FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE FIX THIS MASSIVE LAG PROBLEM!

[Johnearle99]

I never had any lag problems. From time to time, I get connection hiccups, but never seen or experience what you are. Don't go around saying "Majority of us" because that's just complete and utter garbage. Have you actually talked to your ISP? Because if you haven't, then you didn't do "everything I could". Somehow, with so many responses of, "why should I check with my ISP", suggest that either there's something you guys don't want your ISP to know (illegal splitting of cable lines, for example) or there's other things that hasn't been conveyed here.

Ive spoken with my ISP. Ive run tracert and pingtests to the SE servers, there is nothing unusual about the results. There is nothing my ISP can do to help me. The lag is not always the same it is worse at high population times and in the duty finder.

What should someone like me do? Id love to hear your advice? Seeing as how I do not have this problem in any other games.

[Vizarie]

I can't imagine what it's like for EU people during which that is their prime time.

lets just say its incredibly unplayable, with error 90k popping up again.

to clarify ive taken all advice from you raist, contacted my isp and all that malarkey.

im fine till peak time and then boom i had to leave, yet this time about 3 weeks ago i could play with no issues, 2 weeks ago no issues, 1 week ago lag began or mightve been just over a week.

[Raist]

Ive spoken with my ISP. Ive run tracert and pingtests to the SE servers, there is nothing unusual about the results. There is nothing my ISP can do to help me. The lag is not always the same it is worse at high population times and in the duty finder.

What should someone like me do? Id love to hear your advice? Seeing as how I do not have this problem in any other games.

Have you submitted formal support requests to both your ISP and SE, including samples or your research? Even if you are not spotting something in your traces, there are some common elements that can be put up against submissions from other users that will help tham gain a better understanding of what is going on. They REALLY need the data--otherwise they are just shooting in the dark (so to speak).

[Raist]

lets just say its incredibly unplayable, with error 90k popping up again.

to clarify ive taken all advice from you raist, contacted my isp and all that malarkey.

im fine till peak time and then boom i had to leave, yet this time about 3 weeks ago i could play with no issues, 2 weeks ago no issues, 1 week ago lag began or mightve been just over a week.

Well, if you did file a thorough report with your ISP and SE and still nothing happened, then someone is surely dropping the ball. I got my routing changed by simply submitting my traces to the NOC.

Just curious about the nature of your request(s). What was the nature of your contact and reporting? Did you just call them, or did you actually submit a ticket, including specific details on your connection (ie, tracerts or at least maybe server's IP or ping results to them)? Did you just deal with a help desk associate and accept their canned replies, or did you work with higher level techs (did they transfer you somewhere like Tier3)--in other words, was there any escalation that put you in touch with some sort of actual technician or an admin, and did they appear to actually go through your data (provided you submitted the details).

Oh... and did you submit the same info through SE's support portal?

[whilke]

You may be overthinking it.... you aren't paying SE to manage your internet connection. You are paying SE to manage their servers and to provide them with reliable access to the internet on THEIR end. Their responsibilty pretty much ends there. You pay your ISP to provide you with reliable access to the internet at your end. The guys in the middle--they have contracts with your ISP and SE's ISP to provide reliable routing services.

So, if we were to extend this out as you are trying to apply it, the convention and or the hotel would have an agreement to connect you to a quality service provider--they would not be the ones managing your travel experience. They would partner with either a travel agency to manage that, or perhaps directly to an airline like... say, Delta Airlines to provide you a ticket for a fair price. Regardless if it was a travel agent or the Hilton that arranged for the purchase of that ticket, the QoS then falls under Delta's policies and not the hotel or convention's sponsor (unless by chance that sponsor is Delta I guess). So at that point Delta (the air service provider) now takes over with the responsibility to provide you with quality air service. That encompasses their agreements with the pilots, flight crews, maintenance crews, airports, and air traffic controllers.

The same goes with the ISP's involved. Contracts are made at the endpoints for the local service. Those providers then have contracts with outside parties to provide the extended services. If there is a problem, you don't have any legal recourse with those outside parties. You only have agreements with the providers at the end, that being SE and your ISP. THEY have to take over from there to pursue their partners, who in turn may need to pursue their partners, who than again may need to pursue their partners. It all falls into a set chain that must be followed...until someone gets the ball rolling at one end or the other (preferrably both), one really shouldn't have such a high expectation as to expect it to be magically fixed just because they shout out to the users that it's broken without ever addressing it directly with the service providers.

Remember... this is a USER FORUM, and not a support portal for Square Enix or FFXIV: ARR.

I pay SE to play a game with reasonable service, and reasonable reliability.

If I was paying a company to have water bottles delivered to me every day, and their trucks got held up in some massive traffic accident and couldn't make that delivery I would expect the company to resolve that issue somehow (credit, free water delivery for a day, whatever). As long as that truck can park at my house, and get to my front door, that is the end of my responsibility for that service.

