Unable to log into home data-centre with one specific character

[fl0rm]

ISP: Telus (also attempted: Public Mobile, Rogers Mobile, Shaw, Comcast)

Type of Internet Connection: Fibre (also attempted: LTE, 5G, VPN)

Internet Connection Speed: 300mbps (also attempted: 40mbps, 100mbps, 2gbps)

Date & Time: Friday, June 14 at 18:30 MDT (at least when it was first noticed)

Frequency: Always

World: Any world on Primal, initially observed on Ultros

Character Name@Home World: Theria Arsphaela@Ultros

Retainer Name: None

NPC Name: None

Monster Name: None

Class/Level: Astrologian, 86

Party or Solo: Solo

Race: Au Ra F

In-Game Time: Unknown

Area and Coordinates: Hoper's Hold, Bestways Burrow

Housing: None

Steps: Previously, I had logged out after finishing for the night on Thursday. The issue occurred when attempting to log back in.

Specifically, I first noticed that I was seeing "The lobby connection was lost." messages, when usually, entering my credentials in the launcher and clicking 'Play' smoothly transitions to the main menu. I thought this was strange, but also knew the servers were experiencing a prolonged DDoS, so I re-authenticated and got in on the third try.

After choosing 'Start' on the main menu, I proceeded to select my character, "Theria Arshpaela", and login seemed to begin: UI was reset, I got assigned a position in the login queue, and then a picture of the Moon and the loading screen Postmoogle appeared. However, after almost exactly one minute, I was met with the message "Connection with the server was lost." (code 10105)

Google showed that this sometimes means that the character was not logged out successfully, which, given that over 24 hours had passed, was strange, so I tried again, several more times, and had the exact same experience, including intermittent failures after authenticating through the launcher.

I tried logging in on my alts, also on Ultros, and they experienced no problems, completing daily quests and roulettes.

I then tried to log back in on "Theria Arsphaela". Same problems.

Thinking it might be a case of inconsistent game-state, I sent the character to Sargatanas on Aether. Logged in. Did dailies. Progressed a few quests. Everything seemed fine; all inventory and class progress was as I'd left it on Thursday.

Tried returning to Ultros, had the same problematic login experience as before. Tried changing world to Lamia: same problem. Tried moving back to Aether: success. Back to Primal: failure. To Dynamis: success. To Crystal: success. To Primal: failure.

Possibly relevant, but anecdotal: while my character was on non-Primal data-centres, the issues I experienced with progressing from authenticating to the launcher disappeared, but they returned when "Theria Arsphaela" was back on Primal.

In attempting to diagnose possible conflicts, I have used the Companion App to complete a marketboard purchase and check the status of all retainers and other assets, thinking there might have been some sort of state corruption in my world-specific inventory.

I have also attempted to log in using multiple network pathways, a second PS5, a Steam client (purchased expressly for the sake of diagnosis), and observed network activity to confirm that the one-minute lull on the loading screen appears to be a timeout.

My suspicion is that the problem is one of three things:

• there is some lock that is checked late in the login process, and the server is timing out in responding to my client because of it
• normally, when I've been disconnected spontaneously, I do not get assigned a spot in the login queue before code 10105 occurs: a check and rejection happen immediately, so while the code is the same, the symptoms are different
• there is some problem with inventory or mail associated with my character, beyond what is available when visiting another data-centre
• there is some sort of indexing problem in the character database for Primal, where the data itself is copied to other data-centres when travelling, and is properly merged back into Primal upon return, but the lookup when occurring from Primal itself is somehow failing to resolve my character, "Theria Arsphaela" (character ID 7000434)

I hope that this is something that can be resolved by doing some sort of state-flush against my character, and that this is just a really strange edge-case, but there's another complication: my character's housing in the Goblet is set to be destroyed on June 23rd and I understand that investigations on the forums may take weeks to complete. If that timer could be reset before anything else, it would be greatly appreciated.

[fl0rm]

Around 22:50 PDT, I tried jumping back to Primal from Crystal and was able to log in, so the housing timer has been addressed.

I am not yet convinced that this problem is resolved, given that, based on a tally-sheet, this was the 38th login attempt over the weekend, so I will do more validation testing this evening.

However, one thing that was clearly different was the length of the login queue at that point: while it was at least 20 during every failure, it was only 3 on success.

This would seem to make the idea of a database indexing problem the more likely cause, either because an inefficient lookup was able to succeed due to the reduced load at the time (and the subsequent updates may have corrected the error, at least for me), or because there's some background repair process that happened to run over my records between 9:30 PDT and 11:45 PDT.

[fl0rm]

Update, now approaching 96 hours since the problem is suspected to have begun: I continue to be unable to log into any world on Primal with "Theria Arsphaela", though every other character continues to experience no difficulty.

My success last night may well have been related to a decreased number of active players at that time. I will re-attempt logging in around that time again today to see if it may not have been a random coincidence.

[fl0rm]

Upon attempting to log in to Primal, with a queue-length of 2, at 11:13 PDT, I was again successful, with the loading screen period being as quick as I'm used to seeing.

Over 20 attempts in the forty minutes prior to this, with lengths from 9 to 3, failed. In addition, "The lobby server encountered an error" (code 2002) happened approximately 80% of the time while "Theria Arpshaela" was on the Primal data-centre.

Attempts at logging into other data-centres proceeded without issue.

I do not know what additional data I may be able to provide. My speculation remains that there is some sort of database-lookup issue, perhaps falling back to a table-scan, so it can only succeed when the servers are very lightly loaded.

[FelixFujiwara]

I have the exact same issue with my main character....
I love square enix so much, for not letting me play after a hard day at work.
Small multi billion dollar company...

[fl0rm]

Based on the thread you created, our symptoms don't seem to be quite the same: you are experiencing a 90002, where everything in the 90xxx range seems to be a "connection to the server was abruptly terminated" event, with the last three digits specifying why, while I seem to be experiencing something more of a timeout that falls back to 10105, and I think 10xxx means the client side gave up while waiting for the server to respond.

The problem that you, and others, are experiencing may be related, but because I *am* able to log back in, just when the servers are exceptionally quiet, I don't think the root cause is likely to be identical.