AT&T network - "Unable to load persistence data" - Season 5

Just wanted to chime in here to say this is absolutely unacceptable for a AAA game.  I can play on PC throughout the day but as soon as I try to log in at what I suspect are high-traffic times, (9pm EST) I get the persistence data error.  

I shouldn't have to use a VPN to play the game.  I've never had this issue with any other title in 20+ years of gaming. 

EA:  take responsibility and do better.

Hi @CiggyTardust,

Thank you for sharing your feedback. We truly understand that it's frustrating.

Have you seen the updates of this thread that are being shared?
I would like to highlight the accepted solution of this thread.

Not seeing any proposed solution?  If you mean restart my modem/computer I do that every day.

@CiggyTardust, it's on the 1st page of this thread. I linked it in my previous post. 🙂 The post is called an "Accepted Solution", it's also stated in the post why it's marked as a solution.

Hope this helps.

Ok so there's no solution.  Still being investigated.  That's quite a solution.  Got it.  

That EA has been this careless about fixing an issue that’s been preventing a large number of players (ATT largest ISP in US) from playing for 2+ weeks is absolutely unacceptable. What a slap in the face to fans who have stuck with this franchise for so long. Guess it’s time to move on to other games that actually allow their players to enjoy what they paid for. 

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@GroovyDoovy wrote:
@5ubj3ctz3r0I wonder if it's not time of day related but volume of traffic related, and that maybe the volume of traffic tends to start going up around 7pm CST?

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Can't speak for console/Origin/etc users - but for Steam users you can see some historical graphs using steamdb.info ( https://steamdb.info/app/1517290/charts/ ) and there is actually a sharp drop in player count around that time, consistently too (could be AT&T users).

Checking again this afternoon when it does connect and there is no change in which IP addresses I'm connecting to - it's the same ones except during this time there is no errors. If it was bandwidth or load related I would assume that the experience would be intermittent not consistently unable to log in during those times.

AWS, and AWS customers often have redundant designs for their applications - makes me wonder if at a certain time whatever sits behind those before mentioned IPs does some kind of routine maintenance and fails over to other "servers" that are problematic. Whether that's AWS underlying infrastructure causing dropped packets somewhere (though this is AT&T routes specifically, so this seems unlikely), or an EA configuration difference between "A" and "B" sets of "servers" that sit behind those IPs who knows.

I took a trace route when it's working to see if it's different when it's not (I don't expect there to be a change)

Working:

C:\Users\M>tracert -d 99.80.71.123

Tracing route to 99.80.71.123 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.3.5.1
2 1 ms <1 ms 1 ms 10.5.5.1
3 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 108.232.84.1
4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 71.151.17.114
5 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms 12.242.114.16
6 22 ms 22 ms 29 ms 173.241.128.29
7 108 ms 136 ms 99 ms 89.149.185.49
8 142 ms 142 ms 143 ms 154.14.130.134

EDIT:

Not working:

C:\Users\M>tracert -d 99.80.71.123

Tracing route to 99.80.71.123 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.3.5.1
2 <1 ms 1 ms <1 ms 10.5.5.1
3 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 108.232.84.1
4 2 ms 1 ms 2 ms 71.151.17.114
5 9 ms 7 ms 6 ms 12.242.114.16
6 3 ms 4 ms 2 ms 173.241.128.29
7 89 ms 89 ms 90 ms 89.149.185.49
8 151 ms * 143 ms 154.14.130.134
9 * * * Request timed out.
10 ^C
C:\Users\M>time
The current time is: 20:15:35.92

Same path as expected - same previously noted behavior. Appears to happen at 8PM CST.

(Note it doesn't actually make it to it's destination but that just means that ICMP is being dropped beyond that last hop, doesn't mean it's unreachable.)

