HOTWXII Testing and Organisational thread

[LzPrst]

hmmm. good to know that carp had a technical issue and didn't bail. this was always a possibility, but a lot of us jumped to conclusions and made some harsh and apparently very unfair accusations, myself included I fear I must say. though I did hope that it wasn't the case and it turns out that my lack of faith in our player pool has been proven wrong. as said before, all things considered, this was a series of unfortunate events that strung people's patience and caused a lot of frustration. that some people took 5 min breaks for whatever reason wouldn't normally cause us to explode into frenzied anger and namecalling. frustrations were running high and that caused us to get upset. what this session did show was that we have some efficiency measures that should be ironed out.


as mentioned, afk's if you know you'll be gone for 5 mins or if you're restarting your comp or whatever.

and everyone should be on msn.


with these two extremely easy measures, much of the frustration we had will be avoided. now back to the main issue which is getting dear old france to work technically. I won't be able to do anything of this sort until later in the week, but if Cyber and other players are able to give him a hand and run some tests, that would help alot.

I do assume france has the most recent patch.....

[Diplo Holland]

I just been running some ping tests on my network.

All pings to my router are 100% - no drops.

BUT pings to my ISP's Primary DNS server consistently has 10% drops. Would this be an issue?

[LzPrst]

and to you guys saying "i don't care if you know who I am bla bla bla".

etiquette, gentlemen.

[LzPrst]

not sure holland. btw. did anyone else forget to vote should we continue story posting and writing or should we just leave it until next session?


any possibility of a "interrim" session? something short during the week?

btw. anyone else having trouble accessing their plomp-mail?

[The Capo]

Eh, I don't think we should soften our position just because we found it was technical. If it was technical that's fine, but I wouldn't go so far as to say we (or even what I said) were out of line.

Frankly we've seen it happen before, and if there are technical difficulties that's fine. Its like I said last night; we shouldn't play anyone as AI until we find out what happened, because we benefit two ways (1) Even though we miss as session we won't ruin the game, could you imagine if we played Carpathia as AI and it turned out (as it did in this case) that he was having technical problems, and then (2) it just leaves us in a better position to complain about him later, that way we did nothing wrong and it was only his fault.

Now I'm glad it turned out that he had computer issues, but since we thought he simply bailed on the game because we couldn't get it to work I stand by my position; if anyone does this they should be kicked out of the game, there's no excuse for it, its not fair to everybody else and its disrespectful.

So, in sum; glad Carpathia had actual problems and just didn't bail on us. Sorry I had to be harsh, but you must understand, we've worked hard on this and anyone who simply left us in the lurch like that should be similarly left in the lurch by the rest of the group. I regret nothing I've said.

As far as etiquette goes; I could care less, if people are going to tell me they already know who I am, why go out of my way to hide it?

Besides, I take offense to Lz assuming our conclusions were unfair. They were not unfair, and Carpathia should realize that they were not unfair. The last thing we heard him say was "Be back in five minutes." Then he never came back, so I wouldn't just say we were wrong simply because he had technical issues. Now, he didn't just leave he had problems okay, but that doens't make our reaction unfair. They were fair, we were just wrong about what happened. I don't think our reaction was wrong at all, it was a good reaction. If it turned out he did just leave would that make them fair again? Isn't that what we thought happened? Did we actually do anything to punish him after we found out what happened? Did we do anything to punish him at the time?

I mean, c'mon, let's not try to hard to jerk eachother off here. Nothing actually happened to him, so its cool, and if you think what I said was too harsh everything I said was said in the event that he actually just left the game. I said he better have a good excuse, and he does, so the issue is over.

[Diplo France]

I'm up for it! It could be a short one two or less hours... and this week I have all the time in the world, any time except what are late morning slots in GMT.

That is once I fix my problem. But even that ain't a requrement. I could prehaps borrow a certain persons laptop+link for a few hours slap Civ4+BtS on it and play.


PEOPLE, IF ANYONE IS ONLINE DURING THE NEXT FIVE HOURS AND IS WILLING TO TRY TO HELP DO SOME TESTS PLEASE LOG ON MSN WITH YOUR ANON ACCOUNT!

[Diplo France]

Originally posted by Diplo Holland


I'm not so sure that's correct. I think France was blocking during the join which stopped others getting in.

This maybe explains why when we tried me as host that 5 joined with no problems then no one else could - France was joining and was blocking somehow?

Can you confirm your port settings and that your router firewall is off?

What is your LAN IP when you run "ipconfig"?

What LAN IP have you set up in your Port Forwarding (Virtual Server) for port 2056 UDP/TCP?

Just trying to think of things here...

Other possibilities:

* low disk space? This also affects virtual memory.
* Faulty ADSL modem?
* ISP needs to open up ports? Some need to do this.
* simple things like all leads carrying the internet - check and replace
* corrupted Windows? Re-install
* faulty drive? You said you had a drive fail since the last session... some drives have intermittent issues before totally failing btw

Come on guys what else could it be?

3 of us started a new game with France through the Lobby and it ran perferctly. We saved it then reloaded and France could not join - exact same issue as failed Sesson 3 of HOTW12...

Now that's a helpfull post. Please people make more ones like this.

I'll try everything stated in the post. Won't know untill I?m able to do a test. Now before I start, I'll just comment a few things.


Corrupted windows- Doubt it everything else is working perfectly even if that is the case I can't get windows before next Monday. So we'll proceed like its not.

Low disk space- The disk that has Civ on it 21,8GB used 8,14GB free. Don't think that is the problem, even if I discount the other disk which seems to be working now.

faulty drive D: that failed is currently empty, C: that has win and now civ, did not cause me any problems.

If it still happens to be any of the above I'll be ok for the next two sessions since I have another (weaker) PC that should be able to run an early game. (but It won't be able to hold up on beyond 1300AD with the current pace of development and empire growth)


I'll start working on which of these I can, immediately. I don't think its firewall since that’s the first thing I checked. Won’t hurt to quadruple check though.

* Faulty ADSL modem?
* ISP needs to open up ports? Some need to do this.
* simple things like all leads carrying the internet - check and replace

Can you confirm your port settings and that your router firewall is off?
What is your LAN IP when you run "ipconfig"?
What LAN IP have you set up in your Port Forwarding (Virtual Server) for port 2056 UDP/TCP?


Before I know if any of this works I'll need to do tests! Just me and one player, starting a game, saving it and trying to load.

[Robert]

- Maybe your router has a hardware firewall. Check what happens when you disable it.

- Configure your firewall in such a way that it forwards port 2056 to your civ pc. Make sure that your civ pc has a static IP address, otherwise you may have to re-configure your router every week.

- Make sure that all your software firewalls (ie. the windows one) and virusscanners are turned off.

[Diplo Carpathia]

I would be all for an interm game sometime this week to make up for the lost session.

It would have to be the same time though. Not sure everyone could do that with work and all.

[Heraclitus]

Why the same time? There might be some leeway. Lets try to figure out what time we can all make it.

[Diplo Carpathia]

Actually, i could start an hour earlier.

[Toni]

Can Mongolia also attach the last save so CS can load it and see if it works properly, he has the most experience with this.

I'm flexible with having an extra session this week.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Diplo Carpathia
Actually, i could start an hour earlier.

Good for me.

[Diplo America]

I am more than willing, if not happy, to start an hour earlier, or more, if that is what everyone thinks we should do.

I'm pretty sure that ONE of these countries, at least, has a game already that would prevent us from playing an hour earlier. But we'll see.

[Diplo France]

I still need to test anyone online?