Revenge of the Router

You may or may not recall my post about defeating the problems with the new router and then subsequently declaring they had returned. Well its time for an update.

The problem with the internet not resolving URLs properly seems to have not returned or at least to have abated. However the problem with Eve disconnecting in the middle of gameplay was back with a vengeance last week.

Having exhausted normal router solutions I decided to turn to Eve's forums and see if this was perhaps related to the game. In the Known Problems and Workarounds forum I searched for "disconnect" and hit a slew of posts. Apparently, I'm not alone.

It turns out that there is a slight problem with Eve and routers. Eve was designed to be a low bandwidth game so that even people with dial up access (*shudder*) could participate. The speculation is that the game is so low bandwidth that the router interprets the inactivity that sometimes occurs as no activity and closes the connection on the game. This is why I only started seeing this issue after adding the router to our home network.

Finding this out was a relief and frustration at the same time. Relief that the issue was not something limited to my PC or router, and frustration that a game around since 2004 has such a problem at all. I mean come on! Internet connectivity is the meat and potatoes of a online game, it should be perfected by now.

The upside is that someone posted a workaround to try; set up a ping trace to the game server and the connection will not look inactive. (A ping is a command to send a tiny packet of information to a destination computer address and it sends an acknowledgment back which allows us to see the time it took, the route, etc. A ping trace is the same thing except the ping command is repeatedly sent until you terminate it.)

That's right. To improve your connection to Eve you have to increase bandwidth usage. In my business they call that counter-intuitive.

Anyway, since I tried that workaround I've had no more sudden disconnects while playing. Needless to say I'm pleased as punch. The only possible problem I've encountered is that an internet browsing issue seems to arise after playing Eve in this fashion but I haven't worked out the details on that yet. We shall see.