Bad lag again with NTT's NA server network

Still ongoing here in East TN.

What exactly would you tell AT&T and how would you report this issue to AT&T? Hoping to add to the volume of reports/complaints I'm sure they're receiving.

pc or ps5 lag is unbearable, im on att as everyone esle

Can't make it through the first Dungeon boss on Trust... I suddenly have half of my health gone and my casting animation gets hung up to the point that when it catches up, I see a flash of indicator before BOOM mechanic...

*sigh*

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Originally Posted by KosKazuya

What exactly would you tell AT&T and how would you report this issue to AT&T? Hoping to add to the volume of reports/complaints I'm sure they're receiving.

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AT&T is aware, but the real problem lies with NTT.

i felt a noticeable improvement with the warp vpn but today it got much worse

Cloudflare Warp isn't working for me anymore! It worked great and completely eliminated the lag for me Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Fuckers must have nerfed it. What else can I try?

As others have reported, about 30 minutes ago Warp started having issues, at least here in the southeast US.

It wasn't just my ping to XIV that suddenly got bad, even pinging Google's dns 8.8.8.8 was dropping packets with it turned on. Turning Warp off and everything (except XIV of course) returned to normal.

This is extremely unfortunate it has come to this, especially when it is impacting so many.

We have been dealing with it for over a full week now, with little acknowledgement from SE outside of the copy pasta that everyone has received.

I understand if they are bound by a NDA and cant go into specifics, but you can at least acknowledge there is an issue and identify what that issue is. Telling those impacted to contact your ISP is just ridiculous. 1.Do you really think a customer service rep is going to care about someone's connectivity to a game? 2. Be able to really do anything to make a difference? C. Truly resolve anything when its not on our home service side?

There are hundreds of posts on this thread alone with factual data to show were the latency issues and packet losses are happening, that isn't something that can be fixed by repairing lines at a home address or replacing their equipment. So telling us to call our ISP and waste time getting bounced around with their customer support and IT is just ludicrous.

I for one will not invest in a 3rd party service just to be able to play one specific game. I will unsub for now and may return if/when this is ever truly resolved, or just invest my time and subscription somewhere else that values my patronage as much as I do their services.

you know what? find as many online gaming news outlets as you can and email them this thread and describe the problem. i've sent an email to sites and i plan to send more. if the story picks up then square enix will have no choice but to act

Cloudflare Warp is probably suffering from bad peak time congestion. I can only guess that many people are now using it since it's been the most suggested free VPN in this thread and the FFXIV subreddit.

Edit: What probably doesn't help Cloudflare Warp's situation is the fact it seems to be a VPN with just a single button to enable globally on your system. From what I've read you can't set it so only certain program(s) route through the VPN's connection, so there's probably a lot of bandwidth being pointlessly wasted from watching videos, downloading heavy files, etc. Free VPNs can only handle so much.

Having awful ping and packet loss. Got carried by a sweetheart healer and two dps in the new MSQ story. Won't be playing until this is resolved. Send the packet/ping info to SQ and reached out to ATT only to be sent back here. Is there anything else we can do in the meantime? I've been having this issue for nearly two weeks and been not playing this game due to this issue.

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Originally Posted by KaneShelyn

Is there anything else we can do in the meantime?

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Try a VPN or another game.

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Originally Posted by Dragoonhuntz

As others have reported, about 30 minutes ago Warp started having issues, at least here in the southeast US.

It wasn't just my ping to XIV that suddenly got bad, even pinging Google's dns 8.8.8.8 was dropping packets with it turned on. Turning Warp off and everything (except XIV of course) returned to normal.

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Same exact thing happened to me.

Heh. Maybe we should ask the people at Cloudflare if they know anyone who can help get this fixed. :P

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Originally Posted by Merricat

Same exact thing happened to me.

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Interesting. Indiana here, and Warp had no issues for me tonight. I'll keep an eye on it tomorrow during my game time and see how it feels/how the ping and packet loss look.

