Error 303 and variable IP

TheWoanderer

So...
Why am I being booted from server so frequently.
Everything else I use works fine.
ZOS tell me I must approach my ISP but the problem is not their fault. This has been confirmed.
As far as my ISP are concerned everything works perfectly apart from this 1 game.
My ISP are therefore fulfiillg their end of the contract.

My Netflix is fine
My Laptop is fine
My Twitch is fine
My Deezer is fine
My Mobile Phone is fine
My other Xbox games are fine
My Router tests show a solid green connection (green is good)
My Xbox tests say everything is fine
My ISP list no outages
Xbox live is showing no problems.
Multiple router resets
Multiple Alternative Mac Address resets.

So here I am getting booted every 5 minutes and having a horrendous experience with constant disconnects, new dlc bugs (naturally) 'unusually' long load screens. Terrible lag that just boggles the mind where I am unable to pick items up for up to 10 seconds at a time, for each item.

It makes the game virtually unplayable & leaves me wanting to slice my own jugular.

Am I being falsely labelled as a bot because my IP address changes?
Who helps me fix this. ZOS insinuates they are unable to and my ISP doesn't seem willing so here I am paying a year's subscription and purchasing a new dlc for a game that is causing me major displeasure (when it works it is great, but when it doesn't it is beyond horrendous)

I don't understand how it works well for 2 weeks and then boom the most horrendous experience you can have.
Last time if I include the 3 days I struggled before I raised a ticket, I struggled with these issues for 15 days... That is half a month.

What do I do?
This is not right.
And I'm stuck with this ISP until end of contract October.

So right now I'm staring at a (insert expletive) wall because there is nothing I want to watch on Netflix and I can't play the DLC I paid for, for more than 5 to 10 minutes without getting booted or everything taking exceedingly long to do.

I don't know where to turn for some genuine help, guidance or advice.
Beyond the usual standard that ZOS has given me prior.

deleted221205-002626

TheWoanderer wrote: »

So...
Why am I being booted from server so frequently.
Everything else I use works fine.
ZOS tell me I must approach my ISP but the problem is not their fault. This has been confirmed.
As far as my ISP are concerned everything works perfectly apart from this 1 game.
My ISP are therefore fulfiillg their end of the contract.

My Netflix is fine
My Laptop is fine
My Twitch is fine
My Deezer is fine
My Mobile Phone is fine
My other Xbox games are fine
My Router tests show a solid green connection (green is good)
My Xbox tests say everything is fine
My ISP list no outages
Xbox live is showing no problems.
Multiple router resets
Multiple Alternative Mac Address resets.

So here I am getting booted every 5 minutes and having a horrendous experience with constant disconnects, new dlc bugs (naturally) 'unusually' long load screens. Terrible lag that just boggles the mind where I am unable to pick items up for up to 10 seconds at a time, for each item.

It makes the game virtually unplayable & leaves me wanting to slice my own jugular.

Am I being falsely labelled as a bot because my IP address changes?
Who helps me fix this. ZOS insinuates they are unable to and my ISP doesn't seem willing so here I am paying a year's subscription and purchasing a new dlc for a game that is causing me major displeasure (when it works it is great, but when it doesn't it is beyond horrendous)

I don't understand how it works well for 2 weeks and then boom the most horrendous experience you can have.
Last time if I include the 3 days I struggled before I raised a ticket, I struggled with these issues for 15 days... That is half a month.

What do I do?
This is not right.
And I'm stuck with this ISP until end of contract October.

So right now I'm staring at a (insert expletive) wall because there is nothing I want to watch on Netflix and I can't play the DLC I paid for, for more than 5 to 10 minutes without getting booted or everything taking exceedingly long to do.

I don't know where to turn for some genuine help, guidance or advice.
Beyond the usual standard that ZOS has given me prior.

Well the 1st question I would ask myself to BE SURE things are working as intended is... What is my IP lease time????

If its working as intended as your ISP states than it will be a lease of 5min and your IP is actually changing as designed. if its greater than 5min(most ISP are 24h to 1week leases), then your IP is either not changing or you have connectivity issues with your ISP causing you to reconnect every 5min which is your issue not ESO.

Your lease time would have to be 5min for your ISP to accuratly say your connection is working as intended if its swapping IP's that often.

fred4

TL;DR: Get a VPN.

