Developers of MMORPG BitCraft Online have finally figured out why dozens of players were dropped from the servers at the same time during an isolated network outage. The cause has not yet been found, but we have found the mechanism of the problem and have ruled out the bug that may have caused the two shutdowns.
The team spent several months researching connectivity failures and adding server diagnostics. The first change is to increase the timeout from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. This helps players with slow or unstable connections, but when there’s a massive outage, about 50 people lose connection at the same time and automatically reconnect. The old connection remained active for another five minutes.
This is where an unpleasant feature of BitCraft Online was discovered. The server closed the old connection and the game logic treated this as a clean exit from the player without checking if a new connection exists. As a result, users who have returned to the game receive a message about the end of the session, after which the client closes the working connection and is sent back to the login screen. The developers have changed the connection tracking system so closing old connections should now not kick players out again.
But the root cause of the massive blackouts remains a mystery. Maintenance on the cloud provider’s infrastructure on August 5 did not resolve the issue. The next update will add error collection directly from the client via a separate server, which should help determine the source of failures. In the meantime, the team is working on smoother automatic reconnections to minimize short delays caused by future network issues.