Well, not doing any dungeoning tonight that's for sure tho I unlocked the new dungeon. I'll wait until morning, hopefully it won't be getting hit as hard then.

Went ahead and pulled the trigger on 1 year of Nord VPN for $70 dolla to try since Cloudflare shit the bed. I NEED to be able to play with Mistress without tempers flaring over lag. I have other more expensive habits I can cut back on.

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Originally Posted by Allison_Grimvault

Went ahead and pulled the trigger on 1 year of Nord VPN for $70 dolla to try since Cloudflare shit the bed. I NEED to be able to play with Mistress without tempers flaring over lag. I have other more expensive habits I can cut back on.

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As someone who is interested in trying Nord and knows not the first thing about VPNs, do you mind if I ask how it works? Do you just pay for the membership, install the app, pick a location and "turn it on?"

The packet loss problem has been fucking up my crafts, right at the time when materials are most expensive. Someone please get this fixed, this is inexcusable.

I paid for the membership then downloaded and installed the app and then created an account and connected to it. The app shows a map with numbered circles and says I am connected to Atlanta. I am playing from South Louisiana on AT&T fiber. I do not know yet if I am able to pick or change any location. I haven't run any duties to see if it is actually working yet.

So far so good. No lag whatsoever with Nord.

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Originally Posted by Bearnoi5e

As someone who is interested in trying Nord and knows not the first thing about VPNs, do you mind if I ask how it works? Do you just pay for the membership, install the app, pick a location and "turn it on?"

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I donno about Nord but PIA is like that... Also I pay $40/year but I've had it for several years so I donno if I'm on some grandfathered plan or not.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/xsLnRAe

I was using Chicago link today. Smooth going. even macro crafted all the new gear. You can also enable the "Split Tunnel" and add your web browser to bypass the VPN because some websites have been blocking PIA IPs. I posted a shot here: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6256020

I found another thread with more information about this problem, this is an issue with peering ports on AT&T's side, not square or NTT, only AT&T has control over fixing it so if you've got complaints send them to ATT :/.

I've posted over in the AT&T forums--not that I'm expecting that to yield any improvements for us. If this is actually a fight between AT&T and NTT, then we might be in for a very long wait.

Well, here's to hoping that it might be fixed soon. I hate not being able to play with my brother, since there's no easy solution for consoles.

If you are playing on console, one solution if you already have one is to use a mobile hotspot instead of your ATT wifi. I have been playing on my phone hotspot for a year and a half with only minor lag issues during peak times and literally just signed up for ATT fiber on Saturday (install was scheduled a month in advance, before these problems started). I had no idea there was an issue until I tried to play. I've had to switch back to using my hotspot until the issue is resolved, which I'm pretty unhappy about since one of the main benefits of having real internet was going to be the ability to use Discord voice chat to start playing harder content with my friends. But now I have to wait longer... If it's not resolved by this weekend, I'm going to see if they will give me a bill credit or something.

But anyway, my point is that a mobile hotspot will play the game better than ATT fiber at the moment, so if you have one on your phone or as a separate device, try using it for now if you can't use a VPN.

Huh. If it's still bad next week, I may actually try that on pc. We use Tmobile for cell service and I'll tell Neko (his ingame name is Shadowflame Neko btw) that Ryn. Anyway this morning no lag, but I'm not counting on it not lagging later. Oh and before ya ask; we have Uverse for our net. Yes, DSL. And my pc is on wireless anyway (yeah go ahead and laugh) so I can use my phone for net if I REALLY have to.

I think both our phones support tethering; I normally would NOT mess with that unless our net is down (happens rarely) but if I want to play during prime time, seems we have to get out our phones and make sure they are plugged in. And..we're gonna have to stop using Discord so we don't have to yell across the house for now. I guess it's call each other.

