Stutter Stepping?

Today I logged in and for the first time ever I have had this weird stutter step when I walk. My character just starts walking and stops after about 3 steps then does this 1 step- stop - 1 step - stop routine for a while then goes 3-4 more steps and it happens again.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with my W key and when connecting to the server, Valefor, I am shown I have "excellent" connectivity.

I've restarted the computer, turned off things that interfere with connectivity such as download managers, youtube, etc. but the problem has been persisting and I'm really just not sure what's causing it. It is, however, making it next to impossible to play though. Just getting around is a chore and I don't even want to think about going into a dungeon like that.

Are you using a wireless keyboard ? If so try changing the batteries.

its the servers, certain servers been acting like butt since the mog station maintiance begain, almost all of Zalera has been complaining about stuttering

Balmung and the instance servers we use are doing it too.

Ahh, OK. I'll try again when the maintenance is over then. Thanks =)

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Originally Posted by Zetsumei_Tsunarashi

Are you using a wireless keyboard ? If so try changing the batteries.

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Nope! USB keyboard. Unplugged it and cleaned the connection and replugged it in too. Though my typing and W keys seem to be just fine.

Maintenance over and I'm still stutter stepping T____________________________T

There have been numerous reports of severe latency issues where countless people have isolated the problem to SE's end, and SE still has not fixed it. It's not just you. It got so bad last night, I /shouted "Anyone else getting terrible lag spikes? NW Washington here" and I got pages and pages of replies from all over, everyone having the same problem. It's not our connections, it's not our ISPs, everything else, whether it be other games, other MMOs, streaming video, surfing, everything else works fine except for FF14. But SE says it must be our ISPs. Every one of us. From all over the place. Even though everything but FF14 works flawlessly. Seems reasonable.

SE doesnt care enough to admit they are the issue. I mean seriously... 4 years and they havent fixed this issue. I mentioned it in another post. I see bout 5 AFK people in every area i got to but they dont DC ever, yet active players get DC. SE should talk to Blizzard cause apparently they cant fix this issue themselves...

To be honest are you shure its SE's fault? if so wouldnt other datacenters also suffer from that issue?
I've read on here that the US-canada backbone connection isnt the best leading to a lot of issues. Couldnt your problems be located there?
The fact that other games or general internet is fine means little since they use other pathways. The only thing you can be relatively shure of is that your own installation or local provider isnt at fault.

I know at times connection was really bad for me when chaos datacenter was still in canada but all issues seem to have been resolved by the migration to europe.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

To be honest are you shure its SE's fault? if so wouldnt other datacenters also suffer from that issue?
I've read on here that the US-canada backbone connection isnt the best leading to a lot of issues. Couldnt your problems be located there?
The fact that other games or general internet is fine means little since they use other pathways. The only thing you can be relatively shure of is that your own installation or local provider isnt at fault.

I know at times connection was really bad for me when chaos datacenter was still in canada but all issues seem to have been resolved by the migration to europe.

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Square Enix is the only entity that will have any pull with Level3 which is where the bottleneck is occurring. Companies that run major internet backbones don't deal with individual internet users, they deal with the ISPs and companies who are pushing lots of traffic through their networks. Until Square Enix puts the pressure on Level3 by threatening to move their datacenter elsewhere then we're all stuck with this problem. Square of course does not want to have to resort to moving their datacenter as it would cost them an immense amount of money. Instead, those of us routed through Level3 (which is a very large number of people, even if not the "majority"), are instead just stuck twiddling our thumbs waiting on SE to do something, ANYTHING. As of now, they have not even posted an update to let their customers know they're even working on the problem at all.

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

Square Enix is the only entity that will have any pull with Level3 which is where the bottleneck is occurring. Companies that run major internet backbones don't deal with individual internet users, they deal with the ISPs and companies who are pushing lots of traffic through their networks. Until Square Enix puts the pressure on Level3 by threatening to move their datacenter elsewhere then we're all stuck with this problem. Square of course does not want to have to resort to moving their datacenter as it would cost them an immense amount of money. Instead, those of us routed through Level3 (which is a very large number of people, even if not the "majority"), are instead just stuck twiddling our thumbs waiting on SE to do something, ANYTHING. As of now, they have not even posted an update to let their customers know they're even working on the problem at all.

