 a second normally, but in some games it is worse. the games where it is worse, it seems far more likely that the game will drop. almost always my drops are within a second of sending a chat message.

3 Likes

hey GMEvangelos thanks for posting this, I’ve got some questions if you know the answer to them or could help us ask.

Last night I had another game that crash to desktop, but log file in the date/time format of 2020.09.02-15.08.09.txt did not exist and I’ve seen this happen more and more often, each time I crash it doesn’t generate crash .txt except for out of sync disconnection, but crash to desktop seem not to generate log for me nor my friends.

instead, I got a folder created 2020.09.12-0210.57 at the time of crash, in the folder there is a file called Main.txt with 0KB file size which is empty.

how can we get the actual log?

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this one is disconnected out of sync thus the log file did generate. 36 MB in size.

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@GMEvangelos 2nd game out of sync back to back.

log file for 2nd out of sync game

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4 games this morning so far, 3 times someone disconnects on loading in

3 out of 3 2v2 ranked games disconnected in the last hour

watching replay game closes to desktop, log file here

Please follow the steps in this post, above, so we have enough information to dig into the issue at hand:

Thank you! :slight_smile:

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Is this still related to the disconnect issues? Or are you suggesting the disconnects happen because of the more demanding system requirements? The one seems a network issue and the other a hardware issue. Let’s keep this on-topic. This sounds like a feature request.

Computers are not the same as they were 20 years ago. The game also developed (mostly in a positive way) since its first release in 1999. The disconnect issues are an exception.

Today another topic was started about the disconnect issue, showing it is still actual (Drop/Disconnect issues will ever be fixed?). Although it was started out of frustration and is not very constructive, I hope the team can find a solution with the help of the extra debug logging.

Does this always happen after a server maintenance?

Anyone else find it funny that it’s been 4.5 since this problem first started (at least for me) and this problem has largely gone unchanged? I really don’t understand what’s going through the minds of the devs, are minor balance changes or “events” really more important than actually fixing your game? Moreover why did it take so long for them to come out and ask people to send out the logs about the disconnects? Come on man…

2 Likes

I understand it is frustrating but they are currently looking into it. unfortunately game is old and complicated, further more it uses bunch of OS related stuff to run and theres really no easy solution except bug report and submit it to them.

community person mentioned above to help track issue, please follow the steps and provide log file, more data the better so they can resolve it sooner.