Has anyone with a technical issue had ever been actually helped by support?

[Mr_BIap_1]

So, I've had this issue since about 0.9.5 or so - game randomly froze in port. Not during battle, just in port, while mounting signals, looking at captain skills, or just enjoying the view of a majestic warship in the port. I prefer to use Ocean, but the freezing demon doesn't care, freezes the port regardless of background selected :)

Initially it happened like once a month or once a week, no biggie, restart, and off we go to battle.

However, with every new patch it got worse, and with 0.10.x it's just unusable.  Sometimes it freezes before you even manage to hit battle, sometimes you get lucky and you can go and fight. Once you get in the battle loading screen, you're safe, it never freezes there or during the battle.

 

So after being called interesting and creative names by division and clan mates who for some reason got annoyed by waiting for my reboots practically before every single battle, I've decided to submit a ticket with WG support.

And the experience has been so spectacular that I've decided to share it with the community.

 

Here is my initial post.

*edit*

 

Not long afterwards, I got a response from a support agent, yay!

*edit*

 

I rerun the wgcheck, just if for whichever reason it was an older version since before I did a clean install. I installed the latest nvidia drivers. Still the game freezes in port. So I report back to support, together with some additional observations I've noticed while testing:

*edit*

 

Support comes back trying to help further:

*edit*

 

So I've followed all the steps as instructed, run game center as admin, performed check and repair and tried running the game. To no avail, I must admit.

 

*edit*

 

Support came up with further suggestions. None of it helped, not even lowering graphics setting which I was hoping for secretly.

*edit*

 

 

None of it helped, not even lowering graphics setting which I was hoping for secretly.

 

*edit*

 

And then the support drops the bomb...

 

*edit*

 

I was no longer able to keep a straight face...

 

*edit*

 

And then came the (for the moment) last post in the thread, I haven't responded to this one yet, and probably will not. I just see no sense.

 

*edit*

 

If I were to perform an audit or due diligence at the support organisation, I'd probably come to a conclusion that there is only 1st level service desk in place, with poorly trained agents that don't read the notes in the tickets to see which steps have been performed previously, and just run around in circles, most probably with no escalation paths defined or used.

Just because I've got nothing better to do currently, I've completely uninstalled everything Wargaming related today yet again, together with manually deleting anything I could find in the registry. Rebooted. Done a clean install. Upon finishing installation run wgcheck to get a report before the first run of the game. No mods or any changes installed. Rebooted the machine. Launched Game Center as admin. Started the game in safe mode. Port died within 5 minutes...

 

No other game/software has any issue on the machine. I've never ever had it to blue screen on me. No issues with CS:GO, Elite Dangerous, L4D2, F4AF, various retro platform emulators, Magix video editing software. The only thing that freezes is WoWs port (not even the actual game, just the port). I've even opened the box and compressed-air cleaned the motherboard, heatsinks and fans, including CPU and VGA. Still same.

 

Do you folks think there is any sense in talking the support further or should I just forget it?

[Adm_Andre]

Not single word about the own PC specs, the WoWs community never fails to amaze 

[Lootboxer]

PC specs? Have you tried port designer table? Have you tried mods with a black screen background black hole port? Game is bugged and full of  but your case is a bit unusual even when taking into account WG stronk coding skilz.  BTW. Support is useless.

[Mr_BIap_1]

17 minutes ago, Adm_Andre said:

Not single word about the own PC specs, the WoWs community never fails to amaze 

I think there is plenty of own config data in the wgcheck report I've submitted to the support twice. Not sure I understand what you meant by your post.

[Mr_BIap_1]

17 minutes ago, DariusJacek said:

PC specs? Have you tried port designer table? Have you tried mods with a black screen background black hole port? Game is bugged and full of  but your case is a bit unusual even when taking into account WG stronk coding skilz.  BTW. Support is useless.

what is special about designer port table? That there is no water? Or is there anything else? Will look for them black hole port mods, thx for the tip!

[Lootboxer]

2 minutes ago, Mr_Blap_2 said:

what is special about designer port table? That there is no water? Or is there anything else? Will look for them black hole port mods, thx for the tip!