The internet is not broken, their network protocol is just not designed for the internet in general. This is SE's responsibility to resolve, and if they don't they are just going to lose subscribers. People are not going to do the leg work to then get the to pay a company money to play a game.

[Raist]

And yes...before any one calls BS on my ISP actually doing something about my problems, by working with our ISP's I and others DID have our routes changed. Others have posted in other threads that they noticed their route had been changing after we started getting a little proactive about the problem. Here is a post I made about a month ago, showing the route I was following then.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...lease-research

Tracing route to 199.91.189.74 over a maximum of 30 hops

<<First few hops removed for security reasons>>

5 31 ms 30 ms 30 ms bu-ether14.atlngamq46w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.82]
6 29 ms 27 ms 27 ms ae-0-0.pr0.atl20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.171]
7 77 ms 78 ms 79 ms te0-0-0-10.ccr21.atl02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.12.109]
8 77 ms 80 ms 81 ms be2052.mpd21.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.40.249]
9 86 ms 91 ms 90 ms te0-0-0-7.mpd21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.28.197]
10 107 ms 96 ms 93 ms te0-1-0-7.ccr21.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.1.234]
11 122 ms 114 ms 123 ms be2108.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.134]
12 78 ms 68 ms 69 ms 38.122.42.34
13 68 ms 68 ms 68 ms 10.2.2.1
14 69 ms 69 ms 69 ms 192.34.76.2
15 73 ms 68 ms 78 ms 199.91.189.234
16 68 ms 69 ms 69 ms 199.91.189.74

Trace complete.

Over the last month or so, many of us started getting proactive and going after our ISP's to try to get some action. I have not been in regular contact with SE--but I had been in contact with network techs and admins. As of a couple weeks ago, my route started changing up.. a couple legs here and there would move around, things would get better, get worse, get better. Each time, we saw a pattern of congestion around the border crossing. They've been basically hunting for a more stable corridor to get up there. I've gone from the midwest, to eastern, to western, back to eastern--been bouncing all over the place trying to get it ironed out.

Here is my current route:

Tracing route to 199.91.189.74 over a maximum of 30 hops
<Initial hops removed for security>
4 27 ms 26 ms 26 ms xe-8-2-1.rlghncpop-rtr1.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.98]
5 33 ms 34 ms 34 ms 107.14.19.42
6 * 44 ms 34 ms ae0.pr1.dca10.tbone.rr.com [107.14.17.200]
7 33 ms 41 ms 53 ms ix-17-0.tcore2.AEQ-Ashburn.as6453.net [216.6.87.149]
8 56 ms 56 ms 55 ms if-2-2.tcore1.AEQ-Ashburn.as6453.net [216.6.87.2]
9 69 ms 56 ms 56 ms 64.86.85.1
10 54 ms 74 ms 56 ms if-10-2.tcore1.TTT-Scarborough.as6453.net [64.86.32.33]
11 56 ms 55 ms 55 ms if-9-9.tcore1.TNK-Toronto.as6453.net [64.86.33.25]
12 57 ms 86 ms 54 ms if-7-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net [66.198.96.61]
13 57 ms 64 ms 66 ms 66.198.96.50
14 58 ms 84 ms 55 ms 192.34.76.2
15 58 ms 55 ms 66 ms 199.91.189.234
16 56 ms 56 ms 65 ms 199.91.189.74

Trace complete.

Notice that when I initially started reporting it, I was having trouble with Cogent when I was being directed through a midwest corridor into Canada. After the first change, it went out west and through through Washington. Then it went to Milwaukee, then over to the west again as a slingshot around LA and back up through Washington. I am now having a bit of a rough patch running up through a Virginia/DC corridor--but at least my overall latency is dropping a bit, so it seems to have less of an impact as before.

Who has been making this happen? My ISP. If you'll note, I'm running up to Raleigh after my localized hop here in South Carolina. I just realized I removed hop 4 on that trace in that older thread, but it was going through Charlotte. Years ago when I ran into this with XI and I followed the same approach, I was going to Columbia first.

All of these routing changes have been within my ISP's networks, and every time it has been changing at or after the second hop past my Modem. My ISP has been altering how I am handled early enough in my route to get me into a different corridor in an attempt to remedy the problem. It has NOT been SE doing this---but TWC/RR.

All of this has happened before, and was resolved the same way as it is now. I let my ISP know just what was going on, where I was going, and how I was getting there... and they stepped up to the plate to address the problem. So, there is precedent for the ISP's to work towards resolve at least this part of our problem. Now, which ISP is going to be the one to resolve it best (ours or SE's) remains to be seen.

