A response needs to be demanded by everyone from SE

[Appleh4x]

Ping and traceroutes are ICMP traffic (Internet Control Message Protocol), it's small amounts of data and it's only designed for relaying information about certain things, you can't send general traffic down it and as such ICMP is never altered (blocking certain ICMP protocols from working yes, but slowing down/changing/altering in other ways no - It either works or it doesn't).

The game itself, like most Internet traffic, is using TCP and UDP packets. I can see that you're repeatedly blaming SE, but like others have said above, this is 100% your Internet provider. SE don't control how your bandwidth is managed/limited, your Internet provider does.

I appreciate you've said you've spoken to your Internet provider and they've said they aren't doing any throttling so I'd recommend getting hold of the agreement for your Internet connection. Most likely somewhere in there there is a part about traffic shaping which is what this is falling under. They might not be specifically throttling your connection, but as part of their bigger traffic management it's doing that as part of your package.

Like I said, if that was the issue I surely would have noticed it somewhere else. I have a roommate as well, and between the two of us there is always someone online. We both are very big into all forms of media (music, movies, games) and have had absolutely no throttling on our downloads, streams, torrents, etc. This game is the sole issue as far as connectivity problems.

[worldofneil]

Like I said, if that was the issue I surely would have noticed it somewhere else.

Not really, when an ISP filters traffic it will use rules on what/how to filter. For whatever reason this game is triggering on their rules and you're getting the degraded performance.

The game is totally playable past midnight up until about the sun comes up

Which also suggests that it's your ISP doing it and that past midnight they don't care/no need for the traffic to be filtered. It's pretty standard for ISPs to only filter traffic during busy/peak hours.

I'm sure you're going to reply back once again saying that it's SEs fault, but what exactly would you like them to do? Unless they actually supply your Internet connection, they cannot guarantee you any sort of quality of service, that's down to your Internet Service Provider. It's obviously not a service issue their end as the rest of us with truely unfiltered connections aren't having any problems.

Who is your ISP? Probably searching the forums here for that ISP will highlight other people with that same provider having the same problems.

i know they have a thread up where we're supposed to jot down our ISP etc etc. well... you have about 1000 people whos done it so far. you should have taken steps towards fixing it.

They can't fix it, it's not their causing it. All they can do is notify those Internet Providers and give them any information that's requested. It's down to those providers to actually fix their filtering, IF they want to.

[Appleh4x]

Not really, when an ISP filters traffic it will use rules on what/how to filter. For whatever reason this game is triggering on their rules and you're getting the degraded performance.



Which also suggests that it's your ISP doing it and that past midnight they don't care/no need for the traffic to be filtered. It's pretty standard for ISPs to only filter traffic during busy/peak hours.

I'm sure you're going to reply back once again saying that it's SEs fault, but what exactly would you like them to do? Unless they actually supply your Internet connection, they cannot guarantee you any sort of quality of service, that's down to your Internet Service Provider. It's obviously not a service issue their end as the rest of us with truely unfiltered connections aren't having any problems.

Who is your ISP? Probably searching the forums here for that ISP will highlight other people with that same provider having the same problems.

That's a pretty silly thing to say considering every single major ISP is already listed in the 1100 post sticky topic at the top of this forum subsection. I'm sure that you will continue white knighting SE in regards to this issue on this or other topics because people who are unaffected by an issue are quick to dismiss it. The issue started for me the day I paid my sub fee, not sure if that has anything to do with it but I wouldn't be surprised if it did (limiting certain incoming connections to their servers to let others have solid ones to boost subscription rates for when the 30 day users time is up, perhaps.) In most cases I'm not getting degraded performance (in FFXIV,) the game server is flat out refusing to initiate my connection at all once I start it up. If an ISP was filtering my traffic I would have noticed it in the obvious common filtered things; torrents. My torrent speeds are consistently 5MB/s. No ISP would specifically only filter one video game, because that is ridiculously stupid. A server that is over capacity would refuse connections though.

--edit
After looking over your posts, Neil, I am going to assume that you're one of the NA forum moderators and this is your game character account so you don't just go putting mod posts everywhere. That, or you just really love acting like SE support.

