SEVERE LAG PROBLEMS!

[Squa11_Leonhart]

is it a coincidence that many others are experiencing the same issues? this is 100% on squares end, like i said, i DO NOT have problems doing anything outside Final Fantasy, streaming, playing dota, playing LoL, BF4, Diablo 3 and other games. please fix this SE.

Continue your ignorance, its no skin off my nose.

Raist and myself know better, but what ever.

[Raist]

130ms is just past 1/8 a second. The game updates positional data 3 times a second, roughly every 333ms. When your "consistant" ping goes out of whack and a packet gets delayed/dropped and calls for a retransmit (note that ACK's only happen on every OTHER packet by default, so that is every 260ms, not 130ms... so this happens far more often than people are aware), you may have just crossed that 333ms barrier and your packets are now out of order. This causes a slight noticeable jitter, as you just got potentially 1/2 a second (or more) out of sync. Now... if that happens twice in one second, now you are over 1 second out of synch. And so and so and so forth.

That's just a "laymen's" version to explain it without getting into the exact numbers and mechanics of it. About as much as I can dumb it down without getting all technical on you.

EVERY line is subject to jitter and errors--it is NEVER EVER EVER 100% "consistant". It can be consistant down to within a range of MS, but it is never going to be a flat value. It's just not physically possible because of how the waveform itself skews across the wire. Oops.. about to go off into technical realm again...

Simply put, your signal skews naturally, and there are tons of things that can skew it further when you are hopping through 3 or more different people's networks, across a dozen or so routers/servers, and covering hundreds or even thousands of miles of different transfer media (copper, aluminum, glass fiber). Without doing a proper diagnosis of your line conditions (ie, not just pinging a server here and there) you are NOT getting even the slightest hint of what is really going on with your QoS.

And it's not just me and Squall looking into this. There are people far more knowledgeable (at least than myself, Squall probly remembers more about this stuff than I've forgotten the last 10 years) looking into our infrastructure problems--and they have posted lots of whitepapers on the issues, and even filed complaints with the regulators and the FCC as well. So, yes... you likely have issues in route. You just aren't looking at it properly.

[Raist]

is it a coincidence that many others are experiencing the same issues? this is 100% on squares end, like i said, i DO NOT have problems doing anything outside Final Fantasy, streaming, playing dota, playing LoL, BF4, Diablo 3 and other games. please fix this SE.

That's because you aren't passing through the same choking points for those other services. West Coast region has one... let me restate that ONE primary path into Canada on that side of the country. EVERYTHING else for the US goes through the Great Lakes/North East corridors just to get across the border into Canada. Access is for more restricted to Montreal than just about any other city in the US. So comparing this game to ANYTHING hosted in the US is likely to be an apples to oranges comparison.

http://maps.level3.com/default/#.VFZfkcmLBW8

http://www.cogentco.com/en/network/network-map


http://www.bt.net/info/north_america.shtml


http://www.edgecast.com/network/map/

Just a handful of maps I found via a quick google search. I've posted a handful off them in previous threads. We have a major choking point getting into Canada because we are basically funnelled into one of 3 top tier providers to get in there, and amongst them are 7 paths to get over the border from the US (it's a few more physical routes, but they flow through the same cities, so it's like 7 "highways" so to speak, just some are 2 lanes, some are 4 or 8 lanes for a simpler explanation).

This is what is causing our issues with our lag. You have peering/transit agreements that are only using 50% (or less) of potentially available connectivity from these top tier ISP's... simply because our ISP's don't want to pony up the one time cost of $2-10k per upgrade (some of which these top-tiers have even offered to split the bill with them to do), or the ongoing cost to maintain those connections. They just want to keep plodding along with their 10-40Gb access like they've done for nearly a decade now, but keep increasing our local bandwidth (and jacking up our prices to boot), without ALSO expanding the bandwidth at the higher tiers

Effectively, they are funnelling more water into the same size hose, hoping to fill a bigger bucket faster--but it doesn't work that way. Eventually, the funnel can't take on anymore water and it starts sloshing all over the ground because that hose can only deliver at the same flow rate it always has in the past.

They either need to buy a bigger hose, or they need to buy more hoses and buckets.

[Neifirst]

130ms is just past 1/8 a second. The game updates positional data 3 times a second, roughly every 333ms. When your "consistant" ping goes out of whack and a packet gets delayed/dropped and calls for a retransmit (note that ACK's only happen on every OTHER packet by default, so that is every 260ms, not 130ms... so this happens far more often than people are aware), you may have just crossed that 333ms barrier and your packets are now out of order. This causes a slight noticeable jitter, as you just got potentially 1/2 a second (or more) out of sync. Now... if that happens twice in one second, now you are over 1 second out of synch. And so and so and so forth.

And here’s one of the worst failures of this game. Only 3 times per second plus RTD = Titan wipe!!!!

And it is not because of a bad connection only because 3times per second is definitely not enough!!!

333ms from the game to ask what you are doing at this and only this moment plus RTD = half a second (maybe more) to late from what really happens in the game, means that many players can't react in time on boss mechanics. This is what most people here will experience as „server lags“ !!!
THATS the big problem, and this problem is just a SE problem, never had it in any other MMMORPGs (free to play or abo).
If SE just fix this most players will be fine!

[Raist]

And here’s one of the worst failures of this game. Only 3 times per second plus RTD = Titan wipe!!!!

And it is not because of a bad connection only because 3times per second is definitely not enough!!!

333ms from the game to ask what you are doing at this and only this moment plus RTD = half a second (maybe more) to late from what really happens in the game, means that many players can't react in time on boss mechanics. This is what most people here will experience as „server lags“ !!!
THATS the big problem, and this problem is just a SE problem, never had it in any other MMMORPGs (free to play or abo).
If SE just fix this most players will be fine!

That's a global update for the entire game world. It's been known since long before SE increased it's frequency that your positional data gets updated when you commit actions in game. That's why you see some people doing odd things as they leave the prediction circles--it's an attempt to give the server a heads-up that they've gotten out of the way.

It basically boils down to knowing the system, the fight, and how to best position yourself and react in a fashion to ensure the server knows you are out of the way in time. If you are relying solely on animations to judge how long it is safe to stand inside a prediction marker, then you may very well be shooting yourself in the foot because you can more or less be doubling down on your bet that you aren't gonna get bit in the arse by bad latency. Gain a better understanding of how things work and you may see your survival/success rate improves.