Original Post — Direct link

Can't play multiplayer normally for more than 15 seconds before either me or my friend (regardless of who is hosting, we've tried both ways) get kicked with error 028.

the workaround is to close out entirely, launch the game, click play and remove your character from prospects, click play again, remove it from prospects again if it didn't remove you, and then click select character.

now, open up steam overlay, right click your friends game, and join. it should say "join x game blah blah" when you shift tab out.

if you dont do it this way, you get error code 028, or it will just tell you you have no characters able to join even though you see the character in the prospect character select right in front of you.

this game is a ton of fun but man does sh*t like this really make you wanna give up. having to restart to fix memory leaks or change a graphics setting means going through all of these steps every time, it takes 5 minutes to get into a game not counting load times. just actually joining the lobby.

hoping they fix stability or something, cause it's like the main combat in the game is actually managing to log into a prospect instance.

ill add that roughly 30% of the time when you do load in, you encounter a bug where nothing is selectable. You walk around with a blank UI and nothing gets highlighted or is targetable to pick up. I tried to use unstuck to fix it, and one time out of literal dozens of tries, it managed to restore my UI for less than ten seconds before going untargetable again.

but when it works, it's fun! it just doesnt work very well for a large minority of the time. something like 20-30% of my seven hours played is just trying to get the game to run.

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over 2 years ago - /u/thedeanhall - Direct link

The latest updates should have increased the timeout that is causing this to occur. This error (which is badly named 028 - we will fix that and provide something more descriptive) occurs due to a communication problem with the person "hosting" the session. it means "I lost connection with the host", usually because the host shut the game down, or crashed. But it can be because:

  1. The host is sending messages, and some of them are getting lost (or delayed). Commonly referred to as "packet loss".
  2. There is enough delay, especially for important messages that say "connection exists" that the host isn't there.

We will continue to work on fixing this, it is affecting some other users just like yourself and its intensely frustrating. The increased timeouts should help some users, giving their connections more leniency. There is a limit to this, before other problems arise and would make the session unplayable at best.

One mitigation that might help is to experiment with others hosting the drops, someone with a better or more stable connection makes a massive difference.