Sockets, Sockets, Sockets

Socket was Closed

 

I've been getting seriously pissed off with EVE Online the past fortnight and all thanks to one of the most annoying error messages I've ever seen.

 

Socket was closed.

 

That's the message. It would appear seemingly at random when I was trying to login or doing things in EVE Online. So much has this appeared that I could not do anything but the most basic operations.

 

I wasn't even able to run my normal scheduled JF'ing in and out of null sec. Courier contracts came very close to expiring because I could not login more than one or two characters at a time without:

 

Socket was closed.

 

I persevered and eventually I've been able to get done what I needed, some contracts came close to expiring though. And moving through high sec in a freighter was so painful that for three days I didn't even login to EVE.

 

Cause

 

Other games I've had zero problems with. World of Warships has worked without issue, so has Steam and about five or ten other heavy bandwidth using applications.

 

Honestly no idea what the problem has been. It's never been the same character doing the same actions so I really can't reproduce the issue, I just know it happens when the dialog box appears.

 

I've had people suggest corrupt installation or asset downloads to others saying its a ping/route/ISP issue. I've done a fair bit of diagnostics and spoken to both my ISP and several experienced network engineers friends to no avail.

 

I have reinstalled, twice, and cleared cache and temp files. I've setup network monitoring and even swapped my ADSL router out for another brand (I keep spares so it didn't cost me anything but time). My ISP reported no problems, and I even pushed for Level 2/3 assistance which they allowed me to speak to, no blocks or throttling of traffic found to any of EVE Online servers.

 

I'm at a loss to cause, things have settled down a little but I'm still expecting to get the error message appear whenever I login.

Details, Details, Details

CCP have released a couple of updates, not to mention major ones on Singularity, recently and there were minor things fixed but checking the details I noticed one underlying commonality. Changes were made that were not intended and screwed up other functionality in EVE than those intended.

A major change recently has been to fuel blocks BPO's. They've changed their names (rather than being racial they are now named after the isotope used) and had a small amount of strontium, 20 units per run, added to the requirements. It's not a huge change and finally means we have a use for the no doubt millions of m3 strontium that is sitting in hangers around New Eden.

Unfortunately CCP's QA department missed something in these changes, for some reason the amount of strontium used in Triage modules has now changed to 375 base with a 25 unit per level of skill instead of having the size of the strontium changed (from it's current 3m3 size). It's a mistake, CCP Ytterbium has said so:

But why did this happen? It's not the first time changes have happened that should not have, 99% of the time it's good and things work but then we get simple mistakes like that. QA is hard (I should know, I was a Test Analyst in my day job for 11 years) but its the simple mistakes that cost the most in goodwill and acceptance.

As the original reddit poster said, this change was serious as if people didn't check they could easily find themselves running out of strontium mid-battle and this could affect the outcome of battles when it should not have.

In need of a Socket Wrench

I've had a pretty poor week in EVE, I mentioned previously that I'd been having connection issues with our old friend "Socket was closed". Well after I posted it's like EVE read my blog and decided that I needed a bigger dose of errors.

It has been very odd in the pattern I've experienced. My cyno characters had issues every time I logged them in and had them idle for 5 minutes or longer. My main character experienced disconnections at very inconvenient times, once in the middle of a cyno jump but fortunately I was able to terminate the process and login again in less than a minute so I wasn't in any real danger.

But very inconvenient.

The past 24 hours have been better, I even managed to stay logged in with 3 characters for an afternoon as I did RL and EVE stuff. Not a single disconnection. So it looks like things are on the up and I've already had my launcher issues for this release and fortunately managed to fix that with a reinstall.