Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition always disconnects from GFWL after 5-15 minutes

Sorry if this is not where this would go, but it seems like this is the only place that would be relevant for this issue.

Hey, I bought the game a while ago when it was on steam sale and was able to play it for as long as I wanted without it disconnecting ever. Recently, it has been disconnecting whenever I try to stay on for longer than 5 to 15 minutes. I've googled the problem pretty extensively, and there are a few people with the same problem as me. The closest thing to a fix I have found was this: http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=1980444

Granted, it was for a different game and the topic is quite old, but it is just about the exact same problem I have been having. I've searched through my router, and could not find any option that deals with any options that are relevant to that.

Since the little information I could find points to it being a problem with my router, I suppose I should tell you that it is the m1424wr that came with Verizon Fios when we switched over to that. I'm the only one who would even know how to mess with the settings in the house, however, and I didn't change anything when it was working so I don't think that would be the problem.

Other things I've tried:
Asking this in the Dark Souls megathread(No replies)
Restarting computer(of course)
Reinstalling GFWL
Reinstalling Dark Souls
Uninstalling DSFix
Opening all the correct ports
Resetting my router
Letting GFWL through my firewall

I was thinking of installing Bioshock 2 and logging in on the same GFWL account on that to see if it's just a Dark Souls problem or not. It just baffles me as to why it would just start doing this all of a sudden, since it was fine before and I haven't changed any settings since then. I'm not too great with computers, especially networking like this seems to be. Sorry if it is some simple fix I managed to skip over

Not sure if they matter, but here are my Specs according to speccy:

Windows 7 64 Bit
Intel Core i7 3770K @ 3.50GHz
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. B75M-D3H (Intel Core i7-3770K CPU @
AMD HD 7770
932GB Hitachi HDS721010DLE630 ATA Device (SATA)

Thanks to anyone who read this, hope I can get this sorted out. I'll keep looking up what I can and post any useful info I find here.

For how long do you have this problem? Sometimes GFWL decides to act funny before updates and stuff

You can try to do the following:
Start -> Run
Type CMD and press Enter.
Type "PING WWW.YAHOO.COM -t" and press Enter.
Let it ping on the background.
Launch your Dark Souls and stick around until you have a disconnect from GFWL.
Check out your CMD window if any packages are lost.

This will let you know if disconnect is caused my your Internet connection or not.

Alright, did that. I didn't see anything different than what I would expect, so nothing about packet loss or anything like that, thanks for giving me something to try though, Any other suggestions?

Okey, since your ISP provides stable connection, we identified that the problem is solely on your PC. Lets move on to the next step

I recently did some magic to my GFWL client, since I had troubles on Windows 8. You can give it a try, though.
Check out this link, it contains 2 different fixes of a completely different problem, but who knows - it might work out %)
http://leviathyn.com/games/news/2013/01/08/fixing-games-for-windows-live-for-windows-8/

Ed: Ok, I came up with an additional suggestion here.
Note: If you already have another user on your PC, just skip to 11.
Do the following:
1. Go to Start.
2. Rightclick on My Computer and choose Manage.
3. Navigate to Local Users and Groups -> Users.
4. Rightclick on blank space under the list of users and choose New User.
5. Fill in User Name (e.g. DkS).
6. Type in a Password and confirm it.
7. Uncheck User must change password at next logon.
8. Check Password never expires.
9. Click Create.
10. Log off your current user account
11. Sign in using your newly created one - DkS in my case.
12. Start Steam.
13. Start Dark Souls.
14. Login to your GFWL and play the game.
15. Check out if the problem persists.


Please do not hesitate to get back to us with the results
And yeah, Praise the Sun!

Hey, me again. I tried installing microsoft flight like in that link, and it didn't work. That link led me to another solution, which was to install an old GFWL rendition and then let it update, which I thought may have worked for a minute, because in game my hint signs had finally changed, as in there were no longer the same few that had been sitting there for days, but many different summon signs. I am going to try the first thing suggested again, to see if I missed any packet loss. In the mean time, what would I have to do if it is packet loss causing this? Abd what would the prompt say if there was packet loss? Request timed out?

Request Timed Out is the evidence of packages loss, meaning your connection is unstable. I'm not sure about GFWL being too sensitive to that, but could be an issue.

Have you tried to run the game from another user?

It is essential that you give feedback on each solution to let know what didn't work. It will help to narrow down the root cause searches.

Sorry, I forgot to post about running it from another user, but I did try that as soon as I read the post. It didn't work either. I've read that GFWL is hyper-sensitive to packet loss, and since I'm now getting a fair amount of packet loss, around 9-11% when I did a ping test that sent 100 connections, I think that may be the problem more than anything. Nothing else makes any sense considering that it is all the exact same as it was before.

Oh and by the way, thanks for all of the help thus far, every other place I've posted about this I've been completely ignored, so you're the only one who is helping at the moment. Thank you so much!

9-11% of packages lost is terrible. If I played my Dota with that connection quality I'd either kill someone or demolish the PC %)

Contact your ISP and kindly ask them to investigate the network connection issue. They will be eager to help.

Believe me, they are engineers!

P.S. You're always welcome.

It's strange though. I can play League of Legends/Dota 2/BF3 with almost perfect ping and without any connection problems at all, along with every other multiplayer game I have. Either way I'll work on calling my ISP sometime this week to get someone out here to take a look. Might try swapping routers as well, we have one that we stopped using when verizon gave us this one that worked perfectly, but that was before I got dark souls so I have no idea if it will work, but it can't hurt.
EDIT:
I just did the same ping test with google, and I got 0% loss all three times I did it. Tried a few more sites and it was the same story, with 1% loss here or there. Not sure what that suggests that could help me but there it is. Maybe just a problem with yahoo.com?

Whatever it takes - keep trying

By the way - do you have any Anti-Virus running? Or non-Windows Firewall? If yes - give it a try when they are disabled.

Tried that, it didn't fix it. Disabled anything that would possibly block any sort of connection. No idea what it could be at this point, either a problem with my ISP that JUST affects GFWL or maybe some internal problem with GFWL, both of which seem pretty far-fetched. And considering GFWL support hasn't replied to me yet, I have no way to find out. Any more ideas? It's fine if there's not, since we've tried about everything now and it at least narrowed down what is causing it, at least.

PRAISE
THE
****
SUN!

It is fixed!

No idea which one of these got it to work for me, but I will post all of the things I did so I can help out some helpless person like myself who has been googling this for days.

I did all of these and then it worked:

Installed Windows Live Login Assistant
disabled User Account Control
Went to the painted world(going to the zone where you have not defeated the area boss may also suffice!)
Swapped from Google Chrome to Opera(Probably not it, but you never know considering how strange this problem was!)
Ran CCleaner

Again, thank you so so so much Veradox for pointing me in the right direction, now I can go back to being mad at the game for all of the right reasons.

It was my pleasure to accompany you on the way to success!