And..don't know if I can craft the new gear that way, tho I haven't melded my crafting gear yet (no snickering, wanted to be sure of my melds and make sure I had enough coweries to buy the materia) so that's moot. Maybe by the time I get it melded this'll be over..

Let's take the fight onto the AT&T Forums. Keep this one active of course, but let's light a fire under AT&T - if it is indeed a problem only they can fix, it's high time they do so. 10 days to solve a peering issue is unacceptable.

Here's my post: https://forums.att.com/conversations/att-fiber-account/att-peering-issues-with-ntt-nodes-over-a-week-long-issue-and-counting-high-latency-and-packet-loss/646e18b7d72b5e6adff60e27

Here's another: https://forums.att.com/conversations/att-fiber-account/ffxiv-latency-high-ping-and-packet-loss-between-att-and-ntt/646e047c9205de56a01bcff0

Lahtori; not a bad idea. I'll proly get over there once I get rid of some RL stuffies. ^^ That would be better than calling them at least since um, I don't want to piss off the bad tempered brother either. (A RL angry Alisae is not something you wanna mess with.)

Yeah, the Discord thing was just because the hotspot couldn't handle running both at the same time on my phone. Lag city. I don't know if there's another way to have them both work.

Even though this seems to be a problem that affects AT&T users, I know people on other ISPs who are experiencing lag/packet loss. One of my static mates is on Tmobile and she is having the same issues that we are

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Originally Posted by Aranthon

Even though this seems to be a problem that affects AT&T users, I know people on other ISPs who are experiencing lag/packet loss. One of my static mates is on Tmobile and she is having the same issues that we are

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It's been a hot minute since I've studied networking, but if I'm remembering right it isn't at all uncommon for one ISP to carry traffic for another at certain points. If I had to guess, that's maybe what's happening with cases like this?

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Originally Posted by Illyrian94

It's been a hot minute since I've studied networking, but if I'm remembering right it isn't at all uncommon for one ISP to carry traffic for another at certain points. If I had to guess, that's maybe what's happening with cases like this?

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I'm still holding NTT to blame, but at this point I'm willing to present this problem to anyone who is willing to listen.

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Originally Posted by Ruined-Childhood

I found another thread with more information about this problem, this is an issue with peering ports on AT&T's side, not square or NTT, only AT&T has control over fixing it so if you've got complaints send them to ATT :/.

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What we can see with our own data from testing ourselves and from the many reports in these several hundreds of posts is that the issue occurs entirely once inside of NTTs infrastructure, when they are communicating from an NTT device to an NTT device.

While NTT could in theory claim that issues are caused by an issue from whoever provides their DC interconnect (Could be run by NTT, could be run on the global internet backbone (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc.), could be run via a dedicated inter/intraconnect company for dark fiber or metroconnect), the issue would still be internal. However, if NTT were to claim that the issue were caused by a "peering issue" caused by AT&T, and the issue could be easily located within the NTT network stack, that issue would affect every user who connects to the NTT network via whichever NTT DC is affected.

While AT&T (and Spectrum and other smaller regional ISPs) could in theory all use the same routing to this same bad DC, and every other ISP globally somehow avoids this bad DC, that seems unlikely due to pure numbers, as routing will generally take the "path of least hops" before getting to the "last mile", which is within the NTT network. It wouldn't make sense for a major ISP like Comcast to send your data outside of, say, Texas, when there is an NTT DC in Texas.

All this suffice to say that the issue is still within the NTT stack of infrastructure, and seeing that it is affecting primarily (though not uniquely) a single ISP, it is heavily implied that the issue is caused by faulty equipment (or equipment not up to the task) within NTT's footprint, and which is permanently assigned to a route that connects from the AT&T "in" line to the NTT DC in Dallas. Talking to NTT nodes within Dallas is fine and shows no issues, and it's only when traveling from the Dallas DC to the Los Angeles hop that the issue appears, as we can see in our own data.

