Investigating and Mitigating MTG: Arena Network Errors

Tracking down reasons for MTGA Network Errors using log files and Wireshark. Then mitigating using a VPN server in Azure.

While I was in the process of gathering packet captures for this write-up on 07/03/20 Arena decided to be extremely stable network wise for me. This may mean they fixed the stability issues which is awesome. The packet capture snippets I’ll be posting are from when I did get timeouts on 07/01/20.

If you’re just interested in the mitigation and not the investigation scroll down to the last section.

I’m sure every single MTG: Arena player has experienced this at least once. You’re playing a match (or drafting, or building a sealed deck, etc) and all of a sudden you can’t click on anything. Then it happens.

You scramble to gather a log, maybe check your internet connection and restart the client before you time out and lose the match. Sometimes you’re quick enough, sometimes you’re not. You go and look at MTG Arena bug reporting page and find that this sort of thing is extremely common.

After this happened to me multiple times in one play session I decided to dig into it a little bit more and maybe find a way to mitigate the problem.

mtga magic-the-gathering network-troubleshooting mtg-arena neural networks

Dropout is a regularization technique that is designed to prevent overfitting in a neural network. However, it shouldn’t be applied arbitrarily.

Lu Mo Yang, Dylan Weber, Ruslan Askerov, Eric Kwon, Le Michael Song

Neural networks, as their name implies, are computer algorithms modeled after networks of neurons in the human brain. Learn more about neural networks from Algorithmia.

Recurrent neural networks, also known as RNNs, are a class of neural networks that allow previous outputs to be used as inputs while having hidden states.

The purpose of this project is to build and evaluate Recurrent Neural Networks(RNNs) for sentence-level classification tasks. Let's understand about recurrent neural networks for multilabel text classification tasks.