When games lose connection, strangely

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When games lose connection, strangely

Post by spanky4ever »

I have been experienced this a lot when playing recently. When it happens, I lose elo, and that is strange. Pls tell me what is going on here? Is it some kind of cheet?
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by spanky4ever »

And it always happens when I am about to win the games
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by P i k i l i c »

This is weird, sometimes I lose connection as well but I get reconnected quickly. If it is only when you win games, it looks obviously suspicious, but I don't know if a cheater can disconnect you and not lose elo.
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

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Post by musketeer925 »

spanky4ever wrote:
18 Jan 2025, 21:25
And it always happens when I am about to win the games
It happened two me twice tonight, winning a decisive battle that will nearly end the game - and, disconnect. And my opponent ends up getting the Elo. Very frustrating.

I started playing again because my game stopped crashing, but now I get disconnects instead -.-
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by iNcog »

is it bug abuse or just bad luck?
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by musketeer925 »

I think it's most likely some kind of bug in the game - a big fight at a critical game-winning moment where you micro and send a lot of commands produces a flurry of network traffic that makes it more susceptible to a packet drop or other less than perfect network condition.
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by spanky4ever »

I do not know what the issue is, but it is A big ISSUE. To many games that should have been a win, are giving me a lose. I am not competing with most elo, but it is bugging me - a lot.
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by musketeer925 »

another one tonight
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by musketeer925 »

I submitted a support request at https://support.ageofempires.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Getting more reports from other affected users may help them prioritize and identify the problem.
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

Post by Squamiger »

in the last couple of days im also just getting huge lag spikes every game, despite my internet speed being very fast
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Re: When games lose connection, strangely

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Post by musketeer925 »

Support sent the following, which wasn't entirely helpful, but did have a hint:
Thank you for reaching out to us! I apologize for the trouble you have encountered with the disconnections occurring in Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition. For this issue can you please try the steps listed below to see if they help resolve the issue?

  • Please make sure you have Crossplay enabled. You can check this in-game by navigating to Options > Game Options > scroll down to the Multiplayer section and ensure that “Allow Cross-Network Play” is checked.
    • All players attempting to join the match should check this.
  • Make sure you are on the latest game build. If an update was released recently, you will need to be on the latest build to play with the rest of the community.
  • Make sure your local or campus firewall is not blocking connections.
  • Make sure the game is whitelisted so it doesn’t get blocked in the matchmaking lobby.
  • Disable your VPN if you are using any.
  • Make sure your firewall settings are set up to allow incoming communication on TCP Port 8888 and UDP Port 9999, as well as Port 3478 (UDP & TCP) and Port 5222 (UDP & TCP).
Should the issue continue, I would like to ask that you please try the additional troubleshooting steps in our articles that I have linked below:
  • I cannot see any game lobbies. What's wrong? – Age of Empires Support
  • I can't click the Multiplayer button. – Age of Empires Support
  • My game keeps lagging or crashing while I'm playing a multiplayer match. What can I do? – Age of Empires Support
Most of these are obviously not the problem. My game is of course up to date - it's not dropping from the halfway complete game due to this.

However, the most likely suspect, if the problem was really on my end, was that my router's firewall would somehow be dropping packets. I tried forwarding all the specified ports to my PC. To my surprise, that seemed to resolve the connection drops. This confirmed my router's firewall was at fault. However, port forwarding wasn't really a workable solution for me long term, because my network has multiple users who must both be able to play AoE3:DE simultaneously. With the ports forwarded to one computer, only that computer would be able to play.

However, I had another theory. There's no reason for the firewall to drop TCP packets, but UDP session tracking for a firewall is a bit trickier. Because UDP is a "connectionless" protocol, the firewall has to just guess when the session is complete, and stops forwarding external packets to your PC. Most routers implement this as a timeout, and if no activity occurs on the UDP port/dest combo for some duration, the connection is dropped and incoming packets will not be received.

Some routers allow you to customize this timeout in different ways; mine, a custom router running OPNsense, has the following "Firewall Optimization" option:

Image

Setting this to "conservative", rather than the default "normal" setting, says that it "Tries to avoid dropping any legitimate idle connections at the expense of increased memory usage and CPU utilization." After selecting this and disabling the port forwarding, I am having no issues no far - I will report back if anything changes.

I do think the developers should be able to fix this for everyone without requiring people to tweak their router settings, so I'd still consider it a bug or shortcoming of the game's networking code. Any UDP connection used by the game needs to send some kind of heartbeat or ping every few seconds if the connection is otherwise idle in order to ensure any firewalls do not drop the connection.

TL;DR for anyone having the issue:

You can try one of the following:

  • If your router allows you to customize the UDP connection timeout or how aggressively it drops idle connections, this may resolve your issue. If it's a timeout option, I would try setting as high as it will let you, or maybe up to the duration of a game (60 minutes? 30 minutes?)
  • You can give your computer a static IP on your network and forward the following ports to it: TCP Port 8888 and UDP Port 9999, as well as Port 3478 (UDP & TCP) and Port 5222 (UDP & TCP). This should work as long as it's the only computer where you play AoE3 on your network.

If anyone having the issue needs help figuring out their router settings, feel free to post your router model in this thread, and I can see if I can provide guidance. :smile:

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