No water so it should be lesser load to your pc. Black hole is lowest load ever. But I suspect that it can be something with in game browser or something similar that is freezing your machine. God knows. Try black hole mod first. 

[Mr_BIap_1]

5 minutes ago, DariusJacek said:

No water so it should be lesser load to your pc. Black hole is lowest load ever. But I suspect that it can be something with in game browser or something similar that is freezing your machine. God knows. Try black hole mod first. 

yeah, designer's table froze just like any other port.

Interesting fact - container ship never freezes, I can leave it there for hours, but the animation with camera moving back from the container ship to the actual port has frozen already once or twice...

Also after the initial freeze is over after a minute or few, the sound is playing in the background, when I press ESC I can hear the Exit window popping up etc, it's just that the screen is frozen to whichever frame was being displayed when it froze.

[Mr_BIap_1]

nevermind, frozen reliably in black hole port after about 3 or 4 minutes.  I don't think it has anything to do with performance. The game itself (once you manage to get into battle) runs nice and stable, regardless of what's happening on the screen.

[Lootboxer]

Hate to bring it up but it can be something with yours pc and configuration of firewall or the other security software that is causing some conflict with the game. Or something is going to break soon and poorly coded game throws errors first? I have no idea. What is your pc, how old and or cheap it is? Windows 10 64bits? Maybe it's time to upgrade?  Hope that you will find a solution. 

[BrusilovX]

I had a technical problem at one stage and support were helpful and helped me resolve the issue.

 

I must state that in the past I've been part of a technical support team for several mod teams for the Rome Total War series and I know my way around PC but don't claim to be an expert.

 

I've been using PCs since 1993 and have managed to keep my PCs running for many years and have a working knowledge of Windows and problem resolution (once on a new Windows Vista install I managed to get my PC into a loop of fairly constant rebooting and had to get into various Windows 'ini' files to stop the loop continuing).

 

I do know that WG support can be a mixed bag though.  I've had someone else's ticket replied to my own ticket which they closed as being resolved.  I've also had responses that had nothing to do with the issue at hand (and wasn't an answer to someone else).

 

[Mr_BIap_1]

55 minutes ago, DariusJacek said:

Hate to bring it up but it can be something with yours pc and configuration of firewall or the other security software that is causing some conflict with the game. Or something is going to break soon and poorly coded game throws errors first? I have no idea. What is your pc, how old and or cheap it is? Windows 10 64bits? Maybe it's time to upgrade?  Hope that you will find a solution. 

Let's start with the firewall/router itself - it is an i7 Intel NUC I've assembled from parts, it's running linux I've installed. I've asked my ISP to switch the fiber router thing to be switched to bridge mode and put the Intel NUC behind it. I just prefer my own router/firewall rather than some huawei blackbox you can't even update yourself. There was never need to manually whitelist WoWs through, as outgoing traffic from the gaming rig is allowed to the interwebz by default and is only logged. Also the game itself authenticates me successfully with WG, and once I manage to reach an actual battle has no issues sending/receiving data. Also, for random periods of time, the game is able to communicate with servers regarding camo/signal changes, going to armory, naval battles, containers etc. Therefore I consider any discussion on the topic of firewall/antivirus moot.

 

The gaming rig is old, i7-4770, nvidia GTX 770, 16GB RAM. System volume is SSD with win10 64. Data volume is HDD. No issues with storage capacity. However no other application freezes and the system itself NEVER ONCE bluescreened on me.

 

Tbh, I suspect some performance optimization routines on WG side, like the authentication issue - where you had to alt-tab and back for the game to actually authenticate you. Or some time ago there was an issue with loading Armoury, where you were left staring at a spinning wheel for tens of minutes, unless you just clicked your mouse anywhere. So somewhere in the interaction between the client port display and back-end port server something goes wrong and the things hangs at first and when it comes back to, it doesn't refresh the screen (while having correct audio playing).

[Lootboxer]

Do they support Linux? Maybe there is a problem? 

[Mr_BIap_1]

1 minute ago, DariusJacek said:

Do they support Linux? Maybe there is a problem? 

