Outside of country / Server list black / Hotel wifi

[C5BAMF]

I'm staying at a local hotel in Iceland using their wifi connection provided. I'm trying to connect to the servers but after starting the client and opening the server select screen all of the servers are coming up empty (the box is black). Meanwhile I have no issues connecting to this and other websites including my online classes.

I'm assuming this is a connection speed issue? Does anyone know for certain or if there is a fix?

[Darksinga]

I would have the same issue when my internet was crap. Pretty sure it's 100% connection issue. I would keep spamming logins until you get to server select. Once your in game shouldn't have as many issues (well if you don't zone ) :P

[Tann]

Originally Posted by C5BAMF [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm assuming this is a connection speed issue? Does anyone know for certain or if there is a fix?

Yep, the eqemu host doesn't like poor/weak connections.

Only thing you can do is keep trying and trying, eventually you'll see the server list then crash on entering character select screen. Keep trying until you load into a character select that says "spell files outdated", keep on trucking and you'll eventually get in game.. 50% chance of crashing on zone change. glhf

[Tupakk]

I get this every morning logging in on my work machine that is wireless. Just keep logging in and quitting until the list pops up. TBH I think it has something to do with the new patch because it didn't do it before.

[C5BAMF]

I appreciate the replies. I've tried somewhere between 30-40 times to connect over the past 12 hours. No luck at getting the server list to populate. Nor with the "Quick Connect" option.

Before returning to the states I'll try paying for the hotel wifi vs the 24hrs free access version of it and see if it makes the difference.

[Whiteberry]

They may have you throttled. Try a VPN

[Baler]

Test your net speeds a few times. I've played p99 on satellite internet from across a lake. Which was peaking at like ~200kbs download speed rarely. avg 60kb or less. Based on that you can guess the upload speeds. EQ1 uses so little internet.

I used NetLimiter to make sure that no other program or anything else was using internet except for EQ and required things to connect to the net.

The only time things went wrong for me was when I zoned. For obvious reasons.

[Zaela]

If packets are getting dropped left and right, there's not much you can do.

But if your connection is mostly okay, it may be an issue with packets being delivered out of order. Normally when the client receives packets out of order, it informs the server of what it expected to receive next, and the server re-sends that packet and everything "after" it.

The eqemu login server deliberately ignores these out-of-order requests from the client, presumably because it would be a relatively cheap and easy DoS vector. When that happens, the client gets cranky and starts flagging every packet it gets from then on as "out of order", and nothing gets done.

There is a workaround for this, though... We can put a layer between the client and the loginserver. The layer forces all the packets the client sees to be in order. If the layer receives packets out of order, it does nothing -- it just waits until the gaps are filled by later packets, then sends them all to the client in order. As long as no packets are dropped entirely, this works quite well.

As far as the loginserver goes, pretty much the only thing that can be received out of order is the server list, and it's only 10 or so packets. Once you pass that hurdle, char select and zones should handle out-of-order requests correctly, so receiving things out of order shouldn't matter as much (and these can also address dropped packets to some extent).


You can download the workaround program (eqemu-login-helper.exe) here. Code available here.

If you want to try this out, there is a little setup involved:

Steps:
1) Open eqhost.txt in your EQ folder, and change the Host from "login.eqemulator.net:5998" to "localhost:5998".
2) Start eqemu-login-helper.exe and keep it running in the background.
3) Start EQ and log in as usual

The workaround is technically a "man in the middle", but it runs entirely on your local machine, and it does nothing except forward packets (client -> loginserver), possibly after inspecting their "sequence" values and keeping them in a temporary queue (loginserver -> client). Only packets sent between you and the loginserver are treated this way; once you connect to a specific server, eqemu-login-helper is no longer in the middle of any client-server communication.

You'll need to remember to always run eqemu-login-helper before trying to log in, or else remember to change your eqhost.txt back to login.eqemulator.net if you want to log in without it. Making this convenient is left as an exercise for the reader...

[C5BAMF]

Thank you very much for the replies. I tried working on it a bit more today and I've been unable to come up with a solution.

@Zaela I gave the eqemu-login-helper approach several tries after replacing the eqhost.txt which seemed to be functioning correctly however it ultimately continued to return me to the same blank/black server list window.

I should be back stateside again in a day or two and can play from home so this will no longer be an issue then. I did however hope to resolve it in case it becomes a common issue in the future (I travel a great deal for work).

For now I'll just chalk it up to this specific hotel in Iceland.

Thanks again and cheers!

[Wiley]

Updating .NET Framework helped me out a while back (I think it was 3.5 at the time), could be totally unrelated but my blank server list abruptly went away.