Question Intermittent disconnect from game servers ?

[Ashensorrow]

We recently up graded our modem and the direction of Xfinity our service provider, and since then i have been unable to maintain a connection to any game server other than games that run peer to peer... Xfinity has come out here and redone everything from the tap at the pole to my modem/router. It's all brand new yet my connection still drops...

I have a Arris G36 modem/router combo
Im on a wired connection directly from the modem/router
I have this issue with both my Xbox Series X and my PC
no one else in the house has any issues as i am the only gamer
these are the parts in my PC it was built by PC Redux
1000W ATX 80 Plus Gold
CM MasterLiquid ML360
Windows 11 Home + USB Recovery
Wireless 802.11ax
Cooler Master TD500 RGB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24GB
1TB NVMe M.2
32GB DDR4 Dual Channel
ASUS Z690 Series | INTEL
Intel Core i9-13900K 24-Core

Please help, this is super frustrating
Thank you

 

[bill001g]

So first you always want to test on ethernet. Wifi is subject to random data loss and games are extremely susceptible to being disconnected for tiny loss. I assume you are using different ethernet cables for the pc and xbox ?

Simple first test. Open some back ground CMD windows and leave a ping command run to your router IP and to some common ip like 8.8.8.8. When you see issues in the game quickly switch and check the CMD windows. I doubt you see loss to the router since it happens on 2 devices.....unless of course you are using wifi.

Problems with loss to the router IP tend to be software in your pc or more rarely the router itself. You can really do nothing with the arris box since the ISP is in charge of firmware. You could I guess set it to bridge mode which would limit you to a single device but it would eliminate the router software part of the device. You of course can no longer ping the router IP but if you were to still see loss/disconnect in bridge mode then it is more likely a software issue in the pc.

If you get no loss to the router but you get loss to 8.8.8.8 this is more problematic. This tends to be a problem in the ISP network but they have already replaced the most common causes. There are screens on the arris router that show you the signal levels and also how may errorred packets you have. Uncorrectable error packets mean packet loss. You will always see a small number of these and since the counter does not reset often the number can get big over many days/weeks. Pretty much if you can see the numbers changing between commands you have a problem. You can also check the signals levels with the recommended ones but I suspect these are fine since this is what the ISP actually is testing when they come out to your house.

You can run things like tracert 8.8.8.8 and things ping various different nodes in the path but you really can't do much if the problem is past the equipment in your house and the cable leading to the ISP.

 

[Ashensorrow]

So first you always want to test on ethernet. Wifi is subject to random data loss and games are extremely susceptible to being disconnected for tiny loss. I assume you are using different ethernet cables for the pc and xbox ?

Simple first test. Open some back ground CMD windows and leave a ping command run to your router IP and to some common ip like 8.8.8.8. When you see issues in the game quickly switch and check the CMD windows. I doubt you see loss to the router since it happens on 2 devices.....unless of course you are using wifi.

Problems with loss to the router IP tend to be software in your pc or more rarely the router itself. You can really do nothing with the arris box since the ISP is in charge of firmware. You could I guess set it to bridge mode which would limit you to a single device but it would eliminate the router software part of the device. You of course can no longer ping the router IP but if you were to still see loss/disconnect in bridge mode then it is more likely a software issue in the pc.

If you get no loss to the router but you get loss to 8.8.8.8 this is more problematic. This tends to be a problem in the ISP network but they have already replaced the most common causes. There are screens on the arris router that show you the signal levels and also how may errorred packets you have. Uncorrectable error packets mean packet loss. You will always see a small number of these and since the counter does not reset often the number can get big over many days/weeks. Pretty much if you can see the numbers changing between commands you have a problem. You can also check the signals levels with the recommended ones but I suspect these are fine since this is what the ISP actually is testing when they come out to your house.

You can run things like tracert 8.8.8.8 and things ping various different nodes in the path but you really can't do much if the problem is past the equipment in your house and the cable leading to the ISP.

Thank you for the advice! Most of this I have done, ill try to give you the results in the order you layed it out

Yes both PC and Xbox are on Ethernet plugged directly into the G36 Modem/Router

I've run multiple tracert 8.8.8.8 the numbers are solid with an occasional spike at the 5th or 6th hop but even with the spike its still well within a reasonable time around 70ms most the time just over 100ms with the spike

I disabled the firewall at the modem, to test if it was the modem software, that did not change the disconnect issue, If it was just the PC i was having issue with i would be more inclined to think it was something with the PC.


Downstream Qam: -4.5 to -6.4 dBmV with 32 entries
Upstream Qam: 48.27 to 49.26 dBmV with 6 entries

Unerrored Codewords	Correctable Codewords	Uncorrectable Codewords
130676623	0	0
128917922	20	0
128926204	0	333
128934210	1	359
128958896	0	0
128971520	0	0
128988685	0	0
129001537	0	0
129021853	0	0
129034335	9	0

basically nothing, there are 3 or 4 more pages of this but they are all zeros

And yet im unable to connect to game servers even though there is apparently nothing wrong with anything. If you have anything else im open to suggestions.

 

[bill001g]

This is unfortunate because all the testing tools say you do not have a network problem.

This means the game has some issue or there is something different about the network connection to the game severs compared to the servers you have been testing to.

Maybe blindly try to disable IPv6 in the nic settings just to see if you get lucky.

It would be nice if the game actually told you why it disconnected. It is now trying to find some way to get a standard tool to show a problem at the same time as the game. I guess you could ping the game server if it will respond but even if you see something it does little good. The game company will of course tell you there server is fine and your other testing has shown your network connection is also fine so that leaves some random ISP in the path maybe causing the issue.

It may still be worth continued testing of your connection to the ISP, maybe you got unlucky and did not see issue as the same time the game did. Since you can't actually get a problem fixed in something you have no control over it is better if the problem was actually in something you can control.