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I dont think SE can put much pressure at the level3 operator unfortunatly. Shure they can threaten to move their server but the level3 operator knows the cost of moving servers would be huge (as you state) so i can imagine that they would call SE's bluff and just do nothing. :(
If there was an alternative backbone to use and everyone would pressure their local ISP to use alternate routing then perhaps the level3 operator could be forced because they wouldnt have any clients whatsoever.

Or does all this work differently?

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

To be honest are you shure its SE's fault? if so wouldnt other datacenters also suffer from that issue?
I've read on here that the US-canada backbone connection isnt the best leading to a lot of issues. Couldnt your problems be located there?
The fact that other games or general internet is fine means little since they use other pathways. The only thing you can be relatively shure of is that your own installation or local provider isnt at fault.

I know at times connection was really bad for me when chaos datacenter was still in canada but all issues seem to have been resolved by the migration to europe.

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Wait so we have to wait for the migration for them to fix this issue? I already tested my provider.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

I dont think SE can put much pressure at the level3 operator unfortunatly. Shure they can threaten to move their server but the level3 operator knows the cost of moving servers would be huge (as you state) so i can imagine that they would call SE's bluff and just do nothing. :(
If there was an alternative backbone to use and everyone would pressure their local ISP to use alternate routing then perhaps the level3 operator could be forced because they wouldnt have any clients whatsoever.

Or does all this work differently?

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The only way to get the ISP to do anything about it is to ask them. They (Comcast), have already stated many times to many different people that the problem is not on their end and refuse to do anything about it. Comcast has been refusing to give people ticket numbers even who are calling to complain. So our only options are to cancel service with Comcast and try to find another ISP. For many people that's not a viable option. In many US suburban areas we don't get the choice between multiple internet providers. We get but one. Even if we could change our ISP, this often comes with very pricey early termination fees. My early termination fee with Comcast Business is $250, plus an additional 10% of the remaining overall total I would have paid. That means should I cancel my service today to find another provider, I would pay in excess of $380USD. That's certainly not going to happen for me just to play FFXIV when my internet works just fine.

Is it really Comcast's problem though? Ultimately, no.

Square Enix is the one who will lose business over it in the end, firmly making it their problem to deal with. Why should Comcast care if Square Enix loses business? They're separate entities.

EDIT: I also find it relevant to add that it's not just Comcast routing. Reports from Time Warner, T-Mobile Broadband, and other ISPs also use Level3. All of these ISPs are saying it's not their fault and refuse to do anything about it. So say I *do* pay the early termination fees and switch to a new provider.. there is no guarantee the new provider won't use the exact same route through Level3 making the hassle of switching extremely pricey and pointless.

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

The only way to get the ISP to do anything about it is to ask them. They (Comcast), have already stated many times to many different people that the problem is not on their end and refuse to do anything about it. Comcast has been refusing to give people ticket numbers even who are calling to complain. So our only options are to cancel service with Comcast and try to find another ISP. For many people that's not a viable option. In many US suburban areas we don't get the choice between multiple internet providers. We get but one. Even if we could change our ISP, this often comes with very pricey early termination fees. My early termination fee with Comcast Business is $250, plus an additional 10% of the remaining overall total I would have paid. That means should I cancel my service today to find another provider, I would pay in excess of $380USD. That's certainly not going to happen for me just to play FFXIV when my internet works just fine.

Is it really Comcast's problem though? Ultimately, no.

Square Enix is the one who will lose business over it in the end, firmly making it their problem to deal with. Why should Comcast care if Square Enix loses business? They're separate entities.

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I ran a WIn MTR test... latency spikes were not on Comcast... they were on Level 3 nodes... then I hit packet loss with SE's CSP. So Comncast seems to right, sadly, in this case.

Comcast should care if comcast loses business. But as you stated that doesnt seem to be an option for a lot of people. Thats the "advantage" of a monopoly for you. And termination fee's for a isp contract seems ridiculously high. If I needed to cancel my subscription i would have to do it 1 month in advance and thats it, no other costs whatsoever. You can try to put pressure on SE but i wouldnt hold my breath for them to respond.
As a suggestion you dont have to cancel subscription early, just give them notice that you are canceling when your next subscription term is over.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

Comcast should care if comcast loses business. But as you stated that doesnt seem to be an option for a lot of people. Thats the "advantage" of a monopoly for you. And termination fee's for a isp contract seems ridiculously high. If I needed to cancel my subscription i would have to do it 1 month in advance and thats it, no other costs whatsoever. You can try to put pressure on SE but i wouldnt hold my breath for them to respond.
As a suggestion you dont have to cancel subscription early, just give them notice that you are canceling when your next subscription term is over.

