FIX THE LAG and 90000 Errors petition!

[Raist]

Wow seriously?

We are here for help, I am not a technically savvy person and would love to be able to play the game if I could. Your negativity is not helping the situation.

While reading through your haze of insults, I want to thank you for at least letting me know about the sticky thread. Unfortunately my ISP only has a single tier of support, and it is rather poor.

Though the attitude may not have been the greatest, the advice is sound. This is an issue with your ISP and their partners (will be illustrated in a quote further down), and so that is who you need to be working with to address the issue, and not the players (in case you missed the sticky welcoming you to the forums, this is user to user support and not for requesting assistance from SE).

And your ISP does not have just one layer of support... if you've called the help desk and a technician came on site, you just went through a couple layers of support getting that accomplished. The point is you need to ask specifically to be escalated to Tier3 support--those are the guys that can actually look at the larger sections of the network--the tier1 and tier2 people are basically just there to handle the simple problems like downed modems, cabling issues, etc. that affect localized connectivity issues. Tier3 and above deals with more advanced issues like routing and such, which is where the bulk of our problems reside.

Regardless what you say...I don't see why I have to go through all that trouble when it was working fine pre 2.1

Do you go buy a car and manually push it to get somewhere? Same thing, I didn't buy a game just to troubleshoot it myself so that I can play without lag/disconnection.

And the fact that I contacted my ISP first before posting here already show that I did my part. If you don't have anything useful to say don't say it at all. Instead you wasted a post space with your nonsense about trace routes and tier 3 support when I'm not too tech savvy. I just want to be able to tank for my coil group without disconnecting mid-fight. Is that too much to ask for?

Your issues are not resulting specifically from the patch (at least not the main issue, there may be some issues contributing to it, but it's not the core issue at fault here). It's more a side effect of the patch, and various other things that are resulting in increased congestion along your route. It's a combination of various things that have resulted in increased internet traffic across specific corridors--more players in the game, more people cutting off cable/sattelite TV or for whatever reason are streaming content more and more these days, all the buzz about the healthcare.gov site, etc.---it all adds up to heavier traffic on the routers, resulting in systemic failures trying to manage the congestion. You see this all the time with things like traffic jams and Black Friday sales--it's a very similar situation here. More people, more traffic through a fixed pipeline, and things slow down... sometimes to the point of a screeching halt.

As for the car analogy... when you have to take that car in to a service center to troubleshoot a problem, do you not get asked very specific questions to try to gather a clear picture of what is going on with your car? Do you not at the very least expect to have to give some sort of description of what you've noticed about your problem? Same concept applies here. Try just dropping the car off, say "It's broke, fix it." and walk away with out saying a word, or leaving a phone number for them to contact you---just get in your friends car and ride off. That's kind of what you've done by just calling Tier 1, and having them check your local connectivity. Like an issue with your ignition or emissions systems in your car, this problem goes well beyond the scope of your local Jiffy Lube that can offer quick fixes for things like a burned out bulb/fuse or changing a filter. It requires a more advanced approach with specific tools to provide specific information. They will need at the VERY least the proper IP address that is having connection problems. Providing a tracert/pathping result will help them even further, as it provides a much more detailed account of just what may be happening--and where to look for the symptoms/problems you are concerned about.

And no, Misterdapi was NOT telling you to diagnose the problem yourself. What was suggested was for you to generate a simple report that will help them diagnose your specific problems. It's really not that much more than what nearly every support ticket system will ask of you when you generate a ticket. Ever use that handy tool SE provided to generate your system info to submit a ticket through their support portal? It's the same concept, and nearly just as simple. The process has been outlined dozens of times on these forums since it was fingered as a routing issue back during beta4 (if not sooner, wasn't around for the earlier betas). Some have been very simple outlines, some have been very detailed. Here is one such post I made a while back that references a simplified post, followed by some additional details on how you can go about doing it:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post1644618

A lot of how-to's have been posted over the months. Here's one post with a simplifed version:

Quote Originally Posted by ninesunz View Post
system specs?

while logged into the game:
start > run > cmd
type "netstat"
look for listing that starts with 199.

in the same cmd window type
tracert 199.xxx.xxx.xxx

do this 4 or 5 times
post results

this will show if anywhere in your connection there is a provider having an issue keeping your data alive

Basically, you need to be able to alt-tab out of XIV and get to your desktop to open a command prompt (DOS Window) by running CMD from your search or run box. From there you run the commands by simply typing them and pressing the <ENTER> key. You can copy all the text from that window into the clipboard for pasting into notepad, email, forums, etc. by right-clicking in the DOS Window and clicking "Select All" to highlight all the text in that window and then pressing the <ENTER> key. Then you can paste it all into something else with the usual paste operations (CTRL-V or right-click and select "Paste", etc.). If you want to clear the screen to get a fresh window again, you can just type the command "CLS" and press <ENTER>. This may help avoid excessive editing. When done, just type the word "exit" and press the <ENTER> key to close the window.

Tracert is a very simple report, but if you are having a lot of trouble it should capture either a * event (time out) at a hop, or at least show very erratic variances in the 3 ping times taken at a hop. A slight variance is normal (like 85-100 range), but if you see a really big jump (like a 50% increase or more on the same hop) then there may be something they need to look at even though it didn't time out with a * on that hop. If you want to provide an even more detailed report, you can use Pathping in place of tracert (pathping 199.91.189.74). This will run 100 pings per hop instead of just 3 in tracert, and also tracks additional data on the quality of traffic when forwarding between hops as well. It can be a bit impractical for just taking a quick look because it takes a while to run (up to 10 minutes depending on the system and the route), but can be very helpful to a technician if they actually commit to opening an investigation.

