Dallas CoD Servers No Longer Showing up after Router reset?

[SouthernGypsy]

Dallas, Texas is my closest server for Call of Duty games and they have both Dedicated and Peer servers in Dallas (I'm still don't know what a "Peer Server" is vs a "Dedicated Server") and that's usually where I connect to with ping times in the low teens.  Last week our internet company upgraded us to 1Gb Fiber Optic but all week we never got anywhere near the speeds we was supposed to get, a friend of mine is their head tech in the office so he stopped by one evening and together we narrowed it down to the XR1000v2 router, we was getting full speed when not going through the router, and turning QoS on/off made no difference on the max speeds although it did appear to work as it did further limit speeds then turned on.  So after a bunch of testing different settings in every possible corner of the router I finally did what Netgear calls a "90 second hard reset" where you press and hold reset button for 30 seconds, unplug power while still holding the reset button and wait 30 more seconds, then plug power back in while still holding the reset and hold it until the red light flashes. OK, So that wipes EVERYTHING in the router. I set it back up and despite being setup identical to what it was before, we now get our full speeds.

 

Except, the next night (last night) when I went to play Call of Duty Modern Warfare III for some reason the Dallas servers are not showing up at all. Usually I use the Polygon mode and draw a box that sets the Geo-Filter set so it covers most of Texas, Oklahoma, Akrnasas, Missisippi, Alabama, lower Missouri, eastern Tennessee, south eastern-Kentucky. So a large block BUT stops short of the next closest CoD servers in Atlanta and St. Louis. This has worked ever since I got the XR1000v2 and we always connect to Dallas, sometimes a Peer in North-Central Oklahoma and always get consistant pings from 13-15.

Only last night I could not connect at all with this same setup, the search went all the way up to 200ms and then would start over. So I restarted everything in the correct order and still no luck. Finally I turned off the Filtering Mode and restartred the game and finally it connected but now it's connecting me all the way to places like Chicago (800 miles away to the NE) and Atlanta (600 miles away to the east) and sometimes St. Louis (400 miles N-NE) all of which always give ping times in the 30s up into the to low 40s for Chicago.

 

Any clue what happend, did something mess up in the router that it now can't see the Dallas servers but sees all the others normally?

(BTW: Before the hard reset the 3 Dallas CoD Dedicated Servers and 2 Dallas CoD Peer Servers, Along with the 7 Microsoft/Xbox Dedicated servers (2 in western New York, 2 in washington state, 2 in Iowa, and 1 in eastern Kentucky) they use for NAT testing, live chat, and other basic functions was ther only servers I had also saved in as Approved Servers).

 

For that matter, does anyone know if the Dallas CoD servers might be down? 

I did check CoD's website and they show everythings supposed to be OK, also checked downdetector and they show a spike in reports for CoD connection issues but don't list specifically where and it's not a major spike.

 

 

[Netduma Fraser]

A factory reset wouldn't prevent the servers appearing - the Geo-Filter will show servers based on what is attempting to connect to you. It's possible the cloud update was wiped and the router hasn't yet downloaded the latest one so if you resync the cloud on the Geo-Filter then check again it may work. It's also possible the servers are down as you mentioned but there is no way to specifically check the status of each individual server. If it continues to happen please provide a screenshot of what the Geo-Filter shows when you have servers outside your radius.

[SouthernGypsy]

1 hour ago, Netduma Fraser said:

A factory reset wouldn't prevent the servers appearing - the Geo-Filter will show servers based on what is attempting to connect to you. It's possible the cloud update was wiped and the router hasn't yet downloaded the latest one so if you resync the cloud on the Geo-Filter then check again it may work. It's also possible the servers are down as you mentioned but there is no way to specifically check the status of each individual server. If it continues to happen please provide a screenshot of what the Geo-Filter shows when you have servers outside your radius.

Thanks, and I had already hit the Resync button (a couple of times actually trying to get it to work) and it never changed anything and yesterday morning when I wrote my message it still wouldn't connect to any server in Dallas (CoD uses a company called Vultr in Dallas and several other large US Cities) but last night they suddenly came back, in fact a lof more of them seem to now be online. Previously we'd only identified 4 unique Dedicted Servers and 8 Peer Servers in Dallas but last night we identified 15 Dedicated Servers and 35 Peer Servers in less than a half hour. Once we knew the name of the company (after they was back online, didn't remember the name from before) we was able to look it up this morning and despite the Activision/CoD Website status page saying everything was normal and working the Vultr website listed a "major maintenance and upgrade operation taking place this month which may temporarily affect their cloud servers". The time-line for Dallas matched up, CoD was not specifically mentioned but Dallas was. It also noted that they are now supposed to be working on New Jersey.... apperanlty they are moving from one city to the other doing upgrades with each city sloted/expected to take about 24 hours. Their website says that while they are working on one area, their other servers will pick up the slack. However, since we had our Geo-Filter fenced off so Dallas was the ONLY CoD server inside the allowed area and strict mode on, that's probably why we couldn't connect until we clicked the filtering off.

So apperantly a complete conencidence that they was working on their Dallas servers the same day we happened to have done a reset on the router after getting the new fiber connection. In my mind it seemed very strange timing for the server to be down the night after we had reset the router (we didn't try playing the first night we'd reset it) so seemed logical I hadn't set something up correct or the router hadn't re-sync'ed the server list correctly or something but in this case it does actually seem to have just been a coencidence

Activision just announced the next game in the Call of Duty franchise last week with semi-closed Alpha and public Beta game sessions coming soon and release of the game later this year, it makes me wonder if Vultr doing these upgrades at this time might have anything to do with that, since Activision seems to be one of their bigger US clients across multiple cities...

 

[Netduma Fraser]

Ah well done on the detective work and thanks for the update! Yeah they probably are preparing themselves for it - especially with it being available on Game Pass, it'll be available to a much wider audience.