New player at my wits ends with constant disconnects

PercyVanPelt · May 2021

I get disconnected back to the login screen after playing for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. When I get booted, it says "Unable to connect to game server. Make sure you have a valid internet connection.". My internet connection is perfectly fine and my computer can easily run the game.

Things I have tried:

Deleting all addons
Adding game and launcher to firewall
Resetting modem
Port forwarding
Reinstalling the game
Turning off Ipv6
Doing a DNS flush
Resetting program data folder

And probably some other crap that I can't remember. Been trying to get it working for 2 days now and am about ready to give up. I figured I would reach out and see if anyone here has any suggestions because I am stumped.

GreenHere · May 2021

This game in particular has a tendency to wreak havoc on my home internet, causing frequent disconnects for like no reason, just like you seem to be experiencing.

My solution is to play via my phone's hotspot internet. Not sure if this is an option for you, but it's the only workaround I can offer. :P

I get 10GB of hotspot data per month that I don't have to pay extra for, and I only ever run beyond that if my PC starts downloading an update or something in the background without my knowledge. If I'm only using Discord to chat with a friend and playing ESO, 10GB gets me through a billing cycle without any overages. YMMV.

Just be sure HOTSPOT / DATA SHARING / WHATEVER YOUR PROVIDER CALLS IT is included with your plan first! Depending on your carrier, you can connect to the web through your phone for free... or they could try to charge you literally hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege. Highly recommend checking your plan FIRST, if you're at all unsure about using the Hotspot feature already.

PercyVanPelt · May 2021

GreenHere wrote: »

This game in particular has a tendency to wreak havoc on my home internet, causing frequent disconnects for like no reason, just like you seem to be experiencing.

My solution is to play via my phone's hotspot internet. Not sure if this is an option for you, but it's the only workaround I can offer. :P

I get 10GB of hotspot data per month that I don't have to pay extra for, and I only ever run beyond that if my PC starts downloading an update or something in the background without my knowledge. If I'm only using Discord to chat with a friend and playing ESO, 10GB gets me through a billing cycle without any overages. YMMV.

Just be sure HOTSPOT / DATA SHARING / WHATEVER YOUR PROVIDER CALLS IT is included with your plan first! Depending on your carrier, you can connect to the web through your phone for free... or they could try to charge you literally hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege. Highly recommend checking your plan FIRST, if you're at all unsure about using the Hotspot feature already.

I would do that but I am Canadian and we have some of the worst data plans in the world. They are a joke. So, unfortunately, I can't.

I ended paying for a VPN and now it isn't crashing at all. It sucks that I have to pay for an additional service to play the game but so far this has been the only thing that works.

Knoc · May 2021

I've been constantly disconnecting, too. It's extremely annoying. I can't even do a dungeon now.

I tried all the fixes except reinstalling the game. I really don't feel like downloading 100gbs.

GreenHere · May 2021

jc_green101b16_ESO wrote: »

I've been constantly disconnecting, too. It's extremely annoying. I can't even do a dungeon now.
I tried all the fixes except reinstalling the game. I really don't feel like downloading 100gbs.

FWIW, I did try reinstalling the game when attempting to suss out my own disconnection issues. It did not help at all.

Looks like finding a different way to connect to the servers, whether it's connection method (like I did, posted above) or a VPN (like OP did), is the way to go. It seems pretty unlikely that a redownload will do you any good, unless there's something wrong with your local copy of the game; which is possible, but unlikely.

ZOS_Bill · May 2021

@PercyVanPelt

We appreciate that you've listed the troubleshooting steps you've already tried. Since you've done the basic steps and still get this login error, you can go ahead and start a ticket with customer support for assistance.

gronkdamage · June 2021

PercyVanPelt wrote: »

And probably some other crap that I can't remember. Been trying to get it working for 2 days now and am about ready to give up. I figured I would reach out and see if anyone here has any suggestions because I am stumped.

Have you contacted your ISP? if it's comcast (for instance), they sometimes limit what you can do...

etchedpixels · June 2021

Start the game, stay in game doing stuff until it boots you and repeat it a few times noting how long it took. If the time it took is that consistent within a few minutes each time then you are likely to find that either your router or a wifi hub is misconfigured (or crap or both) or your ISP is running a carrier NAT and has it badly set up so it's dropping active connections that persist for a long time.

If a VPN works it suggests it's one of these two. The router one you can often fix in the router settings, the ISP one is best fixed by finding an ISP that doesn't run carrier NAT and actually hands out real internet addresses.

It can also be other less obvious things - if you check your router and see how long the router has been running and how long the connection is up you should see long values, if on the other hand your connection time is always short and related to you getting booted you've got an ISP problem, and if the router up time is always short your router is dying. With a lot of use cases you'll simply not notice if they come back fast because your web page loads are short bursts, your discord chat is connectionless so will just cut out for a bit, and so on.

Given the growing amount of really bad carrier grade NAT in the world it's possible some of this kind of diagnostic ought to be in the trouble shooting info these days @ZOS_BillE