Nightly latency and packet loss
Hi I live on the US east coast and I am experiencing game breaking packet loss every night around the same time. Every game I play and every other service is perfectly fine regardless of the time, but the game flat out breaks around 8pm EST for me.
Any non-GCD ability I use with a 5+ second recast gets its timer messed up. For instance: if I use a 30 second CD, once the timer has gone down from 30 and it shows the ability is back up if I try to use it then the timer jumps up to 8 or so seconds and it gives me an error that the ability isn't ready. I've timed it and the "30 second" CD is actually more like 22 seconds, hence the extra 8 because it actually isn't fully cooled down despite showing so.
This makes the game impossible to play because I have to guess when abilities are actually back up and a lot of times stuff won't go off because I'm sure I used it but it wasn't actually up yet. I guess I would describe it as the cooldown timer jumping. There are no other issues caused by the latency (like rubberbanding, players teleporting, GCD lag or anything), it's only my ability timers for some reason and only from 8-10pm EST.
I've reset everything and like I said this is the only service that has this issue. I even tried several VPNs and used several different servers and they still have the exact same issue. If I ping the server, I generally get 110 ms latency (which is normally fine, like I said I have no other lag issues) and if I run a tracert then the lag appears somewhere around the 5th or 6th hop regardless of where a VPN is re-routing me.
I can only guess it's packet loss due to some server somewhere being overloaded at this time, but this is the only time I'm able to play and I can't even play since the game literally prevents me from using half of my abilities. Is there anything I can do?
Edit: I just realized that buffs, debuffs and even the sprint icon all persist for several seconds after the timer has ended and I keep the effects for that duration. It's like the entire game is running fine but the time is messed up and is counting down too quickly. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this? I thought it might be my client but it should all be server side and like I said it is fine any other time of the day.
Edit 2: I sat here and ran several minutes of pinging both google and the ffxiv west coast servers through cmd. Got 65ms and 110ms each and these numbers only differed by 1-2 each ping (tested google just to make sure my connection itself was okay first). Even after several minutes, cmd showed 0% packet loss and the 110ms being so consistent (and no different than earlier in the day which is strange) worries me. Assuming this is a fairly accurate test, wouldn't a relatively low (and consistent) latency like 110 ms coupled with 0% packet loss mean my connection should be fine and at most showing a VERY slight delay in certain actions? I could try re-installing the game to see if the updates botched something, but it doesn't make sense that the game would work perfectly fine for an hour or so then hit that same time period (8pm EST) and have the same issues as the two previous days.