Game crashes whenever I try playing online

[jetpackboy9]

Not sure if this will be seen, but I've been having problems recently when trying to play L4D2 online with friends. Usually I'm able to enter their lobby and load into the game, but after like a few minutes or so my game freezes for a few seconds before crashing, without showing me an error message at all.

I've been confused about this because just the other night I was perfectly able to play with them normally (granted I was just gifted the game) and I only had about... maybe 20 mods or so installed if I remember correctly. When my game initially began crashing I had about 80 or so, I shrunk it down to just 60 or so. The game still continued to crash, which confused me as well because despite my laptop not being high-end it still runs the game well, no frame issues whatsoever, especially with some of the graphic settings on high per the option's "recommended settings" based on hardware.

I've tried all I could, from uninstalling/reinstalling the game (I did this twice, the second time I deleted the game folder in my steam files to remove any leftover data), setting my graphics and pool memory to low, uninstalled mods I believed to be the suspect of my crashes, turned of Steam Cloud and even tried entering that "-heapsize 750000" launch option to no avail. I'm really bummed out about this since I would like to play with my friends, but I'm not sure what's even causing my crashes. I don't know if it's my mods, or whoever's hosting the game, my graphics or even the campaign we were playing (It was Hard Rain, the other we played the other night was Dead Center), and the thing is my game works perfectly fine in singleplayer, although it does still freeze for a few seconds (maybe like 1 or 2 at most) periodically before returning to normal with no crashing. I would greatly appreciate if anyone had some advice on how to fix this so I could play online with my friends.

[Ayyoue]

When you uninstalled your mods and disabled the Steam Cloud, did you "Verify the integrity of the game files" afterwards?

My bet is that it is indeed a mod but, even after uninstalling it, some data is still present on your files. If you "Verify the integrity of the game files" after you disable the mods and turn off Steam Cloud, you will probably get a message such as "reacquired 1 file(s)".

[jetpackboy9]

Originally posted by Ayyoue:

When you uninstalled your mods and disabled the Steam Cloud, did you "Verify the integrity of the game files" afterwards?

My bet is that it is indeed a mod but, even after uninstalling it, some data is still present on your files. If you "Verify the integrity of the game files" after you disable the mods and turn off Steam Cloud, you will probably get a message such as "reacquired 1 file(s)".

I ran the integrity check and it did say there was a file missing/required, and after running it again I believe it did reacquire it. I haven't check if it has solved the issue but I'll when I get the chance. Also, not sure if you could answer this but do you have any idea which type of mods could've been the culprit or if it's just a general issue among all mods?

[Ayyoue]

Originally posted by jetpackboy9:

Originally posted by Ayyoue:

When you uninstalled your mods and disabled the Steam Cloud, did you "Verify the integrity of the game files" afterwards?

My bet is that it is indeed a mod but, even after uninstalling it, some data is still present on your files. If you "Verify the integrity of the game files" after you disable the mods and turn off Steam Cloud, you will probably get a message such as "reacquired 1 file(s)".

I ran the integrity check and it did say there was a file missing/required, and after running it again I believe it did reacquire it. I haven't check if it has solved the issue but I'll when I get the chance. Also, not sure if you could answer this but do you have any idea which type of mods could've been the culprit or if it's just a general issue among all mods?

Unfortunately there are many mods that can turn out to be problematic.

Make sure you disable the Steam Cloud before you "verify the integrity of the game files", otherwise it will download the problem again.

After you test l4d2 and have guaranteed success, then it's safe to enable the Steam Cloud. Overwrite the Steam Cloud's savedata with the new one.

[jetpackboy9]

Originally posted by Ayyoue:

Originally posted by jetpackboy9:

I ran the integrity check and it did say there was a file missing/required, and after running it again I believe it did reacquire it. I haven't check if it has solved the issue but I'll when I get the chance. Also, not sure if you could answer this but do you have any idea which type of mods could've been the culprit or if it's just a general issue among all mods?

Unfortunately there are many mods that can turn out to be problematic.

Make sure you disable the Steam Cloud before you "verify the integrity of the game files", otherwise it will download the problem again.

After you test l4d2 and have guaranteed success, then it's safe to enable the Steam Cloud. Overwrite the Steam Cloud's savedata with the new one.

I'm sorry for the late reply, but just in advance, would you happen to know how to overwrite the savedata in Steam Cloud so that way if this does work I'll know how to overwrite it?

[Ayyoue]

Originally posted by jetpackboy9:

Originally posted by Ayyoue:

Unfortunately there are many mods that can turn out to be problematic.

Make sure you disable the Steam Cloud before you "verify the integrity of the game files", otherwise it will download the problem again.

After you test l4d2 and have guaranteed success, then it's safe to enable the Steam Cloud. Overwrite the Steam Cloud's savedata with the new one.

I'm sorry for the late reply, but just in advance, would you happen to know how to overwrite the savedata in Steam Cloud so that way if this does work I'll know how to overwrite it?

Sure! Follow these steps:
- Disable the Steam Cloud;
- Make sure you uninstalled every single addon;
- Verify the integrity of the game files;
- Launch l4d2 and test a map (you don't need to play until the end, it's just a small test);
- Exit l4d2.
- If everything went OK, you can now enable the Steam Cloud. It will ask if you want to overwrite the existing Steam Cloud savedata. Click "Overwrite".

[jetpackboy9]

Originally posted by Ayyoue:

Originally posted by jetpackboy9:

I'm sorry for the late reply, but just in advance, would you happen to know how to overwrite the savedata in Steam Cloud so that way if this does work I'll know how to overwrite it?

Sure! Follow these steps:
- Disable the Steam Cloud;
- Make sure you uninstalled every single addon;
- Verify the integrity of the game files;
- Launch l4d2 and test a map (you don't need to play until the end, it's just a small test);
- Exit l4d2.
- If everything went OK, you can now enable the Steam Cloud. It will ask if you want to overwrite the existing Steam Cloud savedata. Click "Overwrite".

I'll see if I can get this to work since I had followed all the steps but I never got a prompt to overwrite my data, steam only gave me an option to "sync it" but I'm not sure if that's the same as overwriting. Either way I appreciated your help greatly!

[Ayyoue]

Also, disable "enable custom server content".