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.

[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.