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Comcast won't lose business over it. Square Enix will. This isn't a problem localized to just Comcast. It's a problem with Level3 which multiple ISP's use to route their traffic. Even if those who have the option of multiple providers switch to a new one, the chances are given that their geographical location has not changed, their internet routes will still use the same backbones.

Essentially that means the only two true ways to tackle this problem as a Square Enix customer is to move to an entirely different city, somewhere that bypasses the Level3 nodes causing issues, or to pay separate fees for a VPN which also I'm not going to do. If I have to pay for a VPN to use a service I'm already paying for, that's when I call it quits. Obviously the VPN is a much cheaper more viable solution but one that a subscription fee based service should not be forcing on their customers because of their poor choice of datacenter locale.

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

Comcast won't lose business over it. Square Enix will. This isn't a problem localized to just Comcast. It's a problem with Level3 which multiple ISP's use to route their traffic. Even if those who have the option of multiple providers switch to a new one, the chances are given that their geographical location has not changed, their internet routes will still use the same backbones.

Essentially that means the only two true ways to tackle this problem as a Square Enix customer is to move to an entirely different city, somewhere that bypasses the Level3 nodes causing issues, or to pay separate fees for a VPN which also I'm not going to do. If I have to pay for a VPN to use a service I'm already paying for, that's when I call it quits. Obviously the VPN is a much cheaper more viable solution but one that a subscription fee based service should not be forcing on their customers because of their poor choice of datacenter locale.

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Level 3 is indeed the Problem, and maybe SE's CSP. At this point however decent VPNs are actually pretty cheap and I think using them is a good alternative. Level 3 bases their contracts with the ISPs off of the amount of traffic they carry. Access to a VPN, atm, can be less than 10 bucks a month. That's like 2 lattes. It is also one less person using Level 3 nodes. The more people who use them the more Level 3 looses, the less money they can ask for in the next contract... so they are essentially forced to upgrade their nodes. It's how Capitalism works... Competition and right now the only competition with level 3 are VPNs, for the most part. Also SE isn't the only one with this issue... Trion has had it as well thanks to Level 3.

Perhaps it wasnt a poor choice at the time they chose it? From what i read in other threads its sometimes peak hour based. Sounds like the line is way overloaded. Moving servers ,would be the easy way out. Consider that the cash-shop is supposed to be created to fund the move of chaos data center to europe, you can imagine the costs in moving the primal and (name escapes me) data center to US to be double that. Also who knows what the cost is for running a data center in montreal compared to a US city?
That combined could make a change of server location something that wouldnt be soon.
And wouldn't a move to US create problems for canadian players who would have to go through te same backbone?

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Originally Posted by Galibier

Level 3 is indeed the Problem, and maybe SE's CSP. At this point however decent VPNs are actually pretty cheap and I think using them is a good alternative. Level 3 bases their contracts with the ISPs off of the amount of traffic they carry. Access to a VPN, atm, can be less than 10 bucks a month. That's like 2 lattes. It is also one less person using Level 3 nodes. The more people who use them the more Level 3 looses, the less money they can ask for in the next contract... so they are essentially forced to upgrade their nodes. It's how Capitalism works... Competition and right now the only competition with level 3 are VPNs, for the most part. Also SE isn't the only one with this issue... Trion has had it as well thanks to Level 3.

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I wish I could bring myself to do it. I like the game, but if SE can't provide me with the service I have paid for, regardless of the reasons why they're unable to provide me with it, then I feel I'm entitled to refunds. I won't open my purse to throw cash at the problem, no matter if it's only 10USD additional a month, because that tells corporations and companies that it's okay to treat their customers the way SE is treating us now and really it's not.

