Hey all.. I'm back, lol!

So, the last week or so I have been getting a lot of LD's when executing macros. I am on Shadowhaven and using the Underfoot client.

Throughout my time playing with MQ2, I have had occasional LD's when running a macro over a bunch of toons. Say, making them all go invis at the same time, or shrinking. But it was just an occasional thing. This last week tho it has increased to a substantial rate. Making it pretty hard to play. Also, initiating melee with my tank seems to LD him quite often as well. Yes, mq2melee is active.

Could this be a server problem? I know SH hasn't been rebooted in a couple weeks. Or is it a timing thing? Would making it so they don't all fire off at exactly the same time make it better?
Thanks
R

What do you mean by linkdead? The only time I go linkdead is when a zone crashes or my network connection craps out.

OK, definition. Linkdead - in this case, while in a group.. a message comes up saying "Soandso has gone linkdead".

So, the character basically removes itself from the game shows a black screen for a while saying disconnected, and ends up at the character select screen.

Its not unlikely that it's a server problem. It's also not unlikely that it's MQ. It's really hard to say... It's not unheard of for An MQ error to cause LD, but usually it crashes hard. You might put a feeler out on the SH forum or try chopping your Marco down to the individual actions you are suspicious of causing it and see if you can consistently trigger it. You can also Download and attach windbg to a session to see a more verbose output from MQ/EQ which occasionally reveals clues.

Linkdeath shouldn't be that sudden.

Do you play with the Ping bar enabled? F11 toggles it.

When a character goes linkdead, the Ping bar clearly shows packet loss. What should normally be a fully green bar turns black at one end. Unless connectivity is restored, the black will overtake the green. This takes a while - 30s to 60s. Only then will linkdeath occur.

Even if the LD character is a boxed toon, you should notice that toon behaving incorrectly for those 30s to 60s. They won't respond to commands, plugins or macros because those instructions get lost while being sent from client to server.

If one toon goes "linkdead" while other toons played from the same computer and located in the same zone do not, it's probably not linkdeath.

Instead, it looks like one toon is being kicked from the server. Why? I don't know. Logging multiple characters from the same EQ account at the same time may produce those symptoms. Doing something illegal can definitely get you kicked though those usually result in bans/suspensions/warnings. Flooding the server with spam *might* get you kicked (think lots of chat messages in a short period of time).

If the loss of connection is actual linkdeath, then anti-virus or firewall issues are likely culprits. Stateful inspection and real-time monitoring can possibly interrupt the carefully choreographed dance between client and server.


This. In addition, MQ2 crashes, like the bandolier/exchange bug you reported before, won't sometimes work and sometimes crash. You should see definite patterns with the crashes.

OK, thanks for the info.
When this happens it's not like usual when the ping bar goes down and all. It's pretty sudden. Like I said, I get the notification in game and when I switch to the character that has disconnected, there is a black screen for a little while which resolves to the character select screen after about 30 seconds or so.
This usually happens when I run a macro that will make all the characters do something simultaneously. Like go invis, shrink, summon a mount.. etc. The deal with my tank going LD when I initiate melee combat is pretty new. As soon as I hit the button to melee the screen goes black.
Trev and Kayen are MIA again it looks like. I will post something to see if I can get them to do a server reset and see if that helps the issue. As I said before, this just started about a week ago and the server hasn't been reset in about 2 or more weeks. They had been having some memory issues previous to that though that were causing some grief.. perhaps this is something left over and it took a while to manifest.
I will also post some queries on the SH forums and see if anyone else is having this issue.
As always, thanks again for the info and help..
R

I can say there haven't been any serious changes in underfoot that would introduce new issues. That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't something in MQ that needs changing. There are situations, like custom servers having really big spell IDs that reveal (read: create) shortcomings in MQ.