SPF Technical Support

[Bizurker]

Thank you both for the replies.

For skills, I've been using Frozen Orb and Chain Lightning for 25 levels now, so it's not that. One of the crashes was opening the portal to Tristram, so it may have been graphical related, but the rest have been nothing over the top for graphics.

I have noticed that when it crashes, every time, the BNet app says it's "having trouble connecting to my account. It might be that i'm running off wifi, and the router is hiccuping enough to crash my game but not enough to affect the rest of the network. Which given I'm doing SP and shouldn't be online anyways.... well, I know that's not how it works, even though it should. My ISP recently upgraded me from copper to fiber, and I've been planning on calling and upping my speed, maybe I need to do that sooner rather than later, see if that fixes the issue.

Gonna start taking more frequent backups of characters even if I can figure out a fix for this. Better to be safe.

 

[snickersnack]

There are ways to prevent the game from contacting bnet when you play offline. I don't use them, but some googling should turn up something. At least you'd be able to rule out network issues that way.

 

[Bizurker]

Definitely a network issue. Because I play while goofing off at work, I was able to watch it a bit. I was playing and hit one of my lag spikes, and about 20 seconds later I got summoned at work. Switch to work, but leave D2 on that monitor (yay 3 momitors), and do my thing; at one point in my work call, I look at D2 and notice its unfrozen, do I know I need to investigate.

I turn on my CPU, GPU, and Network monitoring tools, config the overlays for D2R and play until I freeze. No CPU or GPU spikes happen before, during or after my freeze. Interestingly enough, nothing happens on the network either. Exactly 10 minutes later, to the second, game unfreeze and I can pickup where I was. Freezes happen every 10-15 minutes for the next two hours, each lasting 10 minutes, and I've confirmed my pattern.

Still need to talk to my ISP about upgrading, but I have the workaround in the mean time. As Snickersnack said, it's possible to play "offline" by launching D2R directly through the exe file instead of the BNet launcher. Brings you directly to the Offline character screen and prevents selecting the Online screen. Supposedly you need to login with BNet every 30 days, authentication that you have a valid license I suppose, but I can't personally confirm that yet. Been playing this way all week with zero incidents.

Thanks all for the support