I can’t tell if it’s getting worse or not, but I’ve noticed lately that W2G really struggles when connectivity is flaky. It seems like clients could report whether connections are healthy and reestablish them when things stall / drop. Main symptoms i see are:
- Video turns black or freezes, never recovers. Requires refresh by either client.
- Audio drops out, never recovers. Requires refresh by either client.
In both cases, the client “knows” that the other user has their media enabled and shows it as such (e.g. isn’t showing user avatar and/or is showing volume slider) but doesn’t know that the connection is effectively dead. It’s a shame to force users to refresh the page and reestablish all connections and the playing video to try to recover.
Decent options imo:
- Allow users to toggle their connection to other users somehow and cause the media streams to retry.
- Detect that there’s no data coming over the stream(s) and retry them manually.