[worldofneil]

After looking over your posts, Neil, I am going to assume that you're one of the NA forum moderators

Nope I'm afraid not (although of course you'd expect me to say that even if I was!). I'm just a player like everyone, but I work as a network engineer, hence why I'm keen to jump in and assist people on their networking related posts when they're blaming the wrong things.

That's a pretty silly thing to say considering every single major ISP is already listed in the 1100 post sticky topic at the top of this forum subsection.

Actually I tend to ignore that thread as from the comments a lot of people are mixing up actual P2P filtering issues with general Internet latency issues which is a completely different subject and therefore who knows exactly how many of those are related to P2P. The thread doesn't ask people to describe their problem, only "when" it's happening, not what is happening to be able to tell them apart.

I'm sure that you will continue white knighting SE in regards to this issue on this or other topics because people who are unaffected by an issue are quick to dismiss it.

I'm not dismissing the problem, we've already confirmed that it happens with certain ISPs such as BT, what I've been trying to point out in this thread is that you're trying to get the wrong people to change something. Especially since with the exception of a handful of stickied posts, they don't answer technical support queries on this forum.

As for the white knighting, I'll happily agree that SE have problems, especially with their customer services, but since the maintenance two weeks after launch where they expanded capacity, server stability isn't one of them (unusual circumstances/maintenance permitting of course).

The issue started for me the day I paid my sub fee, not sure if that has anything to do with it but I wouldn't be surprised if it did

Well I haven't had any filtering/bandwidth issues since the launch of 2.0 and my free 15 days (I'm 1.0 player) ran out about 2 weeks ago and I've already paid them for 180 days... and my connection to their server is exactly the same as it was before. One possible difference is that I specifically pay my ISP a premium to not filter my connection.

As asked in my previous post, who is your ISP? It also might be worth asking them again, just because one person said something doesn't mean it's necessarily true. They might not even by lying to you either, lots of companies don't relay information to their call centre staff so they're giving you the latest information they have, it's just not always correct. It can also be more complicated where (as demonstrated with BT Internet), only some accounts have filtering depending of their age/contract.

the game server is flat out refusing to initiate my connection at all once I start it up.

It might be worth checking out any local software firewall to see if that's blocking it, or perhaps try from another computer under the same network connection.

If an ISP was filtering my traffic I would have noticed it in the obvious common filtered things; torrents.

As I said above already, filters are looking for specific conditions which this game is probably triggering for you. You cannot just assume because you don't trigger filters on torrents that you therefore everything you do is unfiltered. I doubt any ISP is specifically filtering this game, just that however FFXIV sends/receives the data it is tripping a filter with your ISP and you get the connection issues.

I don't know where you live, but here in the UK every home broadband connection is subject to some sort of traffic shaping and/or traffic contention (usually 20:1 or 50:1 or somewhere in between). Despite what people probably think, we simply do not pay enough to have 100% uncontended bandwidth.

[Istym]

As I said above already, filters are looking for specific conditions which this game is probably triggering for you. You cannot just assume because you don't trigger filters on torrents that you therefore everything you do is unfiltered. I doubt any ISP is specifically filtering this game, just that however FFXIV sends/receives the data it is tripping a filter with your ISP and you get the connection issues.

I don't know where you live, but here in the UK every home broadband connection is subject to some sort of traffic shaping and/or traffic contention (usually 20:1 or 50:1 or somewhere in between). Despite what people probably think, we simply do not pay enough to have 100% uncontended bandwidth.

Well as a network engineer you will be fully aware that traffic management and contention ratios are two completley different things, and how come its fine off peak?

[worldofneil]

how come its fine off peak?

Either less people are sharing the same bandwidth at that time (contention) or the ISP only restricts speed between certain hours (traffic management).

[bonniebru5]

They can't fix it, it's not their causing it. All they can do is notify those Internet Providers and give them any information that's requested. It's down to those providers to actually fix their filtering, IF they want to.

I mean you are correct if that is the case, however ive played gw2, wow, d3, terra, raiderz and aion with the same connection and i havent encountered anything like this. so i mean yeah you might be correct, could be the internet provider. but I do find it wierd that only ff14 arr is lagging.

will probably be changing provider so hopefully that takes care of it. should probably check to see if they filter the connection beforehand eh?