Screen Freeze kinda

Support Technical Support
1

I have been having a problem for a while now, and have tried quite a few things to fix it already, but I am at a loss.

So while playing I will, at random, get a screen freeze. Or at least that is what I will call it, on my screen everyone else will be running in place, and on their screen I am running in place. The chat still works and ready checks still come through. The game doesn’t exactly crash, but the graphical portion of it freezes.

Everything is updated, all drivers and everything. The computer is decent ryzen 9 3900x 32g 3600 ram 512mb m.2 nvme ssd b550 mobo 1500w psu and dual vega 56’s… yeah the 56’s are getting old but I had them already and new cards are hard to find right now so what the heck they work.

I have thus far tried, reinstalling the game, reinstalling windows, disabling all the trash windows comes with like that silly xbox garbage. I have uninstalled the software that runs my mouse and keyboard, logitech stuff. I have uninstall all my addons, put addons in and out to see if there were some fighting each other and causing the problem… lets be honest this game is unplayable at a high level without some addons so it’s not like I can just not have them, but I have removed every single one of them and use alternatives and even cut back to just dbm for a run.

It only happens in dungeons and raids. Only when in a group. And seams to happen in close proximity to boss fights, before or after them.

None of that worked, so I have everything back the way I want it right now, and of course I have the same problem but at least I have a UI that isn’t strait trash and the problem.

I might got a whole night without a single screen freeze, or like today it’s every single dungeon I jump into.

So anyway, does anyone have any idears? I feel like it’s a problem with some hardware interaction with the game, but damn I don’t know I’m no nerd I just play wow all day.

2

Hey Knoest,

This is what we sometimes refer to as a “partial disconnect” in WoW. It’s not a graphics or rendering issue, but rather a connection issue.

When you’re playing WoW there are multiple connections going at the same time. If you hover your mouse over the game menu icon (the red question mark at the bottom right) you’ll see “home” and “world” latency. These two two separate connections to the WoW servers that each do different things. Home is primarily responsible for chat, guild info, and item tooltip info. World is used for movements of your character and other characters/NPCs, spells and abilities, damage/healing, etc. The world connection usually is sending and receiving more data than the home connection.

So when we see problems with your character or other characters running in place, or spells and abilities not working, but your chat is still working, that indicates you’ve lost connection to the “world” server but the “home” server is still connected.

For troubleshooting this connection issue, the first thing that I would recommend would be to use a direct wired connection to your router if you aren’t already. Wireless can cause problems with connections dropping, especially in dungeons or battlegrounds where more information is being transmitted. Then power cycle the router to refresh the connection.

Beyond that, you may want to try running a WinMTR test in the background as you play in order to capture what the network traffic looks like when the issue occurs. Since you mentioned the problem is somewhat random you may need to let the test run for 20-30 minutes at a time and then stop and restart the test if it doesn’t happen within that window.

  1. Download WinMTR
  2. Right-click on the downloaded .zip folder and select “Extract All”, to extract the files to a new folder.
  3. Open the new folder that was created, then open the WinMTR_x64 folder.
  4. Right-click on the WinMTR application and select “Run as administrator”.
  5. Type the IP address 24.105.62.129 in the “Host” field.
  6. Click on “Start” and then launch the game. Allow the test to run for 20 minutes or so, and then click “Stop”. If the problem didn’t occur during that 20 minutes, start the test again for another 20 minutes. Rinse and repeat until the problem occurs.
  7. Click on “Copy Text to Clipboard”, paste the results here, then highlight everything and hit the </> button in the posting section so it will allow links.
3

Ok well I’m really glad it’s not a hardware issue, but a connection issue might suck even more… as most of that is out of my control.

I am using a wired connection, and I did reset both the router and the modem. I updated the firmware of the router, and had my isp also update the firmware of the modem.

This unfortunately did not resolve the problem. To add to the mystery… when I log back into the game, after closing it via task manager, the load screen will take much longer than normal. I can then load any other character I have, but if I load the one who I was playing at the time of the problem I will get a “world server” error message. And when I do get into the game I am almost always teleported back to where my hearth stone is set.

I got a copy of that winMTR thing but I keep getting a “can’t post links” message here.

4

Use Pastebin and provide just the end of the link.