I've had the same problem, since I can only get 4G+ / 5G in my current location. Sometimes my public IP is constant for a day. Sometimes it changes with every single TCP connection made. In the latter case you can't make it past the character selection screen, which I believe ZOS call the lobby. What ZOS call a megaserver is, of course, a server farm. Every time you log on to a character from the lobby, or when a character switches zone, the game makes a new connection to a new server. If your IP address is not the same as it was for the lobby connection, it disconnects you. I believe the game client is also able to use UDP. If it does that, the problems may presumably be even worse.

I don't know why ZOS do this. It seems a stupid or at least inconsiderate thing to enforce. It could be a security measure, or it could be some programmer not having a good picture of how the Internet works these days, or it could be a legacy issue where some part of their network protocol stack is really old. Certainly Oracle has / had issues with IP-address translation, because they are / were doing something that's kind of a no no in today's environment. They were transmitting IP-addresses and ports in the application layer of their protocol to facilitate load balancing. Not unlike what ZOS have to do with their megaserver architecture, I suppose, but Oracle is rooted in the 70s. They could be forgiven for having code that didn't play well with networks in the late 90s / early 2000s, when I encountered them. ESO was released in the 2010s. What's their excuse?

IPv4 addresses are getting scarce. That's presumably why some ISPs, notably mobile ones, aggressively reuse them. I don't know how IPv6 support is these days. Everyone have been working around the IPv4 address space running out for decades. If you were able to make an IPv6 connection, that may just fix it, but that's theoretical from my point of view. I've no experience with IPv6.

Using a VPN works. I recommend Mullvad. They seem to be one of the more trustworthy, the backbone for Mozilla's (Firefox) VPN. The reason I don't use Mozilla is that they require you to make an account. Mullvad doesn't do that. It just generates a big random number for you.

deleted221205-002626

fred4 wrote: »

TL;DR: Get a VPN.

I've had the same problem, since I can only get 4G+ / 5G in my current location. Sometimes my public IP is constant for a day. Sometimes it changes with every single TCP connection made. In the latter case you can't make it past the character selection screen, which I believe ZOS call the lobby. What ZOS call a megaserver is, of course, a server farm. Every time you log on to a character from the lobby, or when a character switches zone, the game makes a new connection to a new server. If your IP address is not the same as it was for the lobby connection, it disconnects you. I believe the game client is also able to use UDP. If it does that, the problems may presumably be even worse.

I don't know why ZOS do this. It seems a stupid or at least inconsiderate thing to enforce. It could be a security measure, or it could be some programmer not having a good picture of how the Internet works these days, or it could be a legacy issue where some part of their network protocol stack is really old. Certainly Oracle has / had issues with IP-address translation, because they are / were doing something that's kind of a no no in today's environment. They were transmitting IP-addresses and ports in the application layer of their protocol to facilitate load balancing. Not unlike what ZOS have to do with their megaserver architecture, I suppose, but Oracle is rooted in the 70s. They could be forgiven for having code that didn't play well with networks in the late 90s / early 2000s, when I encountered them. ESO was released in the 2010s. What's their excuse?

IPv4 addresses are getting scarce. That's presumably why some ISPs, notably mobile ones, aggressively reuse them. I don't know how IPv6 support is these days. Everyone have been working around the IPv4 address space running out for decades. If you were able to make an IPv6 connection, that may just fix it, but that's theoretical from my point of view. I've no experience with IPv6.

Using a VPN works. I recommend Mullvad. They seem to be one of the more trustworthy, the backbone for Mozilla's (Firefox) VPN. The reason I don't use Mozilla is that they require you to make an account. Mullvad doesn't do that. It just generates a big random number for you.

The thing is your IP shouldnt be changing more often than your lease time... You should be able to shut your pc off and reconnect to same IP within the lease time. If your IP is changing you liky have connectivity issues and your PC/Router is requesting a new one or if your 4G cellular than you are possibly swapping base stations do to low signal? Try to orient your 4G device to favour only 1 so it stops swapping

coletas

Open cmd as admin and do a "ping -t 8.8.8.8>c:\log.txt" during some hours and look the log.txt to see if is any lost packet. Press ctrl-c to stop logging. It can be a routing problem too between your isp and their servers(they have some behind the crappy deutsche telecom). We can check it too, but lets discard a bad connection first.

fred4

sinnereso wrote: »

fred4 wrote: »

TL;DR: Get a VPN.

I've had the same problem, since I can only get 4G+ / 5G in my current location. Sometimes my public IP is constant for a day. Sometimes it changes with every single TCP connection made. In the latter case you can't make it past the character selection screen, which I believe ZOS call the lobby. What ZOS call a megaserver is, of course, a server farm. Every time you log on to a character from the lobby, or when a character switches zone, the game makes a new connection to a new server. If your IP address is not the same as it was for the lobby connection, it disconnects you. I believe the game client is also able to use UDP. If it does that, the problems may presumably be even worse.

