Disco'ed by arena downsizing?

[peterg2]

I've hardly every been dico'ed totally, but have been twice in the past week or so.

I'm not sure if the latest was tied to reduction in numbers of the blue MA on Sat night-Sun morning. The allowed numbers were over 400 when I started. I played online for a couple of hours and players started leaving about 12:30. At about 1:15 am EST, I got the lost connection from the game screen. I ping plotted to the server and it was up. When I tried to reup, the number of people in the arena was 320 and the allowed amount was 200.

I'm glad I wasn't flying a 262 at the time. Are we being kicked out of the game when the numbers get reduced? It would be good to be told that we are about to be disco'ed so we can land our perk planes.

[BaldEagl]

I got disco'd twice tonight in Blue when the limit was 420.  It was still 420 when I logged back on both times.

I've had 4 discos so far this camp and hadn't had one for months before this.

You probably did get warned (UDP connection lost, switching to TCP) but you still only have one or two minutes to get down before your booted.  My second disco tonight never actually happened because I was in the tower when I got the lost UDP message and I just logged out.

[peterg2]

I've had the lost UDP connection switching to TCP, way back in the version 1.xx past and continued on for a while sometimes. But, with these past couple of discos, I haven't received the switching packet warning. It just tells me I've been disco'ed.

Oh well. I guess it's back to the old days of running ping plotter in the background while playing. It doesn't sound like an arena problem then.

When I used to run the game on dial-up back in the stone age, quite often the ping plotter graph would have a few minute periods of 5-15 sec lag delays before hanging up totally. At that time it was my ISP's routers.

I witnessed quite a number of interesting warping effects and point blank shots that never hit anything. I seem to recall similar things happening recently. It might be a router that Hitech has no control over.

If you've had that number of disco's in a session, you should run Ping Plotter in the background when you play. Then when you get disco'ed, check the Ping Plots to see which router started to hang up. If it's HiTech's routers, they should be told of it.

And, software and computers being their quirky selves, if you run Ping Plotter, you'll never have another disco. They seem to know if someone is trying to debug them.