How to improve lag and some technical details.

Some background info to understand lag. The game uses the TCP data protocol. TCP requires:

1. Handshaking
2. Acknowledgements ( for every packet sent, an ack from the server must be received)

It also provides flow and congestion control among other things.

This matters because your connection to the server is not direct, se does not have a wire from their server to your house, rather you use public nodes which route your connection. Those nodes treat traffic equally and could care less about you having to pop out of a circle because titan is about to smack you off the edge.

During prime time, those servers along the way get congested and as such, the delay associated with those nodes increases. I don't feel like going into great detail, but things like flow and congestion control become relevant as things get throttled as to not overwhelm the servers. So, although the servers at SE can handle what is being sent, depending on the routing your packet takes, other servers along the way may slow you down.

What can be done:

1. SE asks for traceroutes because they can look at the info, and ASK to get bottlenecks fixed or ask for routing to be changed. They don't have direct control over it though, as time goes by, this will get ironed out slowly.

2. Use UDP lol.

3. Optimize your TCP protocol parameters.

So, if you haven't already, get the ack fix

http://www.wowinterface.com/download...atencyFix.html

Don't think i need to explain this as they do it as well.

That doesn't do it, time to dig deeper, this guide does a great job and i don't feel like re-writing it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen...dslide_but_it/

Still having problems?

Try a tunneling service as it will cause your packets to have a different routing and you might skip congested/slow nodes. Most have a trial so you can see if it makes a difference.

How to check your ping?

For windows 7 and 8:

open task manager -> performance tab -> resource monitor

Go to the network tab, give a it a second and select the game process (check mark it)

Under TCP connections you will seethe latency and packet loss rate.


Hope this helps a few people.

Just thought I would bump this thread to say this worked for me. I don't know which of the two fixes improved my latency, because I did them both at the same time, but there is a noticable difference.

I can now run out of Titan's plumes as they appear, not before they appear.

any way to take advantage of this playing from PS3? like sharing connection from PC or else?