Comedy 

This still isn’t a solution, or even an update for that matter. @CiggyTardust has every right to be upset about the continued lack of real solutions for this. It’s been 2+ weeks since people who use the third largest ISP in the US can’t play, but sure, keep giving “updates” resolving nothing and continuing to be argumentative towards customers for your company’s repeated mistakes. 

The issue is still present for me. Unable to load persistent data. EA/DICE how long do we have to wait to have this fixed?!

An elastic IP is quite the opposite of what you're describing, it's used to create a static IP that doesn't change. An IP changing wouldn't cause this though, it's definitely a networking issue on EAs side. Notice that you aren't immediately getting blocked when you attempt to connect, like a firewall would do. It just sits and spins til a timeout is reached. Trace route shows it is making it to AWS just fine, it's dropped right after that when it's passed into EA's VPC.

In short, it looks like everyone's requests are being sent into the abyss on EA's side due to some sort of egregious mistake made in their routing. Mind blowing that a production outage has gone unresolved for 2 weeks. I would have been fired being unable to resolve this after one day.

I also don't appreciate the passive aggressive replies with emojis from EA. You have no solution because you don't even understand how the system *you designed* works. It's incredibly bad PR to talk down to someone in this situation, especially when you then point to a solution that everyone has confirmed DOES NOT WORK.

Nothing is resolved, it has only gotten worse and affected more people *that paid money to access this* as time goes on 

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@mmmarfy wrote:

An elastic IP is quite the opposite of what you're describing, it's used to create a static IP that doesn't change. An IP changing wouldn't cause this though, it's definitely a networking issue on EAs side. Notice that you aren't immediately getting blocked when you attempt to connect, like a firewall would do. It just sits and spins til a timeout is reached. Trace route shows it is making it to AWS just fine, it's dropped right after that when it's passed into EA's VPC.

In short, it looks like everyone's requests are being sent into the abyss on EA's side due to some sort of egregious mistake made in their routing. Mind blowing that a production outage has gone unresolved for 2 weeks. I would have been fired being unable to resolve this after one day.

I also don't appreciate the passive aggressive replies with emojis from EA. You have no solution because you don't even understand how the system *you designed* works. It's incredibly bad PR to talk down to someone in this situation, especially when you then point to a solution that everyone has confirmed DOES NOT WORK.

Nothing is resolved, it has only gotten worse and affected more people *that paid money to access this* as time goes on 

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You're right about it not being firewall or NACL behavior, I don't believe it's a routing issue either though. There is still two-way traffic to these IPs, there is just a ton of TCP errors, but also only at a certain point in the day (if it's 8:00PM CST sharp, it confirms my idea that there is "something" on a schedule causing this). The concept that something is failing over due to routine maintenance is the only thing I could think of beyond some kind of time of day QoS setting.

The fact that it's only AT&T based routes is what makes it extra perplexing. The more I think about it the less sense I can make of it. All of the internet circuits that AWS has would have the full routing table so it's not like there is a particular router that has AT&T routes and another has T-Mobile routes. Not every AT&T customer is going to be sourced from the same block of public IP addresses either, so the idea that it's a VPC routing issue seems highly unlikely - for this type of traffic it's all going to just be the default route of 0.0.0.0/0. Regardless, two-way traffic = not a routing issue. When I start going down this path it makes me believe it's actually just an AT&T issue. This could also explain the time it's taken to get it resolved. EA would not have any particular business contract with AT&T in this regard, and neither would AWS.

At the end of the day none of us have administrative access or knowledge of their infrastructure or architecture so there's a lot of speculation outside of what we've able to identify as affected clients. I agree a production outage like this would also have me out of a job. I don't think  EA is being fully transparent about the issue.

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@mmmarfy wrote:

An elastic IP is quite the opposite of what you're describing, it's used to create a static IP that doesn't change. An IP changing wouldn't cause this though, it's definitely a networking issue on EAs side. Notice that you aren't immediately getting blocked when you attempt to connect, like a firewall would do. It just sits and spins til a timeout is reached. Trace route shows it is making it to AWS just fine, it's dropped right after that when it's passed into EA's VPC.

