Getting higher ping during the day on Comcast.

I am in Chicago on Comcast and my link has been all over the place in quality sometimes being great and sometimes being nearly unplayable in any way. The last 2 days I noticed a weird jump in ping on the last hop that my friends on other isps do not get. Very early in the morning it seems to be fine at 45ms, but later in the day it jumps to 110ms till very early in the morning again.

3 16 ms 16 ms 15 ms te-0-4-0-1-sur03.elmhurst.il.chicago.comcast.net
[69.139.185.213]
4 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms te-0-9-0-0-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [69
.139.185.185]
5 20 ms 22 ms 18 ms he-3-9-0-0-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net
[68.86.90.45]
6 40 ms 27 ms 30 ms ix-8-0-3-0.tcore1.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net [64.86.
137.25]
7 42 ms 39 ms 71 ms if-22-2.tcore2.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net [64.86.79.
1]
8 56 ms 40 ms 42 ms if-3-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net [66.198.96
.45]
9 42 ms 40 ms 41 ms 66.198.96.50
10 43 ms 40 ms 42 ms 192.34.76.2
11 46 ms 43 ms 42 ms 199.91.189.234
12 113 ms 116 ms 119 ms 199.91.189.40

Trace complete.

The last 3 hops are the same IP's for my friends and I, but only I am experiencing the jump in ping from .234 to .40

When it's only 120ms it is still playable, but sometimes the game gets so bad everything freezes then rubberbands and commands won't go through.

This is something you're going to want to contact Comcast about (although I can tell you from experience they wont do anything). Nothing SE can do about Comcast overextending their lines.

Its not about the ping, never was, its about the server-client-configuration...i hope SE will finally get a workaround done for the issue since people in korea, in the eu and in the na cant have the same issue regardless of the ping!

Its like these days when a big publisher blames ALWAYS the ISP's and after a reconfiguration of the system the issue magically disappears.

You have a TATA segment that is getting a bit flakey:

7 42 ms 39 ms 71 ms if-22-2.tcore2.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net [64.86.79.1]

Notice the wide range for the responses---from 39ms to 71ms, just over an 80% increase in delay just a few seconds apart.

I would hazard a guess that under really heavy congestion, you start to see even more erratic responses on their segments (as6453.net). These are not under Comcast or SE's control, but are a routing partner that Comcast has agreements with for routing you through that corridor. So your ISP will likely be your best advocate in resolving this particular problem.

Might want to try running a pathping to gather a little more useful data for them to analyze what may be going on in your routing. It may take 7-10 minutes to run, depending on varying factors, but will provide a much better view of what is going on than just tracert (pathping hits each hop 100 times, and tries to collect data on hops between routers as well, not just pings from you to each hop). It would be best to run it when you are experiencing a lot of issues with your line for the best chance to catch clues on where the traffic is having trouble.

It has nothing to do with comcast over extending their lines look at the trace route closer.. the problem is at the final hop which is the ff14 servers at least if I go by the IP i am getting out of netstat.

I have Comcast as well, but out of the Philly area.

I get crazy lag from 5pm EST til about 8-9pm EST

If someone could point me to a post that explains how to do a tracert to the FF14 server I am on (Gilgamesh) please let me know. As I am curious.

It is 2:33PM CST OCT 21 2013 and it is doing that last hop lag right now. I am getting horrible no response/rubberbanding on occassion too.

3 14 ms 15 ms 14 ms te-0-4-0-0-sur03.elmhurst.il.chicago.comcast.net
[69.139.185.209]
4 19 ms 18 ms 19 ms te-0-9-0-2-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [69
.139.185.193]
5 20 ms 19 ms 19 ms he-3-9-0-0-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net
[68.86.90.45]
6 17 ms 17 ms 20 ms ix-8-0-3-0.tcore1.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net [64.86.
137.25]
7 40 ms 40 ms 41 ms if-22-2.tcore2.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net [64.86.79.
1]
8 39 ms 43 ms 42 ms if-3-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net [66.198.96
.45]
9 48 ms 42 ms 42 ms 66.198.96.50
10 40 ms 41 ms 42 ms 192.34.76.2
11 41 ms 41 ms 44 ms 199.91.189.234
12 109 ms 113 ms 117 ms 199.91.189.40

Trace complete.

This problem comes and goes almost every day and it is clearly an issue with the last hop in the trace route. When it's working normally my ping is about 44ms with no weirdness in game.

So this has become like clockwork every day from 11AM CST to 6PM CST. Square please address this issue because it is not going to go away on its own.

I also use Comcast and have periods where I will suffer lag issues and rubber banding that causes the game to be hard to play while doing anything combat related. It seems to run more for me during weekends and comes and goes. However I do know this, when it happens it happens for several hours at a time and my girl who is sitting 5 feet from me playing a different MMO on the same connection has NO lag or connection issues to speak of the whole time.

