Disconnects, client restart time, and risk of losing a ship

Issues, Workarounds & Localization General Issues
1

I would like to report and discuss an issue I have been experiencing with unexpected disconnects in EVE Online.

From my perspective, the main problem is not simply the loss of connection itself. The bigger issue is the amount of time required to return to gameplay after a disconnect.

What happens in my case

When the connection is lost, my experience is approximately as follows:

  1. The game loses its connection to Tranquility.
  2. I receive the connection-lost message.
  3. The EVE client closes instead of remaining available for reconnection.
  4. I have to launch the client again through the launcher.
  5. I have to wait for authentication, loading, and character selection.
  6. I then have to load back into the game and regain control of my ship.

In my case, this process can take approximately 2–5 minutes, depending on Internet conditions and how long the client takes to restart and load everything again.

That amount of time can be critical.

During those 2–5 minutes, the player is unable to control the ship. This becomes especially serious when participating in challenging PvE content such as Abyssal Deadspace and the new Crimson Harvest combat sites.

As a result, a disconnect lasting only a few seconds can turn into several minutes of lost control, potentially leaving the player with no realistic opportunity to recover the ship.

The problem is not simply the disconnect

I understand and accept that EVE Online is a game where ships can be lost but my concern is that a temporary network interruption should not necessarily require the entire game client to be restarted.

A short connection interruption and a complete client restart are two very different things.

When a player loses connection for a few seconds, the additional time required to:

  • close the client;
  • restart the client;
  • authenticate again;
  • select the character;
  • load back into space;

can turn a temporary technical problem into an unavoidable asset loss.

Consider a situation where you are fighting in a CH Gauntlet with a blinged-out Marauder that you spent weeks or months working to afford or build. You lose connection for a few seconds while your Bastion module is active, or an elite NPC warp-disrupts you during those few minutes. By the time you have restarted the client and returned to the game, your ship is simply gone.

The player may have been winning the fight before the disconnect. The loss is not necessarily the result of making a bad tactical decision or being unable to defeat the NPCs. Instead, the player was effectively removed from the fight by a temporary technical interruption and then prevented from responding for several additional minutes.

This happened to me today in a Corax Navy Issue.

I was fighting in a Hollow Outbreak site and was only a few seconds away from completing it — approximately 520 seconds into a 600-second site — when the game disconnected.

After spending the necessary time going through the entire reconnection process, I finally returned to the game, only to find that the Squall Boss had warp-disrupted my ship and destroyed it.

The bitter part was that I was winning the fight.

I came back online in my capsule, with the wreck of my ship already there and the remaining parts of my ship effectively reclaimed by my Mobile Tractor Unit.

This experience alone is enough to make me reconsider participating in the Gauntlets, Bases, and Criterion sites.

A possible solution

I would like to suggest that CCP/Fenris consider implementing a connection recovery or reconnection state within the existing client, rather than immediately terminating the client after a disconnect.

The objective would simply be to reduce recovery time and allow the player to regain control as quickly as possible after an unexpected connection interruption.

This could significantly improve the gameplay experience, particularly during challenging PvE content and limited-time events such as Crimson Harvest.

I simply cannot justify taking this level of risk with a billion-ISK ship, even in High Security space, if a brief connection interruption can effectively prevent me from responding for several minutes.

I would like the community to help bring attention to this

I believe this issue deserves broader attention from the EVE community because it affects more than just the individual player experiencing a disconnect.

If you have experienced something similar, please share your experience in this thread.

The more players who document similar cases, the easier it should be to demonstrate the scale and practical consequences of this problem.

I would particularly like this discussion to reach GM staff, developers, network engineers, and the teams responsible for the EVE client, so that this aspect of the disconnect problem can be considered alongside the underlying connectivity issues that are frequently reported by the community.

EVE Online is built around risk, and I believe that risk is an important part of what makes the game unique.

At the same time, there is a meaningful difference between accepting the risk of losing a ship and being unable to respond because the client has been terminated and must be completely restarted after a brief connection interruption.

2

EvE’s servers are incredibly inconsistent.

Sometimes I spend 6 to 8 hours online with no issues, and then I have a wave of disconnects and subsequent login failures.

Before anyone chimes in with the usual stupidity of “it’s on your end”, NO it’s not. Everything else works perfectly, every other MMO I have installed continues to function while EvE is throwing a fit. My internet is fine, and it works with every other game I play essentially flawlessly.

The problem is with EvE and the way it apparently handles connections. Little burps that may be common and only result in lag spikes in other games are handled by EvE in one way. Straight disconnection. This is the main reason why I cannot participate in Abyss, it’s simply too risky.

The only other online game I can think of that has similar issues is War Thunder, a game notorious for its horrendous servers and packet loss issues.

3

Agreed, other competitive games have successfully implemented such features, so it can’t be technically impossible.

4

No Risk, no ISK.

5

I entirely agree with the OP.
Perhaps some of the seasoned players are just inured to it by now, but three things about the connection issues have surprised me as a newcomer to Eve (with decades of gaming experience).

  1. The fact that the netcode seems so fragile - other games seem able to recover from brief outages much more readily than Eve.
  2. The fact that indeed the entire client has to exit and restart (an amazingly lengthy process given how light Eve is on system resources in general).
  3. The way that a brief connection hiccup can lead to the game getting stuck for literally minutes before it actually declares the connection lost (all the time while showing no requests completing in the monitor window). I’ve given up waiting on a couple of occasions and just killed it with the Task Manager so I could restart without further delay.
6

Yeah, and with every update, the devs put in some hard work bringing new QoL features, but they don’t address this issue, man. They work on new ships, HUDs, etc. Yet still, the netcode seems like an untouched black box.

I believe offering better connection stability would make more people willing to take risks and explore new aspects of New Eden where they don’t feel comfortable yet because of such issues, which lead to bad gameplay experiences.

For me, keeping people interested in the game goes beyond bringing in new players who eventually leave because of bad connection outages.

7

You might also want to post a link to this post in the CSM channel. They have the ability to bring things like this to the Devs where decisions can be made on it.

8

I can’t say this is an issue I’ve seen recently in EvE and previously when it has occurred it was almost certainly due to the dodgy network connection I was using.

However I completely agree with the OP that relogging takes far too long and it would be much better if the process was streamlined.

9

This has 100% been an issues for me. I have fortunately always been able to get back in quick enough as to not lose a ship but I dread the day I get some stupid looking embarrassing death on zkill because of this because I know it will happen. The most frustrating part in my scenario at least is everything functions perfectly until it drops. There’s no lag..no freezing..all modules running fine..everything perfect..then boom! Disconnect which means client restart. And as stated by others I play countless games on my rig that all work fine. This is an EVE specific issue. This needs to be addressed and until it is any ship loss which suffers a disconnect before destruction needs to be 100% reimbursed even in a scenario where someone might have been intentionally acting malicious. I bet they’d fix that crap real quick if that was the case. Though as it stands little hope since this has been an issue since like 2015 and if anything has just gotten worse over time.