In short, it looks like everyone's requests are being sent into the abyss on EA's side due to some sort of egregious mistake made in their routing. Mind blowing that a production outage has gone unresolved for 2 weeks. I would have been fired being unable to resolve this after one day.

I also don't appreciate the passive aggressive replies with emojis from EA. You have no solution because you don't even understand how the system *you designed* works. It's incredibly bad PR to talk down to someone in this situation, especially when you then point to a solution that everyone has confirmed DOES NOT WORK.

Nothing is resolved, it has only gotten worse and affected more people *that paid money to access this* as time goes on 

---

You're right about it not being firewall or NACL behavior, I don't believe it's a routing issue either though. There is still two-way traffic to these IPs, there is just a ton of TCP errors, but also only at a certain point in the day (if it's 8:00PM CST sharp, it confirms my idea that there is "something" on a schedule causing this). The concept that something is failing over due to routine maintenance is the only thing I could think of beyond some kind of time of day QoS setting.

The fact that it's only AT&T based routes is what makes it extra perplexing. The more I think about it the less sense I can make of it. All of the internet circuits that AWS has would have the full routing table so it's not like there is a particular router that has AT&T routes and another has T-Mobile routes. Not every AT&T customer is going to be sourced from the same block of public IP addresses either, so the idea that it's a VPC routing issue seems highly unlikely - for this type of traffic it's all going to just be the default route of 0.0.0.0/0. Regardless, two-way traffic = not a routing issue. When I start going down this path it makes me believe it's actually just an AT&T issue. This could also explain the time it's taken to get it resolved. EA would not have any particular business contract with AT&T in this regard, and neither would AWS.

At the end of the day none of us have administrative access or knowledge of their infrastructure or architecture so there's a lot of speculation outside of what we've able to identify as affected clients. I agree a production outage like this would also have me out of a job. I don't think EA is being fully transparent about the issue.

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@CiggyTardust  schreef:

Ok so there's no solution.  Still being investigated.  That's quite a solution.  Got it.  

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That is indeed correct. Unfortunately, the situation is beyond our control. There's sadly nothing else we can do other than wait for a solution.

*It's also affecting more services (link 1, link 2), not only Battlefield 2042.

Please also take a look at the Battlefield Comms Twitter account that has released this statement: https://twitter.com/BattlefieldComm/status/1686751553024045056.

As much as we'd love to offer a quick fix, there's no magic solution here (unless you want to try a VPN or mobile hotspot). We understand that it's very frustrating, but as mentioned earlier, we're working with stakeholders to resolve it as soon as possible.

Thank you.

You changed something in the patch that the ISP's are having issues with.

Simply change it back.

Hi @sk1lld,

It, unfortunately, doesn't look like it is related to a game patch of some sort, as - like I mentioned & linked in my previous post - it is not only affecting Battlefield 2042, but also various other services (the first reports are also from before one of the recent patches were released). It would be great if it was that simple! But unfortunately, it doesn't look like it is.

So even if the console or PC is plugged directly into the cable modem for direct access to the internet it still doesn't work?

But if a VPN is used then it works?

That suggests either a routing issue or ISP port blocking issue. I remember ISP's blocking Windows NetBios 445 port.

https://business.comcast.com/support/article/internet/blocked-port-445

Not only does this happen with BF 2042 but also with Battlefront II.  I am sure there are other games it affects as well.  I am, however, able to play BF4.  

Here we go again, this started literally after the most recent patch! Really unacceptable! not even a week of actual use! And yes I have At&t! This is frustrating that this * hasn’t been solved. What type of clown show Q & A department you guys have there?!

Ill be more than happy to get a VPN if EA covers the cost for the damn game too play! What is the answer too us getting reimbursed?!

For the first time in a while, I had no problems connecting and playing tonight.  Didn't have to use VPN.    We'll see if that holds up going forward