I don't know why ZOS do this. It seems a stupid or at least inconsiderate thing to enforce. It could be a security measure, or it could be some programmer not having a good picture of how the Internet works these days, or it could be a legacy issue where some part of their network protocol stack is really old. Certainly Oracle has / had issues with IP-address translation, because they are / were doing something that's kind of a no no in today's environment. They were transmitting IP-addresses and ports in the application layer of their protocol to facilitate load balancing. Not unlike what ZOS have to do with their megaserver architecture, I suppose, but Oracle is rooted in the 70s. They could be forgiven for having code that didn't play well with networks in the late 90s / early 2000s, when I encountered them. ESO was released in the 2010s. What's their excuse?

IPv4 addresses are getting scarce. That's presumably why some ISPs, notably mobile ones, aggressively reuse them. I don't know how IPv6 support is these days. Everyone have been working around the IPv4 address space running out for decades. If you were able to make an IPv6 connection, that may just fix it, but that's theoretical from my point of view. I've no experience with IPv6.

Using a VPN works. I recommend Mullvad. They seem to be one of the more trustworthy, the backbone for Mozilla's (Firefox) VPN. The reason I don't use Mozilla is that they require you to make an account. Mullvad doesn't do that. It just generates a big random number for you.

The thing is your IP shouldnt be changing more often than your lease time... You should be able to shut your pc off and reconnect to same IP within the lease time. If your IP is changing you liky have connectivity issues and your PC/Router is requesting a new one or if your 4G cellular than you are possibly swapping base stations do to low signal? Try to orient your 4G device to favour only 1 so it stops swapping

Since my 4G device is just a cylindrical box with aerials inside and no diagnostics on base stations, I don't think that's practical. Leases have been fairly constant lately, the IP-address staying the same for a day or more. My problems date back two or three years. At that time I went to the "Shields Up" page from grc.com and would get a different IP-address with every browser refresh, e.g. every half a second or however fast I could refresh the page. Ping was good. Doesn't sound like weak signal or base-station swapping to me. Vodafone seemed to use a small pool of IP-addresses at that time for my connections, but dynamically use a different one for every single TCP connection. This only affected ESO, so I could see Vodafone's point. You're telling me this breaches a standard?

fred4

coletas wrote: »

Open cmd as admin and do a "ping -t 8.8.8.8>c:\log.txt" during some hours and look the log.txt to see if is any lost packet. Press ctrl-c to stop logging. It can be a routing problem too between your isp and their servers(they have some behind the crappy deutsche telecom). We can check it too, but lets discard a bad connection first.

That can be a start to fixing some problems. In fact I had one the other night, but that turned out to be 4G outright disconnections in my area. How did I know, aside from a light on my router I eventually discovered (I had been facing the other way):

ping -t zos.de
ping -t google.de
ping -t google.ie (Ireland, my country)

If you see a discrepancy in ping times between zos.de and google.de, then you know ZOS' networking has issues. Or if it flat out times out, of course. Then again, if you see timeouts to google.de or to your local google as well, you got general Internet issues.

I don't think this is it, btw. The OP already stated their public IP-address is changing a lot. I still have my VPN and still use it from time to time. I can confirm that works and is the fix for this particular problem.

coletas

He can be under a transparent proxy just for http. He says it changes every refresh no matter the fast it refresh so I just think is that and not a complete asignment negotiation (wich takes it time) Discard a bad connection with just icmp (ping) to well know cluster like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 and later we see what is happening.

TheWoanderer

I am on Xbox One S
I have a mobile router made by Huawei and the service is provided by 3 mobile and is a totally unlimited connection.
My ISP is set to change weekly

I can go for 2 weeks without a single hitch then suddenly it's absolutely terrible and lasts for upwards of 5 days to a week at worst 2 weeks of horrendous issues.

As I said in my post I have no issues with any other service bar ESO granted it is the only mom I play. I don't have anything other than my Xbox connected to the router unless I choose to use it for another device. Whilst I play ESO only my Xbox would be connected.

I don't know how I would use a VPN. I have a VPN on my laptop and my mobile device but how would I connect it to my Xbox. If there is a way I would genuinely appreciate some advice.

