OK, friends: 1 Player Cannot Load Anything

Hey all,

Our group has been running FGC and FGU for at least 2 years now. Here's the sitch: 1 member decided to run RMC on FGU. There are 7 of us in our group. Here are some anecdotal points:

I run RMC on FGC and no one has any problems loading anything at any time.
Another member runs GURPS on FGU and no one has any problems loading anything at any time.

On the new game:
Everyone except 1 player, can log in, loadup modules, characters, et al with absolutely no problems whatsoever. This is FGU using RMC.
1 player, however, has the following problems:

1: overly long acquiring files times in excess of 5+ sometimes 10+ minutes
2: once in game, he cannot load characters, cannot see other characters
3: nothing shows in library or modules
4: no chat dialogue shows for him at all
5: the player and the GM are in the same city as are 3 others of us; 2 players are not: Ohio and Washington State
6: non of the local players including myself, have any of these issues, just the 1 player

What we have tried:

1: tracert to IP address of GM: very good times in MS below 50 some below 20---one time out (My tracert showed the timeout hop, but no problems for me)
2: only anti-virus active for this player is windows Def and it allows all FGC and FGU transfers
3: his network is set public (was private, but again, he has no issues on any other game being run whether locally or elsewhere)
4: shutdown the main game and reload
5: changed game from running on GMs machine to Cloud
6: ascertained that others in his house are using firestick and this, supposedly, is run through his modem/router from his ISP--this factor, I am clueless about, having no idea how firestick operates or what resources it uses

So, this is our issue and we're stumped. Could someone point me to a post or FAQ about this? I searched but came up with nothing similar.

thanks
Cal

Amazon's "firestick" is a wireless web streaming device. Used as a way of turning ordinary TVs into somewhat smart TVs, for watching online content. If someone else is using the firestick at the same time your player is trying to use Fantasy Grounds, then I would absolutely expect to see a big drop in performance of data transfer. The video stream to the firestick, is likely eating up all of the allotted bandwidth to the player's modem. "Alexa" type devices are also a good way to eat up your available bandwidth, though streaming music uses much less than streaming video content. Streaming of HD or even UHD videos can drop the available connection speed to a trickle at best.

Personal experience here: Using a Firestick/Roku and amazon music through an Echo Dot, at the same time, can cause my Internet connection to start to fail. Increased buffering in videos, skipping in audio tracks, lagging webpages, etc...

The same player can play in the other games or is he not part of the other (everything working) games?

The same player can play and load everything in the other games, no problems. Just the new game. That's what's confusing.

I'll recheck all that ASAP.

thanks
Cal

Is the player's computer using WiFi or a wired connection to their local network? If wireless, see if they can use a wired connection for testing next time.

If the same player can play in other campaigns using the same connection then a connection issue seems unlikely. That is unless the other campaigns stop working, too, I would suspect that one of the modules cannot properly be handled by his installation. For testing I would do the following:

- Load the problematic campaign to check that he still cannot connect properly.
- If he cannot connect then load a *different* campaign right away to check if he still can connect properly to that other campaign.
- If he still can connect to the different campaign then delete the FG cache for the problematic campaign from the user's PC.
- If this does not help then disable all extensions (for testing) and then disable modules on the server one by one (or enable them one by one) to find the module(s) that may not play nice on the player's installation.

This will take time, so better do it on a day when you are not gaming (or before the session).