(PC) Severe Packet Loss After Season 3 Update
I've been playing the game on my PC since launch and, though there were some hiccups at the start, after the first major update things were well optimized and the game ran fine. However, after the ...
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I'm an Xbox Series X player, but jumping in because I thoroughly believe some of the issues discussed in this long running thread tie back to a netcode/server problem with Dice or EA following Season 3 updates.
My day job is working for an ISP, specifically on home routers, so when I first experienced the issue of packet loss in game, I went down a 2-3 day rabbit hole of investigating the performance problems initially worrying that it was a router firmware problem. But reading this thread convinced and seeing others like https://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield2042/comments/zmg9fq/packet_loss_issues_on_large_servers/ me otherwise
My experience with it:
- I've played BF2042 on Xbox, wired with CAT6, since launch.
- Like @BertHandsome @arcadeuxe & @Itwazlagiswear have reported, since season 3 updates I mostly see the issue on servers where theres more than 64 players and when I'm around the action. And when it does occur, its pretty consistent: When generating controls, eg moving/looking around/shooting. My latency will climb up from its usual 20ms up to ~150ms and Outbound Packet Loss will also climb to ~15 %. If I stop all controls and stand still, it recovers over ~10 seconds, until I move again. See the attach graph, showing this, latency spikes when I'm moving around/generating controls, dips when I stop.
- I've been testing/replicating the issue with a 128 player Portal server trying to be scientific about my investigation, and if connect to it in the morning when theres a low player count it doesnt seem to happen
- I'm in Australia, so BF2042 routes to Amazon servers in Sydney
- Sometimes shutting down the game or rebooting the Xbox, and reconnecting to force a new UDP connection to be used (and probably a different virtual path within Dice's Amazon environment), will make the issue go away. Again, connecting to the same server, within minutes of the issue previously occurring.
- I have granular live monitoring of my network throughput, and the issue occurs when I'm using mere kilobits of a 50Mbps connection. Tested with 4x routers, multiple firmwares.
- I have tested swapping out to Battlefield 5 when the issue is consistantly occuring in BF2042, and never see it there
- I've previously suffered the TN spike thing, but this issue, high latency/packet loss when around lots of players, has only been occurring since season 3 - hence with others reporting the same phenomenon on PC, am convinced this is some kind of server side or netcode problem coinciding with season 3 updates
After 3 days of troubleshooting, I isolated this down to DSCP tagging. Which for the non network engineer readers, is mechanism for internet traffic to be marked with a priority so it can be treated differently on networks. Xbox has an option (Settings > Network Settings > Advanced Settings > QoS tagging) that I'd had turned on. Turning off the issue/rebooting, resolved the issue for me immediately - I verified this by turning it off and back on across four different 80+ player BF2042 servers and it was consistently the culprit.
So for Xbox players, thats the work around. But there will likely be another work around / trigger, that might help you PC players suffering the issue - and if my theories right, it would explain why some of BF2042 is complaining but not all; using gaming routers. If you run a gaming router like Asus, or Netgear Nighthawk - that performs network prioritisation/QoS functions, its worth trying to turn those features off temporarily for your gaming PC/console, to see if that works for you around.
The root cause, I suspect, is that EA/Dice servers (or netcode) is using these DSCP tags in some way - since one of the Season 3 updates. Seemingly poorly. If I had to guess, it would be something like their prioritisation queues on their AWS servers for the priority traffic is either optimised for the 64 player server count and not dealing with higher traffic load - or its not been setup properly to cascade/overflow.
In laymens terms, its like turning up to a nightclub with a VIP card on a busy night and the bouncer letting you in last after all the other peasants - it should have the opposite effect.
As per my above report, I've been playing BF2042 since launch, same Xbox/network environment with this DSCP tagging setting turned on - and it only became an issue in the last ~3-6 weeks.
Hopefully the findings are useful to others, but more hopeful that EA community managers flag with some Dice folk
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