Horrific loading times and other connection issues

First off, I've had no real significant issues with the game before now other than some occasional latency, nothing game-breaking.

But just now, I tried to do a guildhest and it took THREE MINUTES to load. At this hour, it normally takes around 30 seconds or so. I've tested my internet six ways till next Sunday and there's nothing wrong with my connection-- my average ping is 12-18ms and nothing else is loading slowly.

I've been getting loads of other things that seem to be connection issues in the past two days also: A-rank hunt marks being invisible for 80% of the fight only to suddenly appear, NPCs taking a few minutes to show up after I enter a zone, targeting taking a couple of seconds to shift after I press Tab... none of these were ever issues before this week. I've been lucky enough not to experience constant disconnects, but I'm not sure these issues are that much better.

I'm really hoping that the upcoming maintenance will fix these problems, because this is ridiculous.

Hate to break it to you...

so i'll let Raist do it for me
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post2488649

This is an issue that began since the last hotfix, though. I went away for the weekend and when I came back, suddenly I was having these sorts of problems when they'd never existed before.

Given that multiple other people are also complaining about having connection issues, I'm inclined to think that these things are all related.

EDIT: I should also add that other members of my FC have been experiencing connection problems as well. We're scattered all across the US on different ISPs, making it highly unlikely that that's the problem here.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LunaHoshino

This is an issue that began since the last hotfix, though. I went away for the weekend and when I came back, suddenly I was having these sorts of problems when they'd never existed before.

Given that multiple other people are also complaining about having connection issues, I'm inclined to think that these things are all related.

EDIT: I should also add that other members of my FC have been experiencing connection problems as well. We're scattered all across the US on different ISPs, making it highly unlikely that that's the problem here.

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The congestion issues being discussed in that thread don't typically come from our last mile ISP's (the ones we pay directly for internet access), but the higher tier 1 NSP's they subscribe to for the internet connectivity to everyone else's networks. There are three major ones that nearly all our traffic gets routed through on it's way to Montreal---and amongst them there are less than a dozen routes available. So, when just even one of those routes goes tits-up, it affects a large number of people across multiple regions and multiple ISP's at once.

Running a trace to your particular server will likely shed some light on just where you may be running into problems along the way to SE's servers. To ping other servers/services is not a valid indication of what is going on with your specific route to your game server Montreal. For instance, unless you are in Canada yourself or along the border, I'm pretty sure you aren't getting a 12-18ms ping time to your game server--especially if you are on cable.. I could see 30-50... but to be consistently under 20ms seems a bit unlikely unless you are right there and only have a couple hops to get in to SE's network.

If you are running on a console, there have been recurring networking issues with the subsystems the consoles rely on for quite some time now that may be coming into play here as well. The PSN issues are in Sony's court and not SE to address, and DNS issues fall to the provider you use (which you can change). If you are on PC, might want to check to see if there have been any changes to your system recently (Windows Update may have just hit the wire, if you have a Belkin router there have been issues with their last update to their heartbeat subsystem, may want to check for malware, etc.).

I'm on a PC with a Linksys router-- no changes that I've been aware of lately, Windows updates included. I've run tracert and pingpath to my data server, and while it encounters some latency when it hits the Level3 nodes (everything that belongs to my ISP - Comcast - is just fine with latency of less than 28ms and no packet loss), it isn't anything worse than it's always been. As I said, these are things that only began happening within the last week, which matches up to the timing of the last patch that has caused so many connection issues for so many other people.

The issues with Level3 are intermittent.

A point to make is that you don't just traverse a node via a single piece of hardware (if you did the congestion would be.... urk), so sometimes you might traverse the Level 3 network without issues and on another day you might have nothing but issues.

I did some more testing, and it turns out that the loading issues only occur when I'm trying to load into an instance like a guildhest or a dungeon. Going from zone to zone is absolutely fine and normal. I spent forever trying to load into another guildhest, and then not five minutes later I went from Mor Dhona to Coerthas with a loading time of under 20 seconds.

This is definitely something on SE's end.

I knew I wasn't the only one who had it! One night, loading between areas took waaaaaay longer than it normally did. Once when I came back from an instance, I returned home to this:


https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5614/1...06670c7e_h.jpg

Yes, that's exactly like what I've been experiencing, only mine has been with NPCs and hunt marks. Interestingly enough, non-hunt marks like Odin and Behemoth have appeared just fine.

http://i.imgur.com/Oq5ipov.jpg

Here is an example of what I mean. There are supposed to be several NPCs there, yet it took a few minutes after I teleported in to Mor Dhona for them to show up. I was able to run around the city just fine and I could see other players, but not the NPCs.