Sincerely
W'o'a

TheWoanderer

I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of networks and the like and am tentative to make changes should it make my experience worse and then not know how to correct what I've done.

coletas

TheWoanderer wrote: »

I am on Xbox One S
I have a mobile router made by Huawei and the service is provided by 3 mobile and is a totally unlimited connection.
My ISP is set to change weekly

I can go for 2 weeks without a single hitch then suddenly it's absolutely terrible and lasts for upwards of 5 days to a week at worst 2 weeks of horrendous issues.

As I said in my post I have no issues with any other service bar ESO granted it is the only mom I play. I don't have anything other than my Xbox connected to the router unless I choose to use it for another device. Whilst I play ESO only my Xbox would be connected.

I don't know how I would use a VPN. I have a VPN on my laptop and my mobile device but how would I connect it to my Xbox. If there is a way I would genuinely appreciate some advice.

Sincerely
W'o'a

You would need an openwrt router with VPN client (thats for me the easiest way). But first i would check if u need an vpn or not. It can be a lots of things altough I know nothing about xbox and the debugging possibilities on it

coletas

Ah, about the router... If is one of those ax3 made by hawei, return it if u can and buy a real router. That serie is completely crap and gives tons of problems.

TheWoanderer

Great. I have until October then I can change my router. Unfortunately due to my living arrangements I am unable to go for a landline based internet connection and due to the amount of time I spend playing ESO need the unlimited data that 3 mobile provides. Hopefully I will have the option of a better router once my contract ends. It is nearly 2 years old so a newer version may (fingers crossed) give me a better experience.

As someone who adores the Elder Scrolls universe it is so frustrating to find my experience so terrible and not have many options to improve it.

(Puts tiny violin away)

I do appreciate the response and have read them carefully hoping to understand what is being said, I will he honest and say I'm 50/50

Some of the network stuff i just don't understand sadly

Sincerely
W'o'a

deleted221205-002626

fred4 wrote: »

sinnereso wrote: »

fred4 wrote: »

TL;DR: Get a VPN.

I've had the same problem, since I can only get 4G+ / 5G in my current location. Sometimes my public IP is constant for a day. Sometimes it changes with every single TCP connection made. In the latter case you can't make it past the character selection screen, which I believe ZOS call the lobby. What ZOS call a megaserver is, of course, a server farm. Every time you log on to a character from the lobby, or when a character switches zone, the game makes a new connection to a new server. If your IP address is not the same as it was for the lobby connection, it disconnects you. I believe the game client is also able to use UDP. If it does that, the problems may presumably be even worse.

I don't know why ZOS do this. It seems a stupid or at least inconsiderate thing to enforce. It could be a security measure, or it could be some programmer not having a good picture of how the Internet works these days, or it could be a legacy issue where some part of their network protocol stack is really old. Certainly Oracle has / had issues with IP-address translation, because they are / were doing something that's kind of a no no in today's environment. They were transmitting IP-addresses and ports in the application layer of their protocol to facilitate load balancing. Not unlike what ZOS have to do with their megaserver architecture, I suppose, but Oracle is rooted in the 70s. They could be forgiven for having code that didn't play well with networks in the late 90s / early 2000s, when I encountered them. ESO was released in the 2010s. What's their excuse?

IPv4 addresses are getting scarce. That's presumably why some ISPs, notably mobile ones, aggressively reuse them. I don't know how IPv6 support is these days. Everyone have been working around the IPv4 address space running out for decades. If you were able to make an IPv6 connection, that may just fix it, but that's theoretical from my point of view. I've no experience with IPv6.

Using a VPN works. I recommend Mullvad. They seem to be one of the more trustworthy, the backbone for Mozilla's (Firefox) VPN. The reason I don't use Mozilla is that they require you to make an account. Mullvad doesn't do that. It just generates a big random number for you.

The thing is your IP shouldnt be changing more often than your lease time... You should be able to shut your pc off and reconnect to same IP within the lease time. If your IP is changing you liky have connectivity issues and your PC/Router is requesting a new one or if your 4G cellular than you are possibly swapping base stations do to low signal? Try to orient your 4G device to favour only 1 so it stops swapping

Since my 4G device is just a cylindrical box with aerials inside and no diagnostics on base stations, I don't think that's practical. Leases have been fairly constant lately, the IP-address staying the same for a day or more. My problems date back two or three years. At that time I went to the "Shields Up" page from grc.com and would get a different IP-address with every browser refresh, e.g. every half a second or however fast I could refresh the page. Ping was good. Doesn't sound like weak signal or base-station swapping to me. Vodafone seemed to use a small pool of IP-addresses at that time for my connections, but dynamically use a different one for every single TCP connection. This only affected ESO, so I could see Vodafone's point. You're telling me this breaches a standard?