The more people we have getting the right information out there to people that can get the ball rolling, the better our chances of finding a solution. The more everyone just sits around and b!tches and moans to each other about how bad it is, the less likely we are to achieve a solution for everyone (again, this forum is for users to help other users--it is not a portal for requesting support from SE).

All it should really take is for people to step up and request support properly.

[Raist]

I pay SE to play a game with reasonable service, and reasonable reliability.

The servers are up reliably now, and they have internet access. Their responsibility is met there. Any transmission problems outside of that sphere fall to their ISP and other parties beyond SE's scope, but may fall under the influence of SE's ISP, your ISP, or other ISP's over whome they may have influence. The point is, they appear to be meeting their responsibility--otherwise we wouldn't have so many users successfully playing the game.

If I was paying a company to have water bottles delivered to me every day, and their trucks got held up in some massive traffic accident and couldn't make that delivery I would expect the company to resolve that issue somehow (credit, free water delivery for a day, whatever). As long as that truck can park at my house, and get to my front door, that is the end of my responsibility for that service.

In this comparison... that water company is your ISP and their partners. They are the ones actually delivering the product. They are responsible for managing the routing and transport--not SE. SE just packages it according to the standards set forth by the carrier, hands it off to them, and they take it from there.

The internet is not broken, their network protocol is just not designed for the internet in general. This is SE's responsibility to resolve, and if they don't they are just going to lose subscribers. People are not going to do the leg work to then get the to pay a company money to play a game.

Oh boy... this network protocol you speak of is not SE's protocol... it was actually developed by the government---more specifically the Department of Defense. TCP/IP is a standardized protocol, and it is the bulk of what is used on the internet. And yes, in a way... the internet is broken. More accurately, it is buckling under the strain of high traffic along our specific routes.

There is a lot going on here that some of you may not fully understand, as evidenced by that last quoted section. TCP/IP is a common protocol used all over the place---SE is NOT the first to use it for a game, and many have been successfully using it for theirs. Blizzard included. In case you didn't know, normal websites are hosted on TCP (default is port 80), and the data is tpyically transferred through the TCP/IP protocol. Open up resmon or run netstat while on this site if you don't believe me.

The problems come in primarily because of why TCP/IP is chosen. It has it's own system of error detection/correction to ensure information is delivered as it was originally sent. By contrast, UDP (used in XI) has no error detection or correction scheme---packets can be lost completely, or arrive completely out of order. Unfortunately, part of the correction scheme in TCP/IP also adjusts flow control by varying methods, depending on suspected problems affecting the quality of the connection. In short, if it detects enough problems with packet delivery, it can reduce the transmit windows and such and effectively throttle the speed downward in an effort to control errors induced by high congestion. If, after a while the condition doesn't improve sufficiently--it may adjust and throttle things even slower.

So, what we've likely wound up with is a communication problem that the protocols/policies are trying to auto-correct, and not being able to recover properly for various reasons we may not be able to discern, but we CAN see the symptoms of it with some simple tools like pathping, tracert, etc.. Fortunately, there are teams of experts out there employed by the ISP's to do just that--detect, investigate, and correct these problems. The problem is, many have very lax policies for what triggers an alert, which causes situations like this to easily slip under the radar. It isn't happening on a grand enough scale for them to automatically put someone on it--it's isolated along routes to a specific endpoint, but they are not all from the same origin. So, there needs to be extensive isolation in order to properly investigate and correct. That is where we can influence the process. By us reporting the routing details to people more directly connected to these experts in the field when we are experiencing trouble, we are in effect becoming their means of detection. So, they sort of NEED us to submit this data for them to be able to actually see a problem exists that needs to be addressed.

[whilke]

Oh boy... this network protocol you speak of is not SE's protocol... it was actually developed by the government---more specifically the Department of Defense. TCP/IP is a standardized protocol, and it is the bulk of what is used on the internet. And yes, in a way... the internet is broken. More accurately, it is buckling under the strain of high traffic along our specific routes.

There is a lot going on here that some of you may not fully understand, as evidenced by that last quoted section. TCP/IP is a common protocol used all over the place---SE is NOT the first to use it for a game, and many have been successfully using it for theirs. Blizzard included. In case you didn't know, normal websites are hosted on TCP (default is port 80), and the data is tpyically transferred through the TCP/IP protocol. Open up resmon or run netstat while on this site if you don't believe me.

The problems come in primarily because of why TCP/IP is chosen. It has it's own system of error detection/correction to ensure information is delivered as it was originally sent. By contrast, UDP (used in XI) has no error detection or correction scheme---packets can be lost completely, or arrive completely out of order. Unfortunately, part of the correction scheme in TCP/IP also adjusts flow control by varying methods, depending on suspected problems affecting the quality of the connection. In short, if it detects enough problems with packet delivery, it can reduce the transmit windows and such and effectively throttle the speed downward in an effort to control errors induced by high congestion. If, after a while the condition doesn't improve sufficiently--it may adjust and throttle things even slower.