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

I wish I could bring myself to do it. I like the game, but if SE can't provide me with the service I have paid for, regardless of the reasons why they're unable to provide me with it, then I feel I'm entitled to refunds. I won't open my purse to throw cash at the problem, no matter if it's only 10USD additional a month, because that tells corporations and companies that it's okay to treat their customers the way SE is treating us now and really it's not.

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SE has even less influence, and more expense than the ISP though. The ISPs and peers like Level 3 are always fighting. Level 3 thinks the ISPs aren't giving them their fair share, the ISPs say "we have the stronger bargaining position suck it up. The amount of money to move the data centers from Montreal would be, in terms of ROI, A LOT more than it would cost Level 3 to upgrade their infrastructure at their choke points. In essence you are blaming SE for not supplying an adequate supply of water when someone else controls the valves between you and your house. Also remember the issue likely would not improve. The load would just get transferred from one city to another and unless Level 3 upgraded there the problem would follow. Not much SE can do about this it seems.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

Perhaps it wasnt a poor choice at the time they chose it? From what i read in other threads its sometimes peak hour based. Sounds like the line is way overloaded. Moving servers ,would be the easy way out. Consider that the cash-shop is supposed to be created to fund the move of chaos data center to europe, you can imagine the costs in moving the primal and (name escapes me) data center to US to be double that. Also who knows what the cost is for running a data center in montreal compared to a US city?
That combined could make a change of server location something that wouldnt be soon.
And wouldn't a move to US create problems for canadian players who would have to go through te same backbone?

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It's a poor choice anywhere I fear, thanks to Level 3. The NA internet infrastructure is pretty full at this point. If they moved anywhere, carrying NA and EU servers to the same location I see little difference occurring.

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Originally Posted by Galibier

SE has even less influence, and more expense than the ISP though. The ISPs and peers like Level 3 are always fighting. Level 3 thinks the ISPs aren't giving them their fair share, the ISPs say "we have the stronger bargaining position suck it up. The amount of money to move the data centers from Montreal would be, in terms of ROI, A LOT more than it would cost Level 3 to upgrade their infrastructure at their choke points. In essence you are blaming SE for not supplying an adequate supply of water when someone else controls the valves between you and your house. Also remember the issue likely would not improve. The load would just get transferred from one city to another and unless Level 3 upgraded there the problem would follow. Not much SE can do about this it seems.

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If they are charging money for the water supply then yes, I will blame who I pay. A person should not sell something if they don't own it. Is it Level3's fault? Yes. It is. But Square Enix is charging money for a service that is not accessible to those it's charging. That is failure to provide services rendered. Regardless of where the blame lay, if I order something and I do not receive it I expect to get my money back for it.

I'm not sure how bad the lags is for others, but in my case, this game is completely unplayable during the hours of 7pm EST to 10:30pm EST every day. If one works from 9am to 5pm weekdays, allowing for travel time home from work, and then dinner, one would just be sitting down at their computer shortly before 7pm to enjoy the entertainment they paid for. But nope... unable to keep a persistent connection and even during the times you are able to, you are lagging so badly you cannot even fish because you lose them all. If you'd like to play you must wait until around close to 11pm, keeping in mind you have to be up the following morning for work so you're not going to be playing very long at those hours.

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

If they are charging money for the water supply then yes, I will blame who I pay. /snip

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I see your point... Don't get me wrong. The only way for SE to fix this though is to likely build 3 data centers on 2 Continents. 1 west coast NA, 1 east cost and 1 somewhere in the EU.

I am a recalcitrant SOB though. I say if I can stab Level 3 in the eye I will and I like to think of others do the same Level 3 might say "crap time to spend money" because SE is far from the only game that Level 3 screws in the same manner. /shrug

I understand. Stutter Step is a bit useless when everyone is normally accuracy capped. Perhaps try Box Step or Feather Step?

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

If they are charging money for the water supply then yes, I will blame who I pay. A person should not sell something if they don't own it. Is it Level3's fault? Yes. It is. But Square Enix is charging money for a service that is not accessible to those it's charging. That is failure to provide services rendered. Regardless of where the blame lay, if I order something and I do not receive it I expect to get my money back for it.

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Square Enix *are* providing you with the service that you're paying them for though. You pay for access to their servers so that you can play Final Fantasy XIV. Their servers are all up and (aside from some occasional maintenance) they're all running just fine so they are fulfilling their obligation.

