Suddenly friend can't connect to my server

[Xayrlen]

Greetings! So me and my friend were playing on my server (not dedicated) for 33 in-game days. Everything was perfect, we had a lot fun. Today something weird happened: it took a very long time for my friend to connect to my game and he had around 10k latency and before that he received "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error. We did some research and I deleted his character from the world for him to create a new one thinking his character save became corrupted. However from that point he could never join and was stuck in the connection screen, somewhere around "creating player character" or "initializing the world". When he tried to host and I joined him I received the same problem with abnormally high ping around 5-20k. Here's the list of our actions:

1. Verified integrity of game files;
2. Reinstalled game;
3. Tried different worlds with new characters;
4. Game is already an exception to Windows Defender and Firewall;
5. Restarted our PCs;
6. Rebooted our routers.

None of that helped and my friend still can't join me and I still get a whooping 10k ping and even more.
Here's the link with included log of our latest attempt: https://pastebin.com/LeABRiEX

I hope you could help us resolve our problems. Thanks!

 

[Beelzybub]

before that he received "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error.

Have your friend delete his local cache of your game and try again. It's located in his %appdata%/7DaysToDie/SavesLocal/ folder.

This is just a copy of the original game and may be corrupted. Your server will resend the world so you're not losing any data by deleting this.

If you can still get in the game, try picking up any vehicles that are lying about. Then delete the vehicles.dat and vehicles.dat.bak files from your

save folder. (%appdata%/7DaysToDie/Saves.

Regarding your high ping. Normally that's AV software, but you've taken care of that so, not sure. I'd try restarting your routers & modems

and run the "ipconfig /flushdns" from a command prompt with administrator privileges. As a test, you could start a new Navezgane map

and see if that also has high ping, that way you could narrow it down to something in the network vs. an issue with your save.

Specifically, if you still have a high ping with a new map, it's likely the network, vs. good ping with the new map means it's a problem with the save. Probably....