So, what we've likely wound up with is a communication problem that the protocols/policies are trying to auto-correct, and not being able to recover properly for various reasons we may not be able to discern, but we CAN see the symptoms of it with some simple tools like pathping, tracert, etc.. Fortunately, there are teams of experts out there employed by the ISP's to do just that--detect, investigate, and correct these problems. The problem is, many have very lax policies for what triggers an alert, which causes situations like this to easily slip under the radar. It isn't happening on a grand enough scale for them to automatically put someone on it--it's isolated along routes to a specific endpoint, but they are not all from the same origin. So, there needs to be extensive isolation in order to properly investigate and correct. That is where we can influence the process. By us reporting the routing details to people more directly connected to these experts in the field when we are experiencing trouble, we are in effect becoming their means of detection. So, they sort of NEED us to submit this data for them to be able to actually see a problem exists that needs to be addressed.

Actually, I very specifically mean SE's layer 7 network protocol...which is running over TCP (why TCP instead of UDP for an endgame this twitchy is their first mistake).

All the rubber banding in this game is specifically because of how SE implemented their game network protocol on top of TCP. They are not able to handle the jitter that comes along with dealing with TCP over the general internet. They are not able to handle small amounts of packet loss. Their protocol is just poor for dealing with anything but 100% quality connections.

All of these bad backbone circuits that people keep bringing up in traces are just doing what they normally do. They are going to drop some packets, they are going to delay some. This is how the internet works, and why TCP is not intended for any type of real time usage.

Please stop assuming that people here don't know what they are talking about. I don't need a lesson in how our go to network protocols where developed by the DoD.

This is still up to SE to resolve, or they will lose customers. Customers are not going to go out of their way to keep paying money for a game. Either you pay and it works to your liking, or you stop paying because it does not.

[Raist]

Well if you meant their coding at the application layer... why didn't you just address it as such? When you talk about networking protocols in a conversation about issues with TCP/IP... that's likely gonna be what comes to mind, not the application layer.

As for what is going on at the application layer, it appears to be using http over TCP. A fairly common combination for many real-time applications relying on tcp/ip that aren't having issues like this. WoW uses it in fact, as well as other games. Would make sense I guess, since we spend a lot of time tapping databases, the launcher is kind of a re-skinned MSIE so it depends on browser technologies... and so and so forth. Also, considering how much SE likes to use third party tools, it is likely someone else's API anyway... who knows. Without any glimpses into their code to confirm just what is really going on, not sure it's really fair to pass judgement at that level just yet--especially since we've been able to link bad transmission to bad lag, and good transmission to "good" lag. In case you've missed the many threads detailing it, people have been able to draw a direct correlation between them.

So, there is at least one thing we do know: when there are substantial problems in response times, there are substantial problems in transmission. For those not experiencing such poor response times, they are not experiencing poor transmission. Is it really off base to attempt to address the transmission problems in the hopes that it may provide some relief? If we are indeed confirming that under conditions A in route we see bad lag, and under conditions B in route we see good lag---why would you not want to turn condition A into condition B if you can?

We have seen such work in progress and it is indeed working towards remedying this for some people. It doesn't seem to be a hypothetical anymore---it appears to be working for those that have been successful in pulling in someone to work on their routing. Even if it were just theory, your own interpretation of the failings at their application layer support that theory: They weren't prepared for unstable transmissions, and it's causing problems---address the stability problem with transmission, and you improve the game's responsiveness. That is precisely what we are doing here--improving our transmission quality appears to improve responsiveness.

And that brings us back to a major point we've been discussing: how to get someone to address the problem we KNOW to exist, and KNOW to be impacting game play negatively. Simple fact remains that a large number of people simply haven't been requesting support properly --especially not in regards to addressing this particular part of the equation. They aren't using the proper reporting tools (this forum is not for requesting support from SE---that is to be done elsewhere), and they aren't providing anything remotely useful for anyone to begin a proper investigation. If you want someone to follow through with a support request, it needs to be filed properly first.

[Rosy]

Once again, I will reiterate what other folks have said in this thread. We can play multiple other games with NO lag, games with servers situated in many different countries, but... NOT Montreal. It is not our responsibility to start finding ways to get to Montreal via our ISP, we pay to play this game and it's up to SE to put some servers in a country more suited to European players, not at the other end of the world. Now, if SE would like to refund me my sub for the amount of time it will take me to research and then speak with my ISP etc.etc. that's part way to being satisfactory, and highly unlikely.

This is a lovely game, but SE, be warned there are some great games on the way so you need to spend a bit of that money you're getting now on servers that are playable, before you lose your subscribers and sink back into mmo oblivion.