"This game is no longer available in live" ??? What happened my game?

Was playing a good game and then it just vanished and said, "This game is no longer available in live". What happened?

What is that supposed to mean?

I didn't abandon the game. The game abandoned me. 

Sounds like your internet connection dropped. That will cost you the game.

Why can't they fix that? It should be robust to things like that. Not my fault. It's not hard to fix. 

How? How can their server tell the difference between (a) somebody who is having a connection problem, and (b) some jerk who is deliberately running his time out instead of resigning, just to make his opponent wait?

There are plenty of people who... rather than resign a lost position... will just sit in it until their time is nearly gone, hoping that their opponent will get bored or disgusted and log off, so the time-wasting troll wins by forfeit.

Can you think of any way they could fix this for you, without encouraging the trolls?

At least give people a couple of minutes to reconnect.  Why end the game when someone is gone for 30 seconds? Especially in a game that has been going on for 40 minutes. 

This has been happening very frequently lately. "this game is no longer available live" and then you lose the game. I have lost at least 4 games yesterday, all about to end in a few seconds in my favor. I have a robust 300 mbps robust internet connection. I suspect the Chess.com server is not handling chess games lately. It either loses a connection to the games session, or their communications server that manages app connectivity is losing connection. It sucks. Absolutely sucks. It is something very rudimentary and they ought to fix it. 

There can be issues between you and the site as well, that can impact things. There are some things that can be done on your end to minimize issues, but if the problem is between you and the site, there isn't much that can be done.

https://support.chess.com/article/213-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

The "no connection" timeout clock starts but never gets to 0. It starts counting down and then at 35 seconds or so, I get the message that the game is no longer live. Okay, sure,  if thinks I dropped the connecting, then why doesn't it continue to count down to 0? Something else is wrong because this is not the same as it used to be.

MARTIN STAHL, This is a chess.com problem and anyone who was disconnected today should get lost points restored.  BLUMEE's suggestion that bad players intentionally time-out is not a valid reason to restore points to those of us who take our valuable time to report the problem to chess.com support.

There is NOTHING wrong with my computer and there is probably nothing wrong with anyone else's connection who is complaining about this today.  It's clearly the live chess software and server that is the problem. Want proof?  Next time you reconnect and you can't get into live chess, click another icon, such as "forums".   On my computer, those other icons work just fine.  But if I click the icon for live chess, I get the stupid connection message saying I should change my setting and if I keep clicking the icon, then the truth comes out "please wait.  It's taking longer than usual to connect..:"  THAT IS A SOFTWARE PROBLEM AT CHESS.COM!!!

I've offered to help them fix it FREE OF CHARGE, but apparently, they really don't want to fix it.  Otherwise, they would have hired an expert consultant a long time ago.  I don't offer my services for free EVER!  But I'm tired of this problem that it would be actually gratifying to spend a few hours making it go away.  SERIOUSLY!

This disconnect while playing live chess has been a problem from the getgo.  Most likely, it requires some assembly language programming to see how the semaphores at the server level handle record locking or other low-level functions.  Half the software engineers on the planet don't even know what a semaphore is.  That's problematic because they literally don't have the knowledge to fix it.  If they did, if would have been handled years ago.  Seriously!

The weirdest one I had was yesterday at Puzzle Duel. Everything was normal, I solved 21 puzzles, my opponent 14. Then the 3-minute timer ended, and it reduced my score to 0! Obviously, I hadn´t dropped the connection because I could see that my opponent was solving puzzles while I had been playing! 16 dropped rating points for goodness knows why.

Also had a lot of connection issues while playing recently. Very hard psychologically to concentrate on the game when you can see the timer flashing. That´s my excuse for dropping 13 rating points in bullet anyway!

Sometimes Live does have issues, but when that happens, pretty much everyone has problems, not just a relatively small percentage of the player base.

The simple fact is that transit between the client and live server is not instantaneous. There are multiple factors that can influence connection issues to Live, from other processes running on the client side, from ads for basic members, to any of the hops between the client and the Live servers.

It's the Internet. Packets get dropped all the time and get resent. In a timed process, like real-time chess, the impact is very noticeable. Unlike other games, where you are playing on local code and can still move around but can have jumps or jitter, or streaming platforms that can cache future data, chess games can't really do that, short of giving full lag compensation and 100% trusting the move times from the client side.

Heck, I watch stuff on Netflix and Disney+and still get lag, jitter, disconnects and those are billion dollar companies. 

If you're really a software expert, you know those things, and you also know, that even if it was all a sever-side issue with code, that isn't isn't going to be trivial enough to parse the code base, pinpoint the problem, and resolve in a few hours.