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You have GOT to be kidding me?!

So, I finally found out what was causing my computer to freeze up and/or crash while Livestreaming “Lord of the Rings Online” the last month or so, since Update 22 came out. I know, I know… I ‘found out’ what the cause was last week, and then a couple of weeks before that, and so on, always to have it freeze up and/or crash yet again, right?

Well, this time it appears I really found out the root cause (kinda), and you won’t believe what it was.

But first, lets go back a couple of weeks. I had put in a ticket with Standing Stone Games, because I had exhausted all of my options, and couldn’t figure out the problem. They got back to me rather quickly, gave me some great advise for how to troubleshoot what software might be conflicting with LOTRO, if any, and wouldn’t you know it? But there was literally nothing conflicting with the game, or OBS, or FaceRig for that matter. Not even any startup software, everything came back clean. So since I had moved the game over to DirectX 9.0c (from DX11), and it hadn’t crashed since, I figured it had to be a DirectX 11 issue, and called the case closed.

That is, until I did a little more digging, and through those experiments, found the true root cause.

You see, I wanted to be 100% sure everything was good to go, before I streamed LOTRO again, so I first played the game under DX9, no streaming involved, to see how it went. Everything was fine. So the next morning, being yesterday, I did my usual Saturday morning stream with just OBS, Chatty (to monitor Chat, and give me audio alerts when people post to chat), and LOTRO. No webcam, no FaceRig… and everything went fine.

So I did another livestream Saturday evening, this time adding in the webcam to feed tracking info to FaceRig, basically a mostly normal stream, and everything went fine then, too. So finally, I did my usual Saturday night stream, but added in the one last piece of hardware I had thus far kept out of the loop, being my Razer Orbweaver keypad.

The stream crashed hard not quite 30 minutes in.

Unplugged the Orbweaver, rebooted the laptop, and started everything back up as I had it during the previous Saturday evening stream. No problems, and I went for basically 4 hours straight that time!

So after looking back at everything, it appears there is something about the Orbweaver that is triggering something either in LOTRO, or in Windows that only happens when LOTRO is playing, that causes this issue. Because taking the Orbweaver out of the loop simply solves the problem, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I updated my ticket with SSG, letting them know about this recent testing, and what I came up with, just in case someone else has a similar issue arise.

I’m going to miss my Orbweaver when playing LOTRO, but at least I can still use it with “Rift”, “World of Warcraft”, and… okay, I don’t really use it with anything else thus far. And if I’m streaming, I certainly won’t risk using it with other games I haven’t extensively test the Orbweaver with, in the future! Fine product, but not worth the hassle.

Scormus
I'm the editor, publisher, and primary "talent" here at Scormey.com.
https://scormey.com

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