[Steam] MELE Launcher fails to open. What's port 3216?
It's somewhat funny that I have 60 hours clocked in the steam version but as I finished ME1 and got onto ME2 the launch problems progressed significantly to the point where the game won't launch at all now.
I'm very sure this is the issue in between the EA & Steam. The game itself starts up just fine if I can get it to start.
Here's how it looks to me.
I click PLAY in steam.
Steam launches EALink:
10:11:23.0367537 steam.exe 23716 Process Create C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\EALink.exe SUCCESS PID: 30092, Command line: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\EALink.exe" "link2ea://launchgame/1328670?platform=steam&theme=met" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" ""
EALink launches origin:
10:11:27.6867800 EALink.exe 30092 Process Create C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\Origin.exe SUCCESS PID: 12280, Command line: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\Origin.exe" "origin2://game/launch?firstPartyAppId=1328670&platform=steam&authCode=DELIBERATELY REMOVED IDK"
Origin does some fiddling around and launches EASteamProxy:
10:11:37.0095729 Origin.exe 12280 Process Create C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\EASteamProxy.exe SUCCESS PID: 17168, Command line: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\EASteamProxy.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Mass Effect Legendary Edition\Game\Launcher\MassEffectLauncher.exe" -locale {locale}
EASteamProxy does not launch the launcher.
If I launch the game from the origin then (heh), it launches steam and then goes through the same hoops.
Obviously I did try every option from https://answers.ea.com/t5/Mass-Effect-Legendary-Edition/PC-Possible-workarounds-for-Mass-Effect-Legendary-Edition-launch/td-p/10340978 thread to no avail.
It does seem this isn't the first game that faces the broken steam&origin integration issues – I've found some threads related to BF4. Still, I'd like some feedback on how can I diagnose it better and get the game going.
On dxdiag – the game itself does work, I don't see any useful info in the dxdiag dump otherwise. There are no crash reports, there are no events mentioning EASteamProxy in the logs.
If I trace EASteamProxy itself there's a lot of trying to talk TCP 127.0.0.1:3216, no one's answering. Makes me wonder if whatever's on the other side is failing.
Eventually it gives up and dies:
10:29:48.5100968 EASteamProxy.exe 10572 Process Exit SUCCESS Exit Status: -3, User Time: 0.0468750 seconds, Kernel Time: 0.0781250 seconds, Private Bytes: 9,220,096, Peak Private Bytes: 13,635,584, Working Set: 18,440,192, Peak Working Set: 38,084,608
So, what's that on 3216 that EASteamProxy tries to talk to?
Aha, the answer was in the BF-V forum all along 😃
tl;dr: windows will reserve some ports for its hyper-v nat. that also includes docker-for-win (https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/3171).
If you run `netsh int ip show excludedportrange protocol=tcp` and see any region over the 3216 port then it's exactly it: windows won't allow the EA app to bind to the port, the steam link won't work,. everything gets broken.
You can verify the fix by running `net stop winnat`. The ports are still unused after you start it back, it's exclusive to the docker screw-up.
It's time to take Earth back.
