My father, retired, has been having a daily connection issue with D2R & Starlink (he is in their trial)
He wrote a letter which I will be sending to the support team here. But I wanted to check if anyone else is aware of similar issues? Is this common? His letter is as follows:
"Greetings support,
I’m a long-time Battle.net and Diablo customer. I recently was lucky enough to install a Starlink antenna: SpaceX Starlink: mine averages 150 (Mbps) download, 10 (Mbps) upload, 30 (ms) latency. Its performance is 40x what I’ve been used to over the last 30 years .
I have noticed a change in behavior playing D2R. Now about once every two hours I receive first:
Your connection has been interrupted, then
Failed to authenticate. Please try again.
Starlink averages 150 Mbps but has momentary signal drops as it transfers between satellites. This signal drop affects no other aspect of my computer usage. For instance, Discord doesn’t notice, my VOIP app works fine. I’m playing D2R on an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core Processor 3.80 GHz 32.0 GB, Samsung SSD 860 Pro 2 Tb, Windows 11 Pro with all updates and patches.
I understand that you are working from decades-old code and have international customers. Your number of Starlink customers must be small…but growing fast. I’d hope that you can find the resources to buffer your connection for 1 or 2 seconds so that these Starlink signal drops stop causing this error for online Diablo 2 Resurrected customers.
Respectfully,"
Took out name, but you get the point. I’ve seen it when playing with him on my end as well. Quite painful.
Hopefully this makes it into the mountain of issues they are currently working on. They are doing a fantastic job though.
The issue is with Starlink, not the game. I have Starlink at my workplace as a backup. The times it has been active, it will drop out numerous times for a short period and then come back, which is not good for a real-time game.
At home, I have a very reliable cable internet connection. I’ve only seen “Your connection was interrupted.” two times so far, and both of those times were when Blizzard was having troubles. (DDoS attack and server issues)
As time rolls forward and the density of the satellite mesh network increases, the problem should largely vanish.
This isn’t even an issue with starlink, this is simply networking via satellite limitations, not to mention the majority of starlink satellites are above Ukraine right now. It’s important to keep in mind however, that download speed, and connectivity are 2 totally different things. Even in a perfect world with no interference, satellite technology is not capapble of keeping stable connections. It’s an imperfect science. It cannot ever be perfected.
This is false. The satellites can’t change their position outside of orbital stationkeeping, which is maintaining their predetermined orbit around the Earth. Once they deplete their store of hydrazine used for stationkeeping, they deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
Discord doesn’t do costant realtime checks back and forth. It uses a push system that will simply resume once connectivity is restored. And it most assuredly does affect VOIP apps if they’re in the middle of a call. A person might not notice the interruption but instead simply assess it as a momentary hiccup (which is what the interruption is). Anything that doesn’t have a large enough buffer and requires realtime data communications is going to be impacted by the satellite changeovers. Ironically even DirecTV has this issue on most of their receiver and dish types.
Video games are played in real time. They can’t be buffered. Additionally, such buffering would sadly be exploitable in a number of ways. That’s why a constant connection in online mode is required. Any interruption will require reauthentication, which can’t happen in the middle of the game session, which is why both errors appear in succession.
It could be perfected, but using current technology would require bisecting orbital paths at different altitudes to ensure full uptime. Physically possible, but extremely resource intensive, and also quite dangerous as we don’t have Star Trek levels of technology to ensure satellites wouldn’t collide (since they aren’t all going the same direction). Unfortunately with the myriad international agencies and associated agendas, getting a properly working lattice structure would be all but impossible.
I have the same issue, I just received my starlink and D2R is the only game so far that I’m having dropouts with and I play both Diablo 3 and D2R. Seeing everything you mentioned definitely helps me realize that it’s not starlink or why would Diablo 3 work without dc’s
Diablo 3’s netcode is more tolerant of a low amount of packet loss.
Diablo 2 (the original game) has always been very sensitive to packet loss, even just 1% loss will eventually result in the connection being lost. Since D2:R is essentially the original game with a retrofitted graphics enhancement “wrapper”, it makes sense why D2:R has the same issue with packet loss.
Network topology is the issue here. Satellite based data connections have inherit packet loss due to the way they operate. I’d never recommend any gamer play via Satellite based ISP. Could still be d2r but in my experience I would bet it’s the network. But hey I’m just a random network engineer.