Game Freezing and Crashing After Latest Patch (Compendium) First week of May 2018

Technical Support
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Both PC’s have always been playing the game in ‘Borderless Windowed’ mode.

Sherman PC:
Before updating my drivers
I just played three games on Rialto from the Arcade menu, 1 Defense as Reinhardt, 2 Offense as Mercy. There were no freezes/crashes. This PC has played many games (maybe about 20 or 30) since the initial freeze happened with no problems on other maps in Quick Play. (Note: I accidentally had the Discord overlay turned off at the time, because I didn’t think to launch Discord when I turned on my PC)

After updating my drivers
I played 3 games on Rialto again from the Arcade menu. 2 Defense as Reinhardt, 1 Offense as Mercy There were no crashes/freezes.
(Note: To keep things consistent, I left the Discord overlay off)
I turned the Discord overlay on for the next 3 Rialto games:
1 Offense as Winston, 2 Defense as Reinhardt. Again no issues.

I followed this post to the letter:

If the problem persists or rather, shows itself again, we’ll try removing/disabling the other things you suggested. This also took quite a bit of time, so I’ll update this post later with the results from my other PC, Panther. If any freezes/crashes happen when I test it I’ll make a new post to let you know I updated this one.

94

I had an issue where my keyboard was acting as if the Ctrl key was being permanently pressed (not just in-game, but Windows in general). I eventually found out it was my Razer Synapse software. I totally removed it and the drivers and it started working fine. I reinstalled Razer Synapse after that and things have been running fine ever since.

I’m not sure if that’s related at all with your issue, but I thought I’d throw that out in case other people are having odd issues.

95

My game was a-ok until the 4th, but since then I’ll freeze and crash at any random point on any map, not just Rialto. I’ve just gone through the driver update as above and disabled all overlays, but the difference is I get a couple of mini-freezes before the game totally crashes again.

Just sent the email with the logs and steps taken.

1 Like
96

Win 10 Pro, GTX 1070, Ryzen 1800X, RGB Tridentz Ram 3200 Mhz.
Was using Discord with overlay on, Steam with its overlay, I’ve closed those and it works fine now but which that wasn’t the case.

Both of the crashes occured twice in Comp

The error log cannot be found due to me playing the game again AFTER making adjustments to the said possibility of the issue.

Played QP to make sure it wasn’t crashing before proceeding to play Comp with my friend.

I can confirm that overlay was the cause of crashing TWICE in a row, first one when I just joined a game, one second loading before crashing. 10 seconds of screen being frozen, then everything outside of my PC Via cables were cut off. Unable to control my system at all but everything was still running, which was odd as to why that happened, I’d like to know as why it does that as it’d help me in my IT business whenever the case does occur. The map being loaded was Watchpoint: Gibraltar. Couldn’t pick any character.

Second time, Temple of Anubis on Defender game match loads, no crashes in sight, Picks Soldier 76, run to the defensive spot, game starts as the attacker runs out, 1 min in the game, Junkrat kills me, game froze but I can still hear the sound and people talking so I tell them that my game was crashing. and I proceed to click on the game to make it crash before it shuts off everything outside of my PC again.

Came to this thread, and saw the solution, closed discord’s overlay, steam, anything that was a possibility of even having an overlay. No crashes after the fact. Sorry for being all over the place in this post but I was somewhat tilted and should’ve stopped playing for the day and lost some more SR because of that.

Love this game, hopefully the issue is fixed.

1 Like
97

Hey again everyone!

All the details sent in so far have been great. Please do keep them coming for now. I wanted to follow up with some of the things your fellow players and we discovered overnight/this morning. I’m going to do this reply in two posts. This is the explanation post. If you don’t care about that, skip to my next post to talk troubleshooting.

The things being reported in this thread are not all one problem. There are three major issues, as well as a number of different small issues. As far as we can tell (so far) it doesn’t look like the patch is the actual cause for all players, just a trigger that set off a bunch of minor confllicts.

The simplest issue to fix is game data issues. Some players who had trouble after the patch are having full game freezes because they don’t have all of the needed game data, or part of it was quarantined by an antivirus or corrupted. When the game tries to access the messed up data, it freezes. This can also cause things like sounds or animations randomly going missing.