Linux is the router/firewall, not the gaming PC. Gaming PC is win10 64. The OS on the router/firewall is irrelevant for the game operation as long as the game data is passing through. Could have been just as well cisco IOS, win95 or SCO Uniware or whatever else for that  matter...

[Lootboxer]

1 minute ago, Mr_Blap_2 said:

Linux is the router/firewall, not the gaming PC. Gaming PC is win10 64. The OS on the router/firewall is irrelevant for the game operation as long as the game data is passing through. Could have been just as well cisco IOS, win95 or SCO Uniware or whatever else for that  matter...

My bad, missed the part with win 10. 

[FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor]

Maybe one or two out of ten times.

 

They do have their moments but they are few and far in between all those standard automated boilerplate bot responses.

[Adm_Andre]

Vor 30 Minuten, Mr_Blap_2 sagte:

nvidia GTX 770

Let me guess... newest Nvidia Geforce Experience installed... try an rollback to on older version of the driver

[Mr_BIap_1]

Just now, Adm_Andre said:

Let me guess... newest Nvidia Geforce Experience installed... try an rollback to on older version of the driver

nope, issue manifested with a driver from 2015 as well as the one from 14 or so days back... Can try it but not giving it much hope.

[Duecut]

I would say its related to the GPU. Please don't misunderstand me I not saying anything is broken/wrong with your GPU, it how WG have coded the port to work that's wrong.

 

Going with how my machine works with WoWS, when in a match the GPU operates as normal, temp, clock and FPS all stable and what I would expect. But when I go to port the GPU temp and clock max's out (and it doesn't matter what port I use) it gets hot and loud (I often sit in armoury when waiting on a division mate readying up).

 

You could maybe try going into the NVIDIA Control panel and overriding the 3d settings for the program rather than leaving it as application controlled.

 

But yeah you're right if that is an common depiction of how WG Support works I can see there is little point ever raising a ticket.

[NavalComedian]

6 hours ago, Duecut said:

I would say its related to the GPU. Please don't misunderstand me I not saying anything is broken/wrong with your GPU, it how WG have coded the port to work that's wrong.

 

Going with how my machine works with WoWS, when in a match the GPU operates as normal, temp, clock and FPS all stable and what I would expect. But when I go to port the GPU temp and clock max's out (and it doesn't matter what port I use) it gets hot and loud (I often sit in armoury when waiting on a division mate readying up).

 

You could maybe try going into the NVIDIA Control panel and overriding the 3d settings for the program rather than leaving it as application controlled.

 

But yeah you're right if that is an common depiction of how WG Support works I can see there is little point ever raising a ticket.

I have noticed that too , while in match 30-40% gpu utilisation , when i get to port it jumps to 70-80% and if i have other stuff running in the background it can get up to 99% , while i don't have the latest and mightiest gpu it should be more that enough for wows at 1440p ( rx 5700 xt ) . 

Also when the dockyard was ongoing opening it would absolutely tank everything especially on the last day when collecting the rewards i think it froze for about 3 mins before it recovered . 

So what are they doing in the background ? Mining Etherium , Bitcoin or sheer incompetence ? 

 

Idk if this is helpful for you OP but wanted to share my experience

[Mr_BIap_1]

i switched

9 hours ago, Duecut said:

You could maybe try going into the NVIDIA Control panel and overriding the 3d settings for the program rather than leaving it as application controlled.

 

Thanks for the tip - that might be a step in the right direction eventually. Tried to switch what I could away from application controlled (surprisingly only 2 or 3 things), but port still freezes. Will keep digging around further.

[Gebbly]

I sympathise with your predicament, it sounds like a real pain. However to be fair to tech support a lot of the time it is really difficult to try and debug a fault remotely. You have provided a lot of useful info but they are probably still working in the dark a little as it doesnt sound like its triggered by a particular event, for example if you said "every time I click icon X it hangs" then a developer could examine exactly what triggers on that event.

 

From your description of how thorough you have been cleaning WoWs from your system and doing a completely clean install I would guess it isn't a problem with the installation becoming faulty in any way. That would lead me to wonder about either the hardware or the account that is being logged into.

