I just timed mine. From click the quit button on char select it went to blackscreen for 45 sec before going to the old login screen with the timeout message. This is in windowed mode on 2 different pc's. Forever and very long are obviously subjective. In today's age anything that takes longer then 3-6 sec is too long.
Mostly goes back to the old log in screen if I let it hang long enough, sometimes I do get the Crash Detected pop up asking me what I was trying to do. I always type in camping to server select and hit submit ....
If i wait looooong enough i end up at the old style log in screen. I can understand everyone who is impatient and simply kills the client during the waiting/black scrren.
Playing in fullscreen mode. I counted 55 sec, between quitting the character select screen and the old style login screen. Trying to log back again from this old style login screen doesn't work, you are forced to use the task manager to close the EQ instance.
Any sort of /camp (server or desk makes no difference) can randomly cause the black screen. Waiting long enough gets you to old style login screen but to get past that you have to again wait for a login attempt to time out. Once the login times out you can finally click cancel and then logout - takes about 3 minutes give or take. If you use a windows key (alt-tab, ctrl-alt-del, ctrl-esc, whatever) to get to a place where you can close EQ when you log back in you are usually in windowed mode - not full screen. If you continue all the way into the game and then switch to full screen your layout is toast as has been reported. You can avoid this if you ALWAYS switch to full screen (use alt-enter) while still at the character select and never continue in while still in window mode. No idea why logging back in windowed will destroy your saved full screen layout but it does; although that could be a separate issue and the only relationship may be the fact that the black screen can leave you in windowed mode.
Looks like this is still happening after the patch. Didn't think the patch was addressing this anyway, but was kind of hoping it would.
I saw in patch notes: But, this is still happening, at least for my PCs. 3 Different PCs, of different ages/windows versions. When I go from: in game -> camp -> character select I am okay. But, Character select -> server list -- dead. It never loads to server list, but rather seems to just stay black endlessly, i assume trying to load the server list, or sometimes seems to time out and if i remember correctly on occasion i get a timeout message. If something does load, it is the old school login screen (enter user name / PW like when you bypass patcher). In both cases, I have to tab-out, and force close EQ which causes EQ to revert to windows mode, and than when i log in next time all chat windows are fubar. I did discover that if i /q out of EQ it has been closing correctly, so that when i log in next time i load into full screen mode and chat windows are where they should be.
Unfortunately, we're still trying to narrow down the cause of this. The update addressed a number of crashes however, this thread is referring to timing out at the login server and not technically a crash nor an actual hang.
No, it is a hang. The client just stays in a non-responding state indefinitely on one of my computers (it times out on the other two) requiring you to change user to get it into an accessible windowed state after which you can use program manager to shut it down. The problem is that Windows remembers the state it shut down it, and restarts it like that. Not the server login screen, the actual game. The only way out appears to be changing compatibility to a different Windows version and unchecking the "high DPI scaling override" button. Not sure of the exact requirements, but messing around with all of those things eventually gets you out of the OS-remembered hang scenario. If you don't do that you get caught in an endless loop where it is literally impossible to play at all until you have done that. Having the "high DPI scaling override" unchecked appears critical to your ability to recover from the hang resulting from accidently using the proper quitting procedure (to exit safely you need to window the program, then close the window with the X button)
I never go back to the server select screen. The client waits what seems like forever then returns to the old style login screen. I then have to use Task Manager to kill the task. Sometimes I notice that the GameLauncher screen has remained active in the background. This causes lag in game, so I usually know it has happened. Also, since the recent patch, I am getting disconnected when trying to login. It goes to character select, then after a long wait I get the disconnected screen...
Pretty sure its related to clicking the guild door and hanging too. Its a 100% occurrence the first time I log in and click the standard guild house door. Happens when zoning into a zone that hasn't been loaded for a long time that day too. Its not a crash but just puts you in Limbo forever, have to kill the process to get out of it.
We haven't been able to reproduce this internally. Also, it looks like two separate issues have gotten lumped together in this thread. Issue 1: Eventually you get to the old login screen if you wait some minutes (around 5) Issue 2: You never get to the old login screen and the process stops responding Issue 1 is related to trying to reconnect to our login server but something is having issues reconnecting, it times out, and decides to send you back to the "reset" state. Please PM me your account name, server, exact time this happened last, and the last 100 lines or so of your dbg.txt file (found in Logs directory). Issue 2 it sounds like your client is stuck in an infinite loop. The next time this happens I'll need you to create a dump file using Task Manager. See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/debugger/2009/12/30/what-is-a-dump-and-how-do-i-create-one/ "To create a dump using Task Manager". Once you have one of these, PM me and I'll provide information on how to send it to us.
The underlying problem is likely the same one though, it is just what happens afterwards (scenario 1 or scenario 2) that is affected by specific machines. If the client did not lose it's mind when doing a normal exit then neither scenario would happen. So while it may be useful to figure out why some computers do this reset thing while others hang completely, that is not the basic problem. The basic problem is the client producing an error on exiting.
This happens on several of my boxes. Basically to echo everything that has been said here, since around August any return to char select has a better than average chance of hanging on a black screen until it times out and goes to the client login screen eventually. Any attempt to log in from that screen will also time out. The client has to be closed fully and reopened. To me it sounds like a thread or a socket is locked and not releasing and further attempts to connect are met with nothing.
Issue: Exit to server select hangs both test and live Steps: 1. From character select screen exit to server select 2. Notice black screen 3. After certain amount of time notice time out error popup and old login screen 4. Try to log in from old login screen 5. Notice that you will get another time out message after a certain amount of time 6. Log in again 7. Server select will open as expected. I suspect the issue to be a networking (load balancing/firewall) issue between the character server and server select and is not forwarding correctly to the server select server. To duplicate I would suggest to not be on the internal network or vpn to the internal network as you would bypass outside security settings.