Follow up: Frequent disconnects on Windows 11 but ancient Macbook Pro is solid

Issues, Workarounds & Localization General Issues
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Sorry for the long delay, and thanks to everyone who replied to the prior thread. I had given up on EVE Online and didn’t come back to try to fix it until just this week. The prior thread auto-closed after 3 months of inactivity.

I am posting again because I finally figured it out.

Aside from it being Windows 11 (which is indeed a factor here–no joke), I followed the advice to download the full game client (which dramatically reduced the number of disconnects but still wasn’t enough to stop them all), I finally figured out that it was the Intel AX211 drivers.

What happened was that I happened to be playing a video in the background that is hosted on my NAS across the LAN, and when EVE disconnected, it also cut out the video, meaning that the entire network connection was dropping and then reconnecting in an instant. That made me suspect either Windows 11 itself or the AX211 itself, and with a bit of searching for general (non-gaming) issues with Windows and the AX211, I found dozens of complaints about the AX211 disconnecting and quickly reconnecting under heavy traffic.

Heavy traffic would be exactly what was happening in the beginning, when the game client had not been fully downloaded and it was “Loading resources” at almost every step of the way, causing the network to drop within seconds of starting up the game.

Some people reported that downloading the latest genuine Intel drivers fixed their flaky AX211 connections. My driver was pretty recent–from around July 2024, but based on their successes, I upgraded it to 23.80.1.3 dated 9/4/2024, and voila, EVE Online now works. It still disconnects but very rarely, maybe once per 8 hours, but I can actually play through several tutorial missions in a row without a single disconnect.

I had been playing other online games fine with these faulty AX211 drivers because those games are more tolerant of network drop-outs, so it looked like it was only EVE Online having trouble.

Again, thanks to everyone for their help! I hope my success helps someone else.

NOTE: I also upgraded the Bluetooth drivers for the AX211 at the same time, though I do not think they were involved, only because the people who had success fixing their general (non-gaming) issues with the AX211 said that they also upgraded the Bluetooth drivers when upgrading the WiFi drivers. I copied them exactly. My Bluetooth drivers are genuine Intel and are now version 23.80.0.3.

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Ugh, the problem came back with a vengeance last night. I’d been playing fine for two weeks. In that time there were at least one Windows update and two EVE client updates.

The latest 23.80.0.3 Intel-provided driver is still installed, so Windows didn’t remove it.

I am now trying to fix the issue by tweaking the Advanced settings under the genuine Intel drivers. So far, I am having some luck by turning off the 6GHz band entirely and turning the 5GHz channel width from Auto to 20MHz. I will report back if this works after a few weeks.

Also, I noticed that the failure point is usually after the gift screen and right when I single-click on my character on the character-selection screen. If it doesn’t instantly say “Connecting…” I know it’s going to fail with a disconnection from server. I do get disconnects in the middle of the game, but the character selection screen is where 90% of the failures happen. I am also occasionally getting “unable to connect to chat server” errors along with the disconnect on the character-selection screen. That’s somewhat new.

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It seems you know what the issue is and are dealing with it. I do recall at times there were a few specific Windows/netcard/setup issues that required some fairly tricky fiddling with the network parameters for people to get around them.

Switching from WiFi to ethernet cable connect can help if that is possible. Repositioning routers etc. But for the tricky parts, you’d need to look for some posts on things like MTU size or network timing. I don’t have some of those old links on this PC, but it would be posts like these:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/wifi-disconnects-once-i-enter-a-game-and-wont/89b7043f-b451-4dc1-8705-2ee900d1387e

Perhaps someone with deeper knowledge of network doctoring could provide some other options.

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