 

If it were at all possible it may be worth trying to log in to the game from a different machine. For example if you had a friend with the game installed and you could try logging in there or if there was another machine in your home you could install on and try logging in. If you continued to have the issue whilst logging in to a completely different machine it would fairly conclusively suggest it wasnt the hardware or installation at fault and I would want tech support to thoroughly check your account in case there was a fault with it in some bizarre way. Actually, thinking about it, given accounts are free you could just create a brand new WoWs account and try using that to log in to your current machine and if things worked fine with the new account it would also suggest a problem with your normal account..

 

With regards to hardware some things do seem to point in this direction. The newer software gets, generally speaking, the more resources it needs to run as it gets bloated with new features. This would match up with how it was working on your system but got worse as new updates were applied. One thing you could try would be to have the windows resource monitor running along side the game and watch to see things like cpu usage, ram usage, gpu usage, temperatures. Then you could tell if the hang occurs when, for example, the gpu utilisation hits 90% or if the GPU core reaches a critical temperature. I have certainly had faults where software would crash after a few minutes and it was because a component was slowly heating up and then failing. It would be interesting to know if the resource uses steadily climb whilst sitting in port.

 

You mentioned it didnt happen if you were in the container ship, I wonder if it occurs in the other views such as the CombatMissions or Dockyard. Testing these whilst having a resource monitor open would be interesting if it turns out the port view uses more resources than any other view. Also as a slight variant of this does the problem occur when you are in the other views like "Equipment", "Exterior" and "Ship Tree"? If it turned out other views were fine and it was just the "Port" view a workaround would be as soon as you log in switch to the "Equipment" view or something and never use the "Port" view.

 

There is also hardware testing software on the internet. You could try programs that stress your CPU, RAM and graphics card and see if there are any issues. Also, I dont know how happy you are with opening up your PC but you could also do things like, if your PC has 2 RAM sticks try removing one of them, testing, then swapping which stick is plugged in in case there was a failing RAM stick.

 

Some machines, as well as having a separate graphics card (also known as a "discrete" graphics card), have a GPU built in to the motherboard (known as an "integrated" GPU). If you were able to tell what motherboard you have and found it had an integrated GPU you could try entering the bios, changing the system to use the integrated GPU and removing the discrete graphics card. That way you could remove the graphics card from the equation in case it was having issues.

[BrusilovX]

12 hours ago, Duecut said:

You could maybe try going into the NVIDIA Control panel and overriding the 3d settings for the program rather than leaving it as application controlled.

I recall doing that on my desktops in the past - as I'm 'away from home' I've only got my laptop to play with.

 

I think I used to override the settings for all games I used.

[Mr_BIap_1]

11 hours ago, Gebbly said:

I sympathise with your predicament, it sounds like a real pain. However to be fair to tech support a lot of the time it is really difficult to try and debug a fault remotely. You have provided a lot of useful info but they are probably still working in the dark a little as it doesnt sound like its triggered by a particular event, for example if you said "every time I click icon X it hangs" then a developer could examine exactly what triggers on that event.

 

From your description of how thorough you have been cleaning WoWs from your system and doing a completely clean install I would guess it isn't a problem with the installation becoming faulty in any way. That would lead me to wonder about either the hardware or the account that is being logged into.

 

If it were at all possible it may be worth trying to log in to the game from a different machine. For example if you had a friend with the game installed and you could try logging in there or if there was another machine in your home you could install on and try logging in. If you continued to have the issue whilst logging in to a completely different machine it would fairly conclusively suggest it wasnt the hardware or installation at fault and I would want tech support to thoroughly check your account in case there was a fault with it in some bizarre way. Actually, thinking about it, given accounts are free you could just create a brand new WoWs account and try using that to log in to your current machine and if things worked fine with the new account it would also suggest a problem with your normal account..

 

With regards to hardware some things do seem to point in this direction. The newer software gets, generally speaking, the more resources it needs to run as it gets bloated with new features. This would match up with how it was working on your system but got worse as new updates were applied. One thing you could try would be to have the windows resource monitor running along side the game and watch to see things like cpu usage, ram usage, gpu usage, temperatures. Then you could tell if the hang occurs when, for example, the gpu utilisation hits 90% or if the GPU core reaches a critical temperature. I have certainly had faults where software would crash after a few minutes and it was because a component was slowly heating up and then failing. It would be interesting to know if the resource uses steadily climb whilst sitting in port.

