I haven’t seen a solution like this posted anywhere but this what happened on my end. My friend kept getting disconnected in VRChat, so we checked the log file at C:\Users<YourUsername>\AppData\LocalLow\VRChat\VRChat\output_log.txt and found a line that said “Connection lost. OnStatusChanged to DisconnectByServerTimeout. Client state was: Joined” meaning the game thought he lost connection to the server completely/ it timed out while waiting for data. We saw the game server IP right above that (GameServerAddress: 86.105.169.247:5056), so we ran a ‘tracert’ command in the terminal to that IP to see what path data was taking to VRC servers and found out that his traffic was going through a Tier 1 provider his ISP (Verizon) used called PCCW. These Tier 1 networks are huge backbone companies that move internet traffic between countries and ISPs. The problem is, Tier 1 backbones can get overloaded or deprioritize game traffic, and since VRChat uses UDP (which doesn’t retry dropped packets unlike TCP), even a small hiccup can cause a disconnect. I found out that Tier 1 networks are usually not good for gaming, especially for stuff like VRC which requires a lot of constantly streamed data with minimal packet loss. Other games like Fortnite or Roblox don’t disconnect as easily because they’re better at handling bad network conditions. To fix it, we installed Cloudflare WARP from https://1.1.1.1, which is essentially a free VPN tool that reroutes your internet through Cloudflare’s faster private network. After turning it on, his connection avoided PCCW and started going through a much better route, and he hasn’t disconnected since.
1 Like