Misterdapi and several others (myself included) have started their own threads to try to get more people to do this, but way too many simply won't even bother...but they will sure enough create multiple threads daily to complain about the issue, even though there is often a couple threads about it already on the first page or two. So, I can understand why that post came off a bit on the rough side... it gets exhausting rehashing this over and over again.

This issue is not limited to Time Warner Cable, and in fact the OP lists his ISP (Charter). This is also not limited to SoCal. I'm in Wisconsin (though also using Charter) and have had latency issues from launch, but they seem to have gotten even worse with the 2.1 patch. I cannot clear Titan HM for a relic because I don't see Landslides before I'm being slid off the map and I've basically quit any kind of lvl 50 progression. This is probably my last month paying for the game.

To reiterate for the billionth time: my ISP is fine. There is no throttling apparent on actual torrenting on my end, and every other application is taking advantage of my consistent 25ish Mbps down. My traceroutes show ridiculously long hops well beyond my ISP:

Tracing route to 199.91.189.28 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 6 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 14 ms 25 ms 9 ms 10.130.64.1
3 22 ms 12 ms 10 ms dtr03jnvlwi-tge-0-6-0-6.jnvl.wi.charter.com [96.34.16.130]
4 27 ms 23 ms 25 ms crr01ftbgwi-tge-0-4-0-3.ftbg.wi.charter.com [96.34.16.177]
5 27 ms 23 ms 19 ms crr01euclwi-bue-1.eucl.wi.charter.com [96.34.16.77]
6 25 ms 23 ms 23 ms bbr01euclwi-bue-4.eucl.wi.charter.com [96.34.2.4]
7 39 ms 25 ms 31 ms 4.34.69.9
8 53 ms 48 ms 64 ms vl-3502-ve-116.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.158.6]
9 52 ms 45 ms 48 ms ae-6-6.ebr1.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.69.140.189]
10 * 349 ms 110 ms ae-10-10.car2.Montreal2.Level3.net [4.69.153.86]
11 46 ms 49 ms 55 ms ORMUCO-COMM.car2.Montreal2.Level3.net [4.59.178.74]
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 90 ms 46 ms 47 ms 192.34.76.2
14 56 ms 47 ms 53 ms 199.91.189.234
15 50 ms 47 ms 47 ms 199.91.189.28

Trace complete.

ISP: Charter Communication
Speed: 30 down/5 up
Location: Wisconsin
Server: Sargatanas
Connectivity Issue: Lag, Rubberbanding, Freezing, Latency spikes up to 5000ms (yes, 5 secs)

And, finally... we come to a post that clearly shows where the problem lies, and ultimately hints at the proper course of action.

Note where things break down in the route---switching to Charter's routing partner (Level3) to get across the US and Canada and then finally handed off to SE's ISP (Ormuco):

7 39 ms 25 ms 31 ms 4.34.69.9
8 53 ms 48 ms 64 ms vl-3502-ve-116.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.158.6]
9 52 ms 45 ms 48 ms ae-6-6.ebr1.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.69.140.189]
10 * 349 ms 110 ms ae-10-10.car2.Montreal2.Level3.net [4.69.153.86]
11 46 ms 49 ms 55 ms ORMUCO-COMM.car2.Montreal2.Level3.net [4.59.178.74]

Notice two things happening there--ping responses ramp up suddenly, there is a timeout. Hop 10 did not respond in time. This ultimately results in a retransmit and potentially a forced downward throttle in transfer speed if the quality is bad enough. This is something that is built into the protocol itself, and NOT just something that an ISP enforces (although, they do have rules that throttle to try to reduce congestion). So, even though they may not be doing P2P throttling---your connection is indeed getting throttled---it's just not because it is detecting P2P traffic, but because congestion has been detected. So, for the helpdesk to tell you that you are not getting throttled is grossly incorrect--it happens 24/7 on every connection, even Dial-Up... it's built into the transfer protocols, so it happens even if they don't set a specific routing rule to throttle specific types of traffic.

Those segments are not Charters.. but they are managed by their routing partner, Level3. Your ISP has agreements with third party ISP's to carry your data to Ormuco--NOT Square-Enix, but YOUR ISP has these agreements. Level3 has a responsibility to Charter to provide an acceptable level of service to Charter's customers, which falls under the umbrella of Charter's responsibility to provide their customers with an acceptable level of service.

Because of this structure, your ISP has the most clout with getting this issue addressed. So... you need to lean on them to lean on their routing partners (Level3, TATA, Cogentco, i-web, or whoever their routing partner is that may be showing signs of congestive failure along their segments). Pure and simple. This does NOT fall under the responsibility of SE to address--but rather your ISP. SE can come into play here if the problem is with Ormuco's segments because that is their ISP, or if there is a problem with the game's packet headers (which was discovered a while back by O2, but cannot verify if SE changed the headers to correct that issue yet). But what we are seeing here is an issue with routing and flow control that needs to be addressed by those who manage the troubled segments (typically your ISP's routing partners).

The BEST way to demonstrate who is dropping the ball and ultimately responsible for addressing such issues is to provide a simple tracert or pathping report. At the VERY least, you should take the extra 30 seconds (or less) it takes to identify the IP's your client is using so you can provide that to your ISP and demand that it be escalated to Tier3 support. They can terminal into your modem (or at least the nearest hop) to generate their own reports--if they have the proper IP address to diagnose. But... providing your own report can not only provide proof of a routing issue, but can also provide incentive for them to escalate it to a higher tier if necessary for further investigation. That is why it is so frequently suggested you submit a tracert---it is a VERY valuable report to have on hand to get someone to look into just where the problems actually are instead of just stamping your feet and screaming at the players (again, this is a user to user forum) about how SE needs to fix something they may very well be powerless to address.

Edit: Oops.. set me off into Dennis Miller mode again. Sorry about that. /rant