I'm cancelling my subscription due to lack of response from Square Enix

[Carnage]

It's due in large part to the increased traffic. Before, access was extremely restricted. Remember, SE was only letting a limited number of people get on each server at once. Now they've opened up that restriction, AND population has likely increased as well. So, those already strained network devices are getting hammered even harder now.

Look at it this way. Previously, a certain hop was already struggling when SE was having 3100 concurrent log-ins per server, when population was restricted to 5000. Now, that population restriction may be 7500 and they are allowing up to 5000 concurrent connections. Well, that hop managed by TATA, i-web, Cogent, etc. has NOT been updated to compensate as well. So, that choking point is now further pronounced than it was before.

So what is the deciding factor in whether or not a specific connection hits a congested hop? Using Cox there hasn't been a single time I haven't lagged since the server "upgrades" and the increase in cap. The only difference would be the severity and it could be anywhere from 2s delay to 5s delay. I've also played during Prime-time and during 3am with only 10 or so people on in Reverant's Toll, and sometimes I would lag more at 3am.

Why was it that for the entire 3 weeks I used a different ISP there hadn't been one time I lagged? I can't have been lucky enough to never hit a congested hop in that entire time frame.

Why is it that when I use a VPN instead of increasing my lag it reduces it severely?

Normally at this point I'd assume I'm a victim of Bandwidth Shaping or Throttling of some kind if it wasn't for the fact that my ISP doesn't even throttle torrents I use for school or other games that use the same packet transferring methods such as WoW.

[Yamitri]

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\blablabla>ping 184.107.107.176

Pinging 184.107.107.176 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=117ms TTL=45
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=45
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=137ms TTL=45
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=122ms TTL=45

Ping statistics for 184.107.107.176:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 117ms, Maximum = 142ms, Average = 129ms

I don't know what that means, is it good?

I pinged the same address and only got 17 MS, so.. i think it might be your ISP.

[Pyrorebirth]

Yamitri, i've played other mmo's where the screen was filled with more than 4 people with a latency x4 and never had problems with a rubberband-effect....never. Its plain and simple something wrong at the place where the servers hanging around or the time to react on whatever is way to short, i mean, if i can slowly can start to say "one" (i'm german so count some more time to it ^^) and im out of the area of effect and still got hit miles away...i dont know.

[squidbunny]

Just want to tell the OP I hear you and respect you for bailing and boo to anyone who says folks with customer service complaints are whiners. Someone has to vote with their dollar or SE's handling of our various issues will never improve.

My FC leader was hacked over 3 weeks ago with no word on reinstatement & I've ticketed two unrelated issues myself with no response. The game's customer care is appalling, I feel your pain, and will probably follow you in a month if things don't shape up. Meanwhile, thanks for not putting up with it.

[Arthemisa]

Just want to tell the OP I hear you and respect you for bailing and boo to anyone who says folks with customer service complaints are whiners. Someone has to vote with their dollar or SE's handling of our various issues will never improve.

My FC leader was hacked over 3 weeks ago with no word on reinstatement & I've ticketed two unrelated issues myself with no response. The game's customer care is appalling, I feel your pain, and will probably follow you in a month if things don't shape up. Meanwhile, thanks for not putting up with it.

Thank you. I don't think I'm whining about my problem because I've tried finding a solution, something that will fix the problem. I've waited patiently for a month, checking the forums for any updates, see if anybody from SE provides any update on the situation, but so far nothing. I love this game, I actually like it better than WoW, but when I had a similar issue with blizzard a couple years ago, they made an official post in their forums a few days after the issue with latency started, and explained the nature of the latency and whether there was an estimated time they were hoping to have it fixed. Blizzard contacted the different ISPs people reported in a thread similar to the one we have flagged in this forum, and after a few weeks it was back to normal.

I don't mind waiting and dealing with the lag if I'm kept updated on the process and what is being done to fix it, but when the problem goes on for so long, and nobody says anything, and then I see how friends who have been hacked before there was a token available for android, and then spend weeks trying to talk with an actual person on SE phone costumer service, I really feel weary of keep paying for a service that is far from professional. I get it's a new game and they are dealing with a much larger player base than they anticipated, but that's no excuse not to at least answer to all the issues we keep posting here ad nauseum.

Meanwhile, I've already paid a month, might as well level my other jobs since I can't do anything more difficult than amdapor keep. It's really fun to do hardmode titan and then suddenly find yourself flying off the platform 3 seconds after the attack is over, the animation is finished and you are half way across the platform. sigh.

[ntall1]

SE wont be getting my money. Even if the lag issue didnt exist half the day I still can log into the game.... Why? There is nothing fun left to do in it....

[Raist]

So what is the deciding factor in whether or not a specific connection hits a congested hop? Using Cox there hasn't been a single time I haven't lagged since the server "upgrades" and the increase in cap. The only difference would be the severity and it could be anywhere from 2s delay to 5s delay. I've also played during Prime-time and during 3am with only 10 or so people on in Reverant's Toll, and sometimes I would lag more at 3am.