5 
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |
|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|                                    ubnt -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |    0 |    0 |   12 |    0 |
|           97-64-253-97.client.mchsi.com -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |    0 |    0 |    8 |    0 |
|                             10.152.65.1 -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |    4 |    9 |   50 |    9 |
|                            172.30.18.21 -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |   13 |   21 |   66 |   25 |
|            68-66-73-22.client.mchsi.com -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |   33 |   37 |   66 |   42 |
|              po13.chgil001cr1.mchsi.com -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |   33 |   37 |   66 |   39 |
|              po10.chgil001er1.mchsi.com -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |   33 |   37 |  110 |   34 |
|                          137.221.66.164 -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |   32 |   41 |  123 |   36 |
|                   No response from host -  100 |  407 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |
|         et-0-0-0-pe01-eqch2.as57976.net -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |   33 |   39 |  169 |   37 |
|                           24.105.62.129 -    0 | 2035 | 2035 |   30 |   36 |   77 |   35 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
   WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider
6

Hey again,

The WinMTR results look good, so no indication of where exactly the partial disconnect is occurring.

Something you could potentially try would be to enable QoS (Quality of Service) in your router’s settings, if your router supports QoS. That can sometimes help with connection issues like this.

Or if you can try connecting through a different connection, such as a hotspot or VPN, that would help identify if it’s an issue happening along the route somewhere between you and the server.

7

Ok I have been using a VPN with my endpoint in chicago, because apparently my server is located in chicago, and I have not had a problem since.

I assume this indicates that the problem is in the route. Any clue on how I can identify where the problem lies? wan/lan? if it’s lan side obviously it’s something I can change, and if it’s not then I need my ISP to change something somewheres, and they might because we have a business account and they seam to really support business customers more than the residential side.

8

Hey Knoest,

I’m having the same problem, as described by myself and others here: Combat and character actions lag-frozen, running on spot, while ingame chat still working

I notice that you are also on UBNT hardware. Just wonedering if that is a coincidence. What UBNT gear do you have?

9

I have a USG and antennas but this computer is actually connected to a 48port HP switch via fiber so the only thing in the route is that USG

10

I’m on a USG Pro 4 and all USG wired switches. Considering that your (presumably commercial endpoint) VPN Solution fixed it, do you have deep packet inspection enabled?

11

We have quite a few open services so yes we do have DPI enabled, and IPS.

12

I am also running both of the same options. Thats too coincidental. I think i’ll try disabling DPI as a test.

13

It looks like UBNT might be identifying certain traffic coming from blizz as malicious.

Trojan A Network Trojan was Detected High United Kingdom 137.221.103.31 : 3724 INTERNALIP : 64721 12/17/2020 09:14:43 PM
Trojan A Network Trojan was Detected High United Kingdom 137.221.96.37 : 3724 INTERNALIP : 49815 12/17/2020 10:13:48 PM
Trojan A Network Trojan was Detected High United Kingdom 137.221.99.152 : 3724 INTERNALIP : 49217 12/19/2020 01:07:19 PM
14

I wonder if whitelisting the server would work then.

15

It looks like they own 137.221.96.0/22. I’d like to get a blue’s confirmation before I WL it. I also can’t help but wonder what they are sending that is tripping trojan traffic signatures. I’d like to wireshark it, but the error is so rare, from a packet perspective that I don’t think i’d ever capture it.

16

I’m going to dig through my threat log and see if I can find something similar from my server.

I’m having a little issue accessing my alerts… might need to restart my controller vm or something.

17

It looks like it isn’t just me.

https://community.ui.com/questions/Threat-Management-Alert-1-A-Network-Trojan-was-Detected-Signature-ET-TROJAN-Netwire-RAT-Check-in/80ea2e34-d5a9-487a-98ed-19be7c9cd7ea

18

This just happened again and correlated to the second with an IPS malicious traffic signature.

24.105.33.197 : 3724 INTERNALIP : 61887 12/20/2020 10:16:49 PM

Concerningly, this time a different network range in a different part of the world. Unless blizzard decides to take action, we are going to be left with the choice of disabling IPS or suppressing these IP by IP.

19

I have been attempting to catch it but have not seen the issue yet tonight. As in I have not dc’d yet tonight… still trying to catch it. Hopefully we can both confirm it.

20

Knoest is probably tired of getting update notices for this thread, but I wanted to add a comment just incase we get a blue reading this.

While I can only be certain that this is happening on Ubiquity hardware, it is reasonable to infer that this will be happening on any high end home networking equipment and virtually all corporate equipment that support DPI and IPS signature detection. In short, this may be impacting a large number of users.

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