Since April, I have been having an issue where I frequently disconnect after leaving an arena on this character (Brosum-Benediction).
When reconnecting and logging back in, I receive the “A Character With That Name Already Exists” error message. If I log onto an alt, I can see my character still online - with its location being still in the arena or “Unknown”. After 5 minutes, the character fully goes offline, and I’m able to log in again. (I’m assuming it needs to wait for the arena instance to close). This has become extremely frustrating - as it kills all momentum of an arena session, and makes it difficult to find arena partners that are willing to constantly wait 5 minutes to continue playing.
Since this doesn’t happen every game, I have done extensive testing to try and figure out the conditions on which this happens, and have the following observations:
“A Character With That Name Already Exists” disconnect
- If I have been slowed/rooted/etc a high amount of times during that game, there is a higher chance of the disconnect happening
- The disconnect happens only if my character is alive when leaving the arena - either if I won the game and click the leave arena button, or during the game by using /afk
- The disconnect never happens if I leave the game while dead
- I have noticed that if I was jumping many times that game, especially spam jumping many times in a row - there is a higher chance the disconnect happens once the game has finished. Possibly related to being hit by a slow/cc while in the air and getting some kind of desync from the server? I can’t fully confirm this, but it became a theory of mine after seeing the recent Classic PTR jumping disconnect bug.
I’ll also report some other variations of strange disconnects I have experienced, in the hopes that all of this is somehow related:
Crowd Control Death Disconnect
- There is also a second variant of this bug where I immediately disconnect if I die during a stun. In this scenario however, I am able to log back in after going through two character log in attempts, without geting the “A Character With That Name Already Exists” error. This is still frustrating, but at least I do not need to wait 5 minutes.
- This type of disconnect once actually resulted in me logging back into the arena starting room alive and due to the game still being in progress (I assume because partner was still alive and in the game), I was at full health and all my cooldowns reset even though I had just been killed before the disconnect. I’m not sure how widespread this disconnect bug is, but that is potentially gamebreaking if someone were able to replicate and abuse it.
Raid Disconnect
- I have also experienced a few times in PVE, in Ulduar and VOA. Not in a stun, but while just being engaged with a boss. I disconnect and when logging back in, am ported to the beginning of the instance at full health, even though the rest of the raid is still engaged with the boss.
I have done all kinds of troubleshooting in an effort to resolve this, but these disconnects continue to persist in all scenarios:
- Updated all addons
- Removed 1 addon at a time
- No addons at all
- Cleared Cache/WTF
- WinMTR test showed no packet loss
- Two different connections to rule out ISP issues (Xfinity and T-Mobile Home Internet)
- Fresh install of battle.net / WoW on original computer (Windows 10)
- Completely different computer with a fresh battle.net / WoW install (Windows 11)
- Laptop with fresh battle.net / WoW install (macOS Ventura)
And the most confusing/important aspect of all this:
- This disconnect bug NEVER happens on my second wow license (on the same battle.net account)
- I have an alt of the same class (Brosumxo-Benediction), same server/addons/settings, and it never happens even with all addons enabled, etc.
This leads me to believe there may even be some kind of server side bug on my main warrior (Brosum-Benediction) that I’ll potentially only be able to get fixed with outside support.
Thanks for taking the time to look at all this, hopefully there is some kind of resolution.