I’ve found dozens of posts on this problem, but all of them have asinine answers like blindly reinstalling the game, blindly deleting folders and data, etc. I have the same problem as the dozens of other people who have posted about this. I’ve already done all the things: deleting the folders, repairing, reinstalling, etc. It always comes back.
What I’m looking for is a concrete, SPECIFIC, cause to address with some targeted troubleshooting. Not the standard helpdesk, “Could you please try blindly [insert arbitrary solution here]”
That’s what troubleshooting is, curellge. No one but you is sitting in front of you’re malfunctioning game/system, so unless you expect people to be psychic, blind suggestions is how it works.
I vehemently disagree.
Troubleshooting is having a strong understanding of the thing you are trying to fix and then based on the presented problem deriving a targeted, specific, list of possible causes and then systematically eliminating them.
For example: I saw one suggestion that asked the user to change their DNS. Given that stuck on preparing game data was the issue described it strains credulity that could somehow be caused by failed DNS resolution. If DNS had failed then you would have no network not a slow network as the name wouldn’t have resolved to begin with. If you had slow DNS resolution that could explain perceived slowness if the underlying code makes a huge number of DNS queries, but that would be fairly surprising for something like preparing game data which ostensibly is going to do some sort of pull and you usually don’t pull from a huge number of disparate places for an update. Suffice it to say, not a particularly plausible explanation.
Other solutions had you clearing out the totality of appdata and reinstall. I don’t need to explain how this isn’t targeted. Still others had people power cycling their computers.
These sound like a tree of possible resolutions being read which is frustrating. I don’t mind trying things, but I do want to be headed in a specific direction based off informed hypothesis not down a pre-built tree of things we’re just checking boxes on but no one really knows why.
With no knowledge of the 100,000s of different system environment or the state of the multiple 3rd party hardware and software in between, there’s too many variables to possibly have targeted troubleshooing.
As for the examples you provided, (assuming they were given by tech support agents), understand that they are given by people who have far better knowledge of the games’ underlying functions than anyone on the outside.
It’s certainly your prerogative to disagree, but doing so doesn’t change the realty that issues can have many possible causes that don’t have well defined starting points for troubleshooting.