hyena64:
Bout a 98% chance that wgt had nothing to do with booting anyone. Just because you see the "there has been an error" screen from wgt doesn't mean there has been a problem with wgt.
That is a preposterous statement! You have no facts to back this up. You're shooting from the hip as you have no credentials to make those statements. And where did fancygirl mention the "there has been an error" screen? What are you thinking?
Anyway
A few points:
-The full message is: "UNEXPECTED ERROR WE'RE SORRY THERE HAS BEEN AN ERROR WITH THE GAME. PLEASE CLOSE THIS WINDOW AND TRY AGAIN LATER. THANKS WGT" (the all caps is WGT's not mine)
-As a retired software developer/manager with 30 years experience, that message tells me exactly what it says. The WGT program has encountered a variable or event it does not recognize. Its a bad value. Stuff happens. A rare series or particular sequence of events happens that were not anticipated. Maybe it fell through a CASE statement for example and typically you then invoke an error handling routine which decides what to do. Retry? Punt? In this case WGT decides its better to punt than perhaps lock up the game client window or crash the server or whatever. Its a fail-safe technique.
-Millions of single play rounds are played without seeing these errors. I cannot remember the last time I failed to complete a single player round.
-What's different on multi-player then? I don't recall it ever being mentioned before but there is a 3rd party software platform involved in multiplayer games. In 2007 it was called Neutron 4.0. Produced by Exit Games. Read that to understand Neutron (I think now upgraded to Photon) runs on the WGT server, communicates with our game clients when in multiplayer games, whether its Windows, Apple, mobile iOS whatever, and handles all the multiplayer game lobby, game setup (find a game) searches, and sequencing needed. Of course there is WGT application specific code running within Neutron as well. But Neutron is handling all the connections.
-Neutron is also determining if we have disconnected. Here's an interesting post from the Exit Games Flash client forum: Debugging Client disconnect issue I quote:
"some of our clients report intermittent disconnect even though their wifi network is pretty stable, and with low round trip times." and
"clients are disconnected even though they have stable internet. e.g.
they have low ping, can listen music, watch video, play games online.
However, at the same time they are disconnected from the server with
TimeoutDisconnect reason."
Gee that sounds familiar. Could Neutron need adjustment to be less sensitive to not receiving data or ACKs from clients (our PCs) in a certain amount of time.
Its a distinct possibility IMO. And its on WGT to make the change on their Neutron software. We don't have disconnect problems in single player games.