Under normal conditions we can both play, stream video and/or run downloads with no issues, however once the game decides it wants to start lagging it doesn't matter how much I tone down the other activity as the problem still continues.

I am also seeing the same problems coming. It is fairly obvious that it is a load issue at the data center or on the lines into it. Please add more bandwidth soon. This is a fairly regular trace for me. It will stay like this for the next 5-6 hours at least and make the game unplayable, and before anyone says anything this is squares fault, they need to be on their provider to fix this. It should not take a month. It really shouldn't be lasting more than a few hours before it is rerouted by a decent admin. Fairly obvious the lag is from 199.91.189.234 right before the servers IP.

Code:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | WinMTR statistics | | Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last | |------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------| | 10.0.0.1 - 0 | 478 | 478 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0 | | XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX - 0 | 478 | 478 | 6 | 9 | 21 | 9 | | 68.87.160.113 - 0 | 478 | 478 | 7 | 10 | 21 | 9 | |be-1-sur02.spokane.wa.seattle.comcast.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 7 | 23 | 153 | 8 | |ae-37-0-ar03.seattle.wa.seattle.comcast.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 13 | 25 | 116 | 23 | |he-1-8-0-0-11-cr01.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 14 | 23 | 42 | 27 | |ix-0-2-2-0.tcore1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 14 | 29 | 115 | 18 | |if-13-0-0-4.core1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 14 | 45 | 234 | 23 | |if-8-1-2-4.tcore2.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 96 | 107 | 149 | 111 | | if-3-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 86 | 96 | 157 | 88 | | 66.198.96.50 - 0 | 478 | 478 | 87 | 95 | 112 | 88 | | 192.34.76.2 - 0 | 478 | 478 | 87 | 96 | 150 | 110 | | 199.91.189.234 - 5 | 403 | 384 | 93 | 139 | 170 | 117 | | 199.91.189.40 - 3 | 431 | 419 | 105 | 138 | 169 | 131 | |________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|

Looks like evidence of congestion in the middle actually. And as many have been reporting, it may be happening on TATA lines (as6453.net) as well as Comcast (your ISP?), not just Ormuco (SE's ISP):

Code:

ix-0-2-2-0.tcore1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 14 | 29 | 115 | 18 | |if-13-0-0-4.core1.00S-Seattle.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 14 | 45 | 234 | 23 | |if-8-1-2-4.tcore2.CT8-Chicago.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 96 | 107 | 149 | 111 | | if-3-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net - 0 | 478 | 478 | 86 | 96 | 157 | 88 |

Note the bolded sections...look at the wide variance between your best and worst pings. The delay is increasing anywhere from about 55% increase (96 best to 149 worst, average 107 in Illinois) all the way up to a 15X increase in Washington (14 to 115 and 14 to 234 on two different hops, with their averages at 29 and 45 respectively). For just that one segment, your worst ping was 15x your best ping (not 15%, but 1500%), and 4 times your average ping. To put it another way, looking at just that one leg, you had at least one spike that took 400% longer for a response as the average response time on that leg, and 1500% longer than it's best response time--all within the short time frame of when you ran that test. Even if you throw that one 234ms response out of the mix, your average is STILL 44.6, with the best being 14 ms (45 X478 pings=21510, subtract 234 to get 21276 and divide that by the remaining 477 pings and you get 44.6). So it isn't just a single odd ball ping--- you still have a freakishly wide range of response times getting to/through that one hop alone.

Going back and looking at all your numbers more closely, it seems to be a bit off in general across the board. 7 to 153 with 23 average. and 13 to 116, with 25 average when in Washington on Comcast. Even the hops closer to you are showing an odd variance as well: 6-21 with 9 average, and 7 to 21 with 10 average.

There definitely seems to be some heavy congestion in route causing problems when going through the Washington area (both the Comcast and TATA networks there are showing issues), but it looks like there may be something close to home causing extra jitter as well.

Keep in mind that this can stack, as you aren't going just from your system directly to each hop in turn. Depending on the routing policies in effect, you may be passing through some if not all previous hops each time you move forward pinging each hop in your route in turn. So if you have multiple hops with problems, it may appear to get progressively worse as you go further down the list in the trace. For instance, if hop 4 and 5 are both having problems and they are also used in getting to hop 6--they may stack and make 6 look really bad, but 6 may actually be OK. The trick is for the techs at the ISP's responsible for those segments to figure out where it starts and move forward from there with testing. Why it's important to provide this information when filing a bug report--it gives them a road map to work with.

Greetings,

It seems that there have not been any further posts about this concern being an ongoing issue. Because of this, we are considering it to be resolved. If this does continue to be a concern, please create another thread to further discuss resolutions or contact the Support Center at support.na.square-enix.com for assistance.