"1018" Errors on multiple servers

[Necro23]

Just FYI -

Seems a lot of players on multiple servers are getting kicked from the game for no apparent reason and are then unable to get back in because of the "1018" error (Active character already in game). Some people have waited for *days* before the error clears.

1018 happened to me last night, but I was evenyually able to get back in. While I was locked out, though, I stopped by the general chat room - which is where I heard of the issue. I lurked for a bit since there was a GM on the channel.

The GM said there is another patch coming as soon as they figure out what the fix is. Apparently, the problem is related to packet structure. The reason they keep farking with that structure is to reduce lag.

Take it all with a pound of salt, folks. But look for yet another patch soon.

Necro23

[BlueAdept]

To me, they seem to be making the lag worse in most zone. I am getting lag in zones I never had before. They should put it back to the way it used to be. It was much better then.

I also had the error a couple days ago. I gated and never got to pok. It just hung. Rebooted the pc cause you cant get out of it and waited like 5 min...cant get in... about 2 hours later, it let me back in.

[fester]

I have seen problems with some firewalls.

Some firewalls (Cisco Pix and others like Dlink, Linksys, etc.) will not allow some ports through without inspection. A common port for this is H.323 (video/voice over IP) ports are examined. I personally have had many times when a ZONE at SoE picks one of the H.323 ports duing boot/reboot and until that server is reset you can not log into any character in the zone.

The "fix" for it is to upgrade your firewall code. I doubt Sony would do anything to fix it. They will however walk your character out of the zone.

You basically go "LD" because your replies to the server on the port, which randomly happened to be the same as the port that the firewall considers special, never read the SoE server.

[AnotherCoreDump]

This would only happen on LD's during zoning, but most LD's happen when you're IN some zone, doing just what you normally do (not neccessary things that produce a massive data stream like raids).
In this situation there would not be a port change.
I seen 2 different type of things that happen then:
Either going LD the normal way (Ping/Red line going up, although a ping -s to the zone server shows no abnormalities)
or you just crash down to server select or even desktop (Win98 SE here).
Both result in Active Char (1018), so there is a problem in the keep-alife routine.
The Server NOTICES you are LD (you are removed from group/channels), but actually forgets to remove you from game too (the NPC/Combat mode gets invoked, till the char hits some kind of zone timeout?). So the problem should be fixable on the serverside.
I really wonder why they didn't find it up to now.