Im saying its not normal operation for your IP to be rapidly changing... Its a considerable negotion reconnecting a new IP and updating dns servers etc for both your PC, router and routing table and would cause a considerable delay in packets during this process you would likly be disconnected for anything you were connected to or should be as they are tryiung to connect to you the entire time at the old IP still till they timeout!

fred4

TheWoanderer wrote: »

Terrible lag that just boggles the mind where I am unable to pick items up for up to 10 seconds at a time, for each item.

I overlooked this. I do not know how ZOS' anti-botting (if any) works, but I have not had these problems.

If your PC makes a TCP connection, that connection is persistent until you change zone. Your ISP cannot change IP address for that connection, while you are in a zone. If your ISP did that, they would break a fundamental rule of TCP and your Internet would basically not work at all. All your other services would have issues.

In other words, the following are all different things:

• Disconnections while changing zone or going to / from the character selection screen. These can be due to your ISP changing IP-addresses with every new connection, the problem that I had.
• Disconnections within a zone. These could be due to an unreliable Internet connection in general...
• ...or possibly to your game client using UDP. The latter is usually said to be more efficient, but is more easily affected by firewall issues in my experience, and may also be more easily affected by your ISP switching IP-addresses. In that case I would read up on disabling UDP, either via game configuration or your firewall(s)...
• ...on the other hand, if I've misread the situation turning UDP on could be a good thing. In other words, play around with that...
• ...finally, if you are in Cyro under very heavy load at prime time, disconnections can also be due to ZOS' server flaking out. In that case you can't get back to your Cyro character, but log on to others.
• Lag of 10 seconds is very rare in my experience, unless you have general Internet issues. ZOS' server lag is generally not that long. As to anti-bot measures, I don't know.

If you are unsure whether your IP-address is actually changing frequently, put your browser on to the Shields Up page at grc.com and refresh it from time to time to confirm your IP-address is actually changing. Getting a VPN is only a fix for that particular issue.

fred4

@sinnereso, to be honest, you must be confused about what DNS is used for. Businesses that provide services typically need a DNS record so that clients who know them by their name can connect to them. The business (ZOS) does NOT need to know the DNS name of the client nor, indeed, does the client have to have one. The client establishes the TCP connection. The server can send back data to the client, no problem. This is done by knowing the client's IP-address while the connection persists. And it does persist. The IP-address of an established TCP connection cannot change, because that would break TCP. However when new or additional connections are made - which are always initiated by the client, never the server - a different client IP-address can be used. This is what Vodafone were doing. As long as the routers / firewall(s) along the way do their jobs, it's all routed back to the same computer, no problem.

EDIT: I accidentally overwrote a much longer explanation. Looks like the OP is also on a mobile connection. In those cases I find your router doesn't usually have a public IP-address itself. It's on a Vodafone internal network (network 10) in my case. Vodafone are doing some trickery whereby they route data from that internal network to the Internet via a bank of multiple public IP-addresses. Whenever a new TCP connection is made, that connection may use a different public IP-address from the previous one. While a connection persists, it retains it's public IP-address, of course.

fred4

XBox puts a spanner in the works. I'm out of my depth how you would tackle this on that platform. You can still use your PC, go to the grc page and confirm whether your IP is changing frequently. This certainly matches my experience of what can happen with mobile connections. As coletas says, if that is confirmed, you could look at a router that supports a VPN, but I have no idea how to set that up.

TheWoanderer

@fred4 One of the other housemates came home and thought there was a power cut and proceeded to flip the mains breaker which *** the power down across the entire house.

My heart just sank as I knew I was going to get problems .. upon zoning back in I was faced with multiple issues.

I'm guessing my router reset my IP?

I'm not saying this was the main cause I'm not clued up enough to be able to say that but what I do know after years of playing and dealing with different problems is sometimes these issues arise after a sudden power loss or disconnect.

I am simply trying to figure out how, if possible, I can make my experience just a little better because sadly the options I've been presented with seem to not be working out for me due to outside agencies and influence.

I am reading all responses thoroughly, trying to get the general gist in how these things work.

Sincerely
W'o'a

TheWoanderer

I genuinely appreciate the responses.
Thank you
I posted here because I feel as though I surely can't be the only one experiencing this and hoped maybe someone would be able to offer some advice.

It certainly is interesting reading the responses

Thank you again.
W'o'a

coletas

You can try a WiFi tethering connection with a mobile too if you cant check connections from the xbox... If the sim card is from different provider you could discard a routing problem or something like that