The second issue is a compatibility issue with overlays and other background programs. We’ve seen this for the last few weeks with Razer Synapse 2/3. This is mostly causing launch problems, but also causes a few other lockups. Meanwhile, other overlays like Discord/Trillian/Shadowplay/etc seem to be fighting for priority of drivers, which can cause full system lockups or just crash the game.

The third issue is a driver compatibility issue due to a bad driver installation. For this one, often all you have to do is restart your PC safely if you haven’t yet, but sometimes you also have to reinstall the drivers and restart.

As far as we know right now, what ended up happening was a perfect storm of tech issues over the past 2-3 weeks compounded with a major patch that added things to the game. The next post will cover the best troubleshooting we have so far. I’ll also talk about what to do if it does not work.

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Troubleshooting Post

Please keep in mind while doing this troubleshooting, you should troubleshoot the game until you find the issue is resolved before playing a competitive mode. We do not restore skill rating or remove penalties when this sort of thing happens, because your other teammates’ experience of the game suffers when you leave for any reason. I recommend testing in a custom game vs bots to avoid penalties on your account.

Some players have mentioned that they can prevent full system lockups by putting the game in windowed modes. This doesn’t fix all of the crashes but it should make things easier on you while you troubleshoot. If your whole PC is locking up, I highly suggest doing this by going into the Video settings in-game and changing to Windowed(Fullscreen) or Windowed mode.

Based on what we’ve found over the last few days and the timing of the issue, I want to start with game data. Here are the things to do to fix the game data.

  1. Reset the game settings
  2. Repair the game client to patch anything that went missing.
    ** Retest the game. **
  3. A couple antivirus programs have been known to quarantine game data at times, especially when something changes and their virus definitions are not updated. Temporarily uninstall your security programs.
  4. Now that these are removed, reinstall the game client.
    ** Retest the game **

The next thing to test is removing other programs from the equation. Some of these are fighting us for control of your graphics drivers in some situations.

  1. If you own a Razer product or are using Razer Synapse/Cortex/Chroma SKD, temporarily uninstall the programs and restart the PC.
    ** Retest the game - if this works, you can try reinstalling these programs. If the problem returns, Razer’s working on the compatibility issues already. **
  2. Disable all other background programs. In particular, pay attention to programs with overlays. (Discord, Twitch, Overwolf, programs with FPS overlays like many overclocking programs, or any program you use to stream like Open Broadcaster Service, XSplit, etc.)
    ** Retest the game **

Last up, there were a couple driver issues, particularly with NVidia cards running the 397.31 (April 25th) drivers. This should be fixed by updating to the more recent versions of the drivers - the bugs should be fixed by Nvidia.

If you have time, we could use more information before troubleshooting

We’d also like to get a bit more information from players experiencing the crashes. If you can send us a process dump as a lockup happens, this should help us identify the common threads.

Once you have the dump file, send it to techinfo@blizzard.com with the title Attn: Drakuloth - Rialto Lockup Dump. We’ll have our Quality Assurance/Devs check 'em out.

If none of this helps you, please contact us directly

Our goal is to get these issues handled for you ASAP so you can get back to playing normally. We’d like to troubleshoot with you directly through support so we can try to get you back in action. For this, submit a ticket, live chat, or phone callback request. Include this info:

  1. What you’ve already done to fix the problem
  2. When the problem happens
  3. A copy of your MSinfo/DXDiag files. (Make sure to Export the MSInfo as a .txt rather than Save it.)
3 Likes
99

Sadly i updated to the 397 nvidea patch while trying to find the issue with this since i had it happen while not on that patch. i have 0 overlays on, and ive had this happen twice, ive never had this exact issue before the patch thursday, both times it happened as the play of the game was starting, i have since ran the repair and got a 46mb download, idk if that fixed it or not though because i dont wanna run the game and have it freeze up my machine again. but ill give it a try here in a minute, and ill update this post if i freeze again and try to get the info you require.

Edit: 2 games vs bots, 6 qp games, and 2 comp games later, with it set to borderless windowed, 0 issues so far. will update this post if i have a crash.

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100

The thing about the overlays was apparently true. I disabled Nvidia Ansel, their relatively recent overlay service, and was able to play several matches uninterrupted this afternoon. Just disable it in GeForce Experience. I hadn’t even thought about Ansel since I used it for W3 screenshots. No crashes yet, gonna wait it out and see if it crashes again before saying this fixed it completely.