The problem you are having is your route across the Internet to actually get to the SE servers, none of which is anything Square Enix has anything to do with as they don't control anything outside their own network (so definitely not Level 3 networks where the problems are happening).

Putting simply the Internet is essentially made up of lots of toll roads. These roads vary in size and the operators of each "road" charges various amounts to the Internet providers so that their customers can use them. You and I don't generally have to worry about any of this, we pay our Internet provider their monthly fee so we can access anything on the Internet and they sort out which roads we take to get to those places and it all happens automatically. At least that's the idea.

But in this instance your Internet provider is sending you to the Square Enix servers via Level 3. Basically, they're sending you down a small country road that's already full of traffic instead of taking an alternate route down a nice big empty highway. Why? I can't say for sure, but I feel it's a pretty good guess that it probably saves them money to send you down the small road as the "toll" on that road is probably a lot less than if they paid the toll to someone running a highway.

Unfortunately if you can't get your Internet provider to adjust your routing and moving to an alternative provider isn't an option, your only other option is to get a VPN service. :(

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Originally Posted by worldofneil

Square Enix *are* providing you with the service that you're paying them for though.

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My packet loss reports would disagree with you. Packet loss that doesn't happen while connected to any other service on the internet. I won't sit and argue about it, there's a very long sticky thread at the top of Technical Support all about it. And you forgot to mention the third option, which is unsubscribing.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

Perhaps it wasnt a poor choice at the time they chose it? From what i read in other threads its sometimes peak hour based. Sounds like the line is way overloaded. Moving servers ,would be the easy way out. Consider that the cash-shop is supposed to be created to fund the move of chaos data center to europe, you can imagine the costs in moving the primal and (name escapes me) data center to US to be double that. Also who knows what the cost is for running a data center in montreal compared to a US city?
That combined could make a change of server location something that wouldnt be soon.
And wouldn't a move to US create problems for canadian players who would have to go through te same backbone?

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Oh and I forgot. If moving would work this is how you determine when/where/why. Where are the majority of your customers in that market. If 80% of your NA customers are in the US and 20% in CAN, you may consider a move to appease the 80%. I would be surprised if the difference between Canada and the US is even more than that since CAN total population is like only 10% of the US's.

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

My packet loss reports would disagree with you. Packet loss that doesn't happen while connected to any other service on the internet.

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Because the Internet isn't located in a single place. Everywhere you go will take different routes to get to wherever it needs to, and in this case, it goes via L3 to get to Square Enix.

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

there's a very long sticky thread at the top of Technical Support all about it.

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There is indeed, full of people with the same routing problem (most of which are the same ISPs). It might be an officially created thread, but it's not claiming responsibility, it's just there so for the people that don't understand SE are appearing to do something instead of nothing (although ultimately they have no control over L3 so all they can do is tell them it's a problem, they can't fix it, SE isn't L3's customer).

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Originally Posted by Downdrop

And you forgot to mention the third option, which is unsubscribing.

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True, although I didn't think that was much of an option :(

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Originally Posted by Galibier

If 80% of your NA customers are in the US and 20% in CAN, you may consider a move to appease the 80%.

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Not everyone on the NA servers is from NA. I play on there myself (as do my friends) and we're all in the EU. I have no idea how many people play that are outside NA, but probably enough that it should be considered. Unfortunately moving isn't really an option because of housing and having to disband/recreate a FC from scratch so we've stayed where we are and probably a lot of others are the same.

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Originally Posted by worldofneil

Square Enix *are* providing you with the service that you're paying them for though. You pay for access to their servers so that you can play Final Fantasy XIV. /snip

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I agree with you on this point. The thing is ISPs don't necessarily have a choice as to what Peer you use. The way the internet grew there are various choke points for your route and if you are your "average" internet user you just use the automatically selected route choke points and all. These choke points become more common the closer you get to your destination.

If you look at the main thread on NA issues it doesn't matter what ISP people have. People with AT&T, Comcast, Time-Warner, Verizon etc. are all having the issues. They are all hitting Level 3 nodes, because often there is no choice. The difference between someone having an issue and someone not having an issue seems to be where they are, and thus how many level 3 nodes they hit on their way in.

As for my post regarding US v CAN I was just using that to illustrate that you decide if servers will be moved via a cost/benefit analysis.