Why was it that for the entire 3 weeks I used a different ISP there hadn't been one time I lagged? I can't have been lucky enough to never hit a congested hop in that entire time frame.

Why is it that when I use a VPN instead of increasing my lag it reduces it severely?

Normally at this point I'd assume I'm a victim of Bandwidth Shaping or Throttling of some kind if it wasn't for the fact that my ISP doesn't even throttle torrents I use for school or other games that use the same packet transferring methods such as WoW.

You've almost answered your questions in that bolded statement. You had better connections when following a different routing path, because you were avoiding the segments that are way out of whack. On one, you may have been going 11 hops through a Cogent partner in the path, and on another you could have been going 16 hops with a TATA partner in the path. With the VPN, you could have been bypassing a lot of the troublesome routing partners because they are sling-shotting you through their own private tunnels to skirt most of the problems.

So, yes... depending on just how different the routing goes, using a different ISP, or a VPN may very well allow you to follow a more stable route simple because you are taking off from a different backbone and get assigned to a different partner (or at least a different segment). I can see a different route at work than I do at home. I live about 8 minutes from work, and they are both TWC--but one is Business and the other Residential, so they go through different nodes/gateways at the start which ultimately causes them to follow different routes.

As for what signals a troublesome hop, go back and look at the tracert I provided. When you see a hop that responds AND times out (* is a timeout) on the same trace, that hop is clamping down on it's lower priority connections. You may also see a hop that has it's response time periodically spike really high in the same trace--like 3x or 4x that of one or both of the other responses. Both of these can happen because of traffic shaping. Shaping is essentially what everyone keeps calling "throttling", only they are mistakenly relating it just to P2P style shaping. Shaping simply means you are classifying packets based on specific characteristics of the packet, and then assigning how that packed is handled compared to others. For instance, they could restrict UDP to 1MB/s throughput, but let TCP go through at 5MB/s on a DSL line. This is shaping the traffic to slow down UDP to reserve bandwidth for TCP. In this scenario, the UDP is throttled down.

Some shaping may only be enforced when congestion crosses a certain threshold. So, if you see it occurring on a router during peak traffic times, and not during off-peak times--that is a clear sign that that segment is likely getting overloaded, or at least dangerously close. Either way--it is getting high enough of a load for it to start dropping data, which presents a problem that needs to be investigated.

[Raist]

I pinged the same address and only got 17 MS, so.. i think it might be your ISP.

Again... that is a WEBSERVER and not the GAME'S SERVER.

http://myip.ms/browse/sites/1/ipID/1...84.107.107.176

Pinging square-enix-montreal.com [184.107.107.176] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=78ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=77ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=79ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=78ms TTL=47

Ping statistics for 184.107.107.176:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 77ms, Maximum = 79ms, Average = 78ms


Pinging monsterlabsweeps.com [184.107.107.176] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=80ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=87ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=77ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=88ms TTL=47

Ping statistics for 184.107.107.176:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 77ms, Maximum = 88ms, Average = 83ms


Pinging deusex3.com [184.107.107.176] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=80ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=108ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=47

Ping statistics for 184.107.107.176:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 80ms, Maximum = 108ms, Average = 90ms


Pinging eidos.fr [184.107.107.176] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=80ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=76ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=77ms TTL=47

Ping statistics for 184.107.107.176:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 76ms, Maximum = 82ms, Average = 78ms


Pinging justcause.com [184.107.107.176] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=88ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=77ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=78ms TTL=47
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=76ms TTL=47

Ping statistics for 184.107.107.176:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 76ms, Maximum = 88ms, Average = 79ms

This, however is an actual IP used by FFXIV:

Pinging 199.91.189.74 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=91ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=88ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=91ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=87ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 199.91.189.74:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 87ms, Maximum = 91ms, Average = 89ms

Which is actually a bit slower than I typically see in lower traffic times... it's average drops to the mid 70's, a few times I've seen the average as low as 69. It's basically because of higher traffic loads in general that the response time goes up.

[Poki]

Didn't renew my sub because this was a constant issue and weeks later I'm checking back and it's still a problem. There's nothing the end user can fix about it in most of these cases and it falls to SE to either upgrade their network infrastructure (or get on their 3rd party providers to do so). Even intermediate steps or issues with the ISP it falls on them to work out a solution because we don't have access to the technical details and configuration data needed for these providers to prioritize the game traffic to minimize the lag.

[PSxpert2011]

May I suggest taking a speed test to rate your ISP? http://www.speedtest.net/
Your PING?
Upload/ download speed?


Base on what kind of plan you have, I bet you have to pay more to get more internet speed. I had to upgrade when I was hired to work as CRT for U-Haul and have a cold-connection instead of Wi-Fi.


Right now my PING is 32ms, Download speed is 8.13Mbps and Upload speed is 6.69 Mbps from my laptop(and that's crap for me) basicly an F+ rating but I play ARR fine on my desk-top, with occasional lag. It's there but not enough for me to complain.


If you believe your lagging because of the servers, it could be that your data-capacity with your ISP is limited.