Fix the game (Lag problems)

Please fix these lag spikes they are unbearable making content unplayable for many players. I mean with the expensive cash shop and the high volume of players we would assume that this wouldn't be such a huge problem. :(

Its not the game that's broken, or EVERYONE would have lag.

Its routing between certain ISP's, which SE has NO control over...

Edit: Who's you ISP? What's your Ping and distance from the server? Are you wired or wireless? Ps3, PS4, or PC? Laptop or desktop? Do you have a new modem/router or older ones?

All of these can effect your connection to the game.

Grabbing my pitchfork, torch and heading to Comcast HQ. I have extras if anyone wants to join me.

I've been having issues the last few days, but it's more or less the result of heavy cyber attacks by various countries. Yeah for living 5 minutes from Lynnwood, US.

http://map.norsecorp.com/

^my favorite website for understanding why my internet connection is suddenly terrible on some nights.

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Originally Posted by Gunspec

I've been having issues the last few days, but it's more or less the result of heavy cyber attacks by various countries. Yeah for living 5 minutes from Lynnwood, US.

http://map.norsecorp.com/

^my favorite website for understanding why my internet connection is suddenly terrible on some nights.

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I'm in Redmond and having no issues.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

I'm in Redmond and having no issues.

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Then maybe I should move a few miles southeast, because I've been getting 5 second long lag spikes since the recent round of attacks started this evening.

If your ISP is Comcast, its not a problem on SE's side. Several people on these forums and reddit, including myself, have reported lag spikes around this time for the last four days and a majority of us have Comcast as our ISP.

Yep. It's not a problem with the game, but an ISP issue. I also have Comcast and the game works perfectly during the day, but at night I get lag.

Far be it from me to defend Comcast, but I've traced latency and packet loss back to servers. There's nothing going on until you get to the "end of the line". It's also restricted to dungeon/raid servers; my realm servers are working well.

Terrible lag in the evening for me for the last few days, starting around 9:15 pm EST, and this is out in the world, not in dungeons or raids. It's getting to where I'm just logging off rather than dealing with it.

Comcast, Northern Virginia, playing on PC

I've found that ISP's will take some rather bizzare routes from my house to the servers. There are ways to correct this for many games out there including this one, but they do cost money.
But it's sooooo worth it.

I used to have terrible lag spikes, then I started using WTFast... now I won't play without it. There's a lot of issues with connectivity out there, some are with individual ISPs, but in the Eastern US it's one of the Main backbones *cough*Level3*cough* that causes a lot of issues. If you can't change your ISP, or if it's an outgoing connection from your ISP to a backbone, there's nothing much you can directly do. Some people have success with GPNs (like me), others don't. I'd still suggest giving it a try... might help. Of course, sadly you'll have to ignore this if you're a PS3/4 user... no real way to use those GPNs on consoles that I'm aware of.

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Originally Posted by Crissy

Far be it from me to defend Comcast, but I've traced latency and packet loss back to servers. There's nothing going on until you get to the "end of the line". It's also restricted to dungeon/raid servers; my realm servers are working well.

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That doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong though. It's not unusual for a node, especially at "the end of the line", to shunt a ping test packet to low priority or to throw it out all together in order to make room for actual traffic. It can easily cause a test to give you exaggerated ping or timeouts even if normal data has no issues whatsoever. For example, even when I'm having zero issues with my connection in the game (including instances), if I were to do a ping test from where I am in north Florida up to where SE has the servers in Canada, my "ping" always skyrockets into the 400-600 range once it hits Montreal. And that's all because of how the Level3 node handles the ping test packet more so than my actual connection.

Besides, as mentioned, if it were a problem with the servers themselves then literally everyone connected to that data center would be having the same problem. That's rarely the case, so the cause is almost always something going wrong in between your ISP and the game servers, which is typically out of SE's hands.

Also a comcast user getting hit with massive lag.

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Originally Posted by Crissy

Far be it from me to defend Comcast, but I've traced latency and packet loss back to servers. There's nothing going on until you get to the "end of the line". It's also restricted to dungeon/raid servers; my realm servers are working well.

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I bet you never. The no reposes near the end are a security feature and they wont ever respond to pings.

Can you post the tracert.

I have Time Warner Cable and am getting lag here in Ohio.

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Originally Posted by PandaPause

Grabbing my pitchfork, torch and heading to Comcast HQ. I have extras if anyone wants to join me.

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May I borrow one of these?

Does comcast generally not have issues? Not trying to be a smart ass just have heard from a few users out there on how bad it is, and countless others on reddit as well

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Originally Posted by Maero

Does comcast generally not have issues? Not trying to be a smart ass just have heard from a few users out there on how bad it is, and countless others on reddit as well

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Comcast is so bad I named the race of villains in my novel after them.

I am serious.

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Originally Posted by Saccharin

I bet you never. The no reposes near the end are a security feature and they wont ever respond to pings.

Can you post the tracert.

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Curios about the trace as well. Many times we have found they aren't tracing to the proper subnet. See a lot of people still tracing to the EIDOS web server...on i-web lines (not Ormuco) and physically in a different section of Montreal.

I had comcast service for years an never had any problems til couple of days ago lag spikes really annoying specially night time
FL COMCAST PS4/PC User

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It's not necessarily Comcast's fault either. If they can find you a different route then that's about the extent that they can do. Unfortunately Level3's junction in to Canada is shite.

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Originally Posted by Zephanoa

It's not necessarily Comcast's fault either. If they can find you a different route then that's about the extent that they can do. Unfortunately Level3's junction in to Canada is shite.

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That is the thing though...Comcast can peer with up to 4 other top tier providers. Their routing servers have access to every one of them. You can look up the ASN's and the bgp data and see routing is available through TATA, Cogent, etc.

The problem is for whatever reason they are choosing not to contact the current peering partner or to switch to an alternate peer. So, that at least makes Comcast responsible for perpetuating the problem.

I've noticed an uptick in the number of people complaining about lag across various ISPs. This occasionally occurs after they patch or hotfix or if there's an uptick in simultaneous logins (which is likely since they announced a free login period a couple days ago).

It's most likely the login campaign, but resetting your routers can't hurt anything!

As much as everyone loves to blame their ISP, my raid WHM reported his ping is just fine but he's experiencing severe game lag with FFXIV. No lag with any other games. I've also been experiencing bad lag in anything 8+ man, but 4-person parties go just fine.

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Originally Posted by bounddreamer

As much as everyone loves to blame their ISP, my raid WHM reported his ping is just fine but he's experiencing severe game lag with FFXIV. No lag with any other games. I've also been experiencing bad lag in anything 8+ man, but 4-person parties go just fine.

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And people do the same thing with SE when there's also stuff between those two points!

Ahhh.but was that a simple ping (4 hits in roughly 1 minute), or a more extensive monitoring of continuous 200 or more pings over an extended time frame that may show signs if heavy jitter or the odd dropped packets every dozen or so pings.

Need to be tracking things over time to see the range of responses. Just one or two retransmits here and there is barely noticible, but if it is happenenig regularly enough it knackers things up. It may even trigger TCP/IP error correction to flag it for slow start and clamp down the receive windows. It serves it's purpose well in some applications, but for a game like this it can complicate things further.

-nods to Raist-san-

Thanks for the informative input as always sir. I figured I would see you on these issues. :)