Taking this to the AT&T forums will only move an issue that isn't necessarily Square Enix's fault from these forums, to a place where it isn't necessarily AT&Ts fault. This is an issue that is primarily NTTs fault, either in their own equipment, or in equipment which they have purchased or leased from another vendor (possibly AT&T, if they wish to claim so). However, even if that were the case, it would still be NTTs fault that the issue is still present if it is not affecting other major ISPs, as that would imply that there exist multiple inter/intraconnects between their Dallas and Los Angeles DCs, and they continue sending primarily AT&T customers down a known bad line.

In addition, regarding the thread you linked (which comes from a mailing list of no known repute), it alleges that this could be an issue with UDP peering. While there does seem to be some sentiment on the global backbone that UDP isn't a "modern protocol", there is no evidence to support that this could possibly be the issue at hand, as if it was a UDP issue, it
1.) wouldn't affect the ICMP protocol the ping command uses
2.) wouldn't affect the ICMP protocol the traceroute command uses
3.) if the issue was in the NTT network, WOULD affect all users
4.) if the issue was in the AT&T network, would affect ALL UDP traffic

As none of the above statements are true, the issue cannot be a UDP peering issue. As such, and until further information is provided by relevant and involved sources (specifically NTT or AT&T), the only true, factual, sourceable, and testable information we have points the finger squarely and solely at NTTs inter/intraconnect between their Dallas and Los Angeles DCs.

Peace love and happiness. I hope our days are great.

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Originally Posted by Aranthon

I'm still holding NTT to blame, but at this point I'm willing to present this problem to anyone who is willing to listen.

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Oh, absolutely. I wasn't trying to say this wasn't possibly an NTT problem--just a thought as to why some folks on other ISPs are being affected as well. The more places we can raise this issue at this point, the better imo.

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Taking this to the AT&T forums will only move an issue that isn't necessarily Square Enix's fault from these forums, to a place where it isn't necessarily AT&Ts fault. This is an issue that is primarily NTTs fault, either in their own equipment, or in equipment which they have purchased or leased from another vendor (possibly AT&T, if they wish to claim so). However, even if that were the case, it would still be NTTs fault that the issue is still present if it is not affecting other major ISPs, as that would imply that there exist multiple inter/intraconnects between their Dallas and San Angeles DCs, and they continue sending primarily AT&T customers down a known bad line.

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I still stand by the "everyone sucks here" approach. But it definitely doesn't hurt to light a fire on the AT&T forums as well. I'm not saying to abandon this thread or to stop sending reports/tickets to SE, that definitely should still happen.

The blame just keeps getting passed around. As AT&T customers, we can pressure them. As customers of SE, we can pressure them. Where is the issue most likely? NTT. Who can pressure NTT? SE for sure (they pay NTT right?), and probably AT&T as well.

We all want the same thing, to play the game unimpeded by this NTT latency and packet loss, as we had been doing up until last week. (at least for me, I'm aware these issues are far more rampant for others)

Is there anyway for us to get in contact with NTT? I know a few posters have gotten in contact with reps from NTT last week.

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Originally Posted by Aranthon

Is there anyway for us to get in contact with NTT? I know a few posters have gotten in contact with reps from NTT last week.

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This is very much something that interests me in knowing. Where/How are these folks communicating with them? I'd imagine they wouldn't give light of day to us as we do not compensate them directly. But I'd love to fuel fire with NTT too!

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Originally Posted by Allison_Grimvault

I paid for the membership then downloaded and installed the app and then created an account and connected to it. The app shows a map with numbered circles and says I am connected to Atlanta. I am playing from South Louisiana on AT&T fiber. I do not know yet if I am able to pick or change any location. I haven't run any duties to see if it is actually working yet.

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Interesting. I'm playing from Atlanta (physical location), on AT&T fiber. If you get good results through the VPN connected to Atlanta... LOL. Just shaking my head over here.