1 Like
101

i had it happen with 0 overlays enabled at all so just keep an eye out lol, hoping what i did fixed it which was a small fix, didnt notice any input lag going to borderless windowed either so. also run a game repair scan on bnet, never know.

2 Likes
102

Hi,
I’m still pretty sure this bug has something to do with the new patch, and not the overlays or antivirus software.

This is because I have no overlays, streaming software, or razer software of any kind. During almost 2 years that I have played, the game has been extremely stable for me (gratz blizz QA, good job. Until now…). Actually I don’t remember it ever crashing, or freezing. Just a random disconnect now and then.

And for the people who do have overlays or background programs, they have likely had them for quite some time before the patch too, right? And they had no freezes, judging by their posts, saying they began experiencing it after rialto patch as well.

Anyway, I’ve run the repair on the installation, and it had really found some broken stuff, and repaired it. I wonder how it got corrupted in the first place, after 2 years w/o issues, and right after the last patch. Coincidence?
I will play some more and see if it helps.

5 Likes
103

Another test setting for nvidia users is disabling ansel. To disable ansel go to C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Ansel\Tools and run the NvCameraConfiguration.exe, at the very bottom change from enable to disable click save and you’re done.

3 Likes
104

Yupp, these overlays some people have, may triggered the freezes but they didn’t harm anything berefore the patch it seems. Most people didn’t changed anything on their system, except the OW patch I’m sure. So the cause of the issues may be deeper and I suspect Overwatch, not something on the PC alone.

I don’t use the latest Nvidia drivers by the way (because it’s garbage and bugy until they release a newer one). Im still on the 388.71, solid driver for my needs (unless you want to play recent games with specific driver optimisations). Overwatch always run fine since I had this driver. Until recent patch of course. :wink:

Tip for a clean driver install. After erasing the old driver with DDU, you should also delete not needed files within the bloated nvidia display driver folder before installing ( under C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver\(driver number)\Win10_64\International after you extracted the driver - cancel the install process after it was extracted). For the pure driver you only need:
[folder] Display.Driver
[folder] NVI2
[folder] PhysX
setup.exe
setup.cfg
listDevices.txt
licence.txt
EULA.txt

Audio if you want. This prevents the driver from installing all the spy and telemetrics crap you can’t disable from within the setup.

1 Like
105

Lost 100 SR from this too. Really depressing to have all the SR you gained over some hours wiped out just like that. When it happens the game is completely frozen, won’t close, and cannot even bring task manager up because the Overwatch window is always in the foreground. The only fix is a full restart.

I have no overlays, no other programs running, no antivirus other than the built in Windows Defender (which says it has not found anything), never had any crashes before May, nor has any other game crashed.

I’ve done a scan and repair, hopefully it won’t happen again. It is not fair to lose this SR from a buggy game…

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106

My system is the same since before rialto update (same antivirus, no windows update). The freezes only occur after rialto update.

On Windows 10 BTW.

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107

I did a scan and repair as suggested. 107 mb of files downloaded. Pretty exciting. I launched the game afterwards only to see this message:

General Error: 0xE0010160

What a bummer. Time to reinstall… the whole game…

2 Likes
108

Was in comp game playing as Mercy. I died and my screen froze. I couldn’t esc (was full screened), couldn’t pull up task manager. Had to hard shut down. Afterwards, blizzard pulled up, but clicking “play” made my screen black for half a second, but refused to launch game. I tried turning off my firewall. I tried repairing my game. I tried resetting my in-game settings. Nada.

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109

That problem has been looked at over in this thread. See if it solves your problem:

111

Well, I wish I’d have looked at that before I uninstalled the game! :frowning:

Thanks though Bitty.

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112

Sorry about that. Let us know if you still have problems after the reinstall.

113

I’m having the same issue as well. Tried doing repair and still in the middle of the game, game just freezes and then sound suddenly stops and ctrl+alt+del only brings up window manager option and I cannot alt tab out to force quit. Best I can do is either hard reset or sign off and back in. Never had game freezing in the middle of the game before 'til this new rialto patch.

1 Like