Had to cancel my game tonight because of some really weird issue that I can’t make sense of.
First, I was doing some game prep earlier this afternoon and everything was working just fine. However, at some point, as I was finishing up I noticed things were getting a bit laggy. Then about an hour before my game was supposed to start it suddenly just won’t load. No gray screen but the progress bar just keeps going and going until it gives up.
Here’s the weird part: I have tried to load the game on my PC and on my Mac, neither work. I also tried signing in on my own account and my wife’s account and both won’t load the game. However, all the other players in our game that are signing on from different networks can access it just fine. Two different computers and two different accounts but having the same problem. The only common denominator is our network. I tried unplugging the modem and router, clearing cookies, restart the computers. Nothing is working. It’s like our network isn’t properly communicating with The Forge website all of a sudden. All other websites are working fine and our internet speed is super fast.
It should be mentioned that it’s not just my game that is having issues though. The entire Forge website is laggy for me right now. Like the thumbnail for my game is taking an eternity to load. But again, all other websites are fine.
Please help! I’m at a total loss. We rescheduled our game for Friday, got to get this figured out by then.
Did any of your players try logging in? See that’s what’s so weird to me is that all my players were able to connect. At first I thought it was just the website but the fact they were able to get into the game with no problems is what made me think the problem was on my side.
Which region are you two located in? And which ISP are you using? That sounds to me like it might be a specific routing issue from your ISP affecting a small geographic location.
The way Foundry connects to the server and downloads the world database (via a WebSocket) might be what’s triggering the slowdown with your ISP, might be a problem with their network equipment, or some firewall rules they’re fiddling with.
I’m surprised the Forge website itself is slow, from what you’re saying. We’re passing everything through Cloudflare (including the Foundry WebSocket) because 60% of the internet’s websites is through them, and generally, it’s meant to be extremely reliable (if cloudflare goes down, the whole internet is down, and if there’s an issue routing to cloudflare, your ISP would know about it immediately).
Not sure what else to say, everything seems to be running just fine on our side, and the fact that your player’s had no issues is what confirms the issue is probably coming from your ISP. Trying a different computer and rebooting the router would have been my next recommendations but you already did that!
The next step would be to test with a VPN. It’s certainly not a great solution, but it usually helps, and it’s easy nowadays to use free VPNs via browser extensions for example.