 

You mentioned it didnt happen if you were in the container ship, I wonder if it occurs in the other views such as the CombatMissions or Dockyard. Testing these whilst having a resource monitor open would be interesting if it turns out the port view uses more resources than any other view. Also as a slight variant of this does the problem occur when you are in the other views like "Equipment", "Exterior" and "Ship Tree"? If it turned out other views were fine and it was just the "Port" view a workaround would be as soon as you log in switch to the "Equipment" view or something and never use the "Port" view.

 

There is also hardware testing software on the internet. You could try programs that stress your CPU, RAM and graphics card and see if there are any issues. Also, I dont know how happy you are with opening up your PC but you could also do things like, if your PC has 2 RAM sticks try removing one of them, testing, then swapping which stick is plugged in in case there was a failing RAM stick.

 

Some machines, as well as having a separate graphics card (also known as a "discrete" graphics card), have a GPU built in to the motherboard (known as an "integrated" GPU). If you were able to tell what motherboard you have and found it had an integrated GPU you could try entering the bios, changing the system to use the integrated GPU and removing the discrete graphics card. That way you could remove the graphics card from the equation in case it was having issues.

lot of good suggestions there, thanks a lot!.

 

Will try the system monitor and try clicking about the port. Interesting thing, it is really only the container ship that doesn't hang. Equipment, camos, signals, tech tree, captain skills, combat missions, naval battles, ranks even, all of them froze at one time or another. Haven't tried dockyard yet, I don't think it is active currently tbh.

 

No issue to open the box, I've mentioned in one of the earlier posts that I've cleaned all the heatsinks and fans with compressed air. I've also removed and reseated the GTX770.

Regarding hardware in general, I don't think it's hardware related in a sense something is broken - the game works fine in a battle, no issues there. Every other game and application works fine, even intensive stuff like video editing etc.

To me it appears that there is a some sort of brief hiccup, and while everything works in the background, when the game comes back to its senses from the freeze, the screen is not refreshed. As I've described in an earlier post, I can hear actions being performed (like pressing ESC you hear the Exit confirmation window popping up) but you just can't see them as the picture displayed on your screen is a freeze frame from 3,4,5... minutes ago.

 

And btw, exactly something like your post here in the forum I'd expect from a tech support, rather than a 4th guy (or chatbot) asking again for a wgcheck report that has been included in the ticket twice already in an obivously boilerplated response. Much appreciate your effort!

[Mr_BIap_1]

I tried to switch between windowed and fullscreen, as I was too lazy to plug in a second monitor. It switched from Fullscreen Windowed to Windowed without freezing. Switched back to Fullscreen without freezing. Switched to Windowed yet again and it froze after clicking Apply in settings. When it woke up again, it declared it couldn't load some resources. I wonder if there are genuinely missing resources after now 3 clean installs or it is just a general non-specific catch-all error message.

[Gebbly]

Some possible hunches...

 

When it says *load* resources that makes me think of libraries or system files or something rather than hardware resources like CPU/GPU. Also we can see in the background that cpu is only at about 20% so that should be fine.

However (and I use linux most of the time so I dont know for sure) I notice that the bottom Memory graph says "100 Hard faults / sec". That doesnt sound like something that should be normal behaviour should it?

With regards to "Could not load resources" this could be because there were missing or corrupted files. But maybe another possibility was that it couldn't load the resources into RAM because there was a fault with the RAM?

I wonder if the RAM could be an issue. I think flipping back and forth to windowed mode has to swap data in and out of RAM so perhaps the swapping in and out repeatedly is stressing the RAM and triggering a RAM fault? 

 

Looking at something like https://www.howtogeek.com/260813/how-to-test-your-computers-ram-for-problems/ there appears to be various software out there that can test your RAM from the inbuilt windows diagnostic tool to things like memtest86.

 

Its probably worth trying 1 or more of these even if its just to prove the RAM is ok and we can remove it as a possibility.