• I had a decent connection over wifi - occasional stutter but totally manageable.
  • Fiber internet with a high capacity wifi6 router
  • Suddenly, I get ping spikes for 10 seconds.
  • no other network activity at time that I’m playing.
  • router is one room over.
  • Only recent update is maybe a Fedora system update, or a Deadlock update.
  • Please help. I don’t want to go beneath house to run cat6. It’s dark and there are spiders.
  • Nils@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    11 hours ago

    tl;dr: it is probably Deadlock, use a VPN to force a different the server/route.

    @hello_there Does your computer support wifi6? What time of the day are you playing Deadlock?

    As others mentioned, you need to isolate the problem. The usual suspects are:

    • Computer to router - check the Wi-Fi strength,(@tal’s mtr, linssid, nmcli… there are many out there. Use something that would monitor for a while, since you said that the spikes happen every 10 seconds. If you are willing to move your computer, or get a longer cable to your antenna, or to buy wifi6 antenna with a long cable: you can get a phone app to do the strength test and check for better spots nearby.
    • Router to “outside” - if you use all in one solution, just make sure it is working properly, either connect to it thought your browser. Or be lazy and do the power cycle, waiting 20 seconds before reconnecting the power cable (or whatever is your ISP guideline).
    • Route to game servers - Try to play other online games, take note of the server location you are to experience the problem. As there are always some issues with the route, like a flood in a region, a truck that destroyed a cable, or just ISP incompetence.
    • Route to the Deadlock servers - You can enable settings to show more details, or open the steam overlay. It will show you locations, and if it hopped in multiple servers. Take note of the servers the problem happen and the ones that do not.

    The other suspects do not happen so often, but:

    A faulty Wi-Fi device, but the 10 seconds interval is a bit weird for it. And you would see a bunch of errors in your logs. If you want to rule that out, get one of those wifi-usb dongle with a big USB extension, or one of those fancy ones from TP-Link or Netgear that comes with big cables and antennas.

    If you think it might be a fedora update, you can rollback to test it. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/manual-rollbacks/

    I am inclined to think it is Deadlock because I played it for a while, and from my list, it was the only thing inconsistent and extremely erratic. From one day to another, it would go from small spikes, to something that looked like randomizing my ping between 45 and 350 every couple of seconds. One of those days it was connecting me to Amsterdam servers, with a hop in Buenos Aires first. And sometimes it would change depending on the time of the day. The game is not released yet, and their servers are still experimental.

    Sadly, there is no way to force a server at the time, not sure if they implemented that yet. And there were plenty of people complaining on their forums about those problems. There, you might find a case similar to yours with a different solution, but what worked for me sometimes was to use a VPN and chose a location in the same city as the server closest to me. When that failed, I would try a different city for the VPN.