Need to look at your actual routes. If your ISP isn't analyzing your actual path to the game server, they may never see any problems because they are looking in the wrong place. The problems more frequently occur after they hand us off to one of their peering/transit partners and before getting to Ormuco. In such cases our ISP can help resolve things by either working with their routing partner to investigate further to fix problems or switch you to one of their other partners.
Time Warner has been doing just that for me since around last spring. On average I switch to a different peer roughly every 3 weeks or so trying to stay ahead of he congested segments. It will require dealing with at least Tier3 though...not the guys that typically answer the phone or check your cables and modem out. You need escalation to a higher layer of support.
Thread: Latency issues
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04-25-2015 07:50 AM #1Player
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(1)
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04-25-2015 08:17 AM #2Player
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Well, all this sound alien to me. I want the services I pay for to work without me putting the work extensively.
Originally Posted by Raist
The problem started immediately after last Maintenance. I was online exactly before the maintenance and as soon as it ended. The problem started immediately.
It's on Square's end.(0)
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04-25-2015 08:40 AM #3Player
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There are 5 ISP's that feed all the data to Ormuco, SE's ISP. Not one of those ISP's has more than 4 routes specifically into Montreal...some only have 2 or 3. There are north of 40,000 ISP's in the world.
Originally Posted by Spiroth
Basically, we are all getting crammed into some narrow pipes along the way, and they can get congested at anytime for a long list of reasons. As we become more and more dependent on the internet for so many things, it just gets worse and worse. Note that it's not just the game traffic you are contending with--financial and other business related traffic, facebook and twitter, our phones, our TV... everything is digital now and takes a slice of the bandwidth throughout all markets you travel through on the way to Ormuco in Montreal. Not uncommon for a household with streamers/gamers to consume a DVD's worth of data (4.38Gigabytes) per day, and most of that gets packed into a short window during primetime. Bottlenecks and failures occur sometimes with no warning whatsoever, and they are becoming more and more frequent as people use it more and more.
Edit:
For a bit of a visual, here is a trace to the IP I have been using for Midgard lately:
Notice the big latency spike at hop 5 as I am coming through the Charlotte, NC area. Notice that it happens again just as I am coming into Montreal at hop 13. Latency spikes stack. Any hiccups along this route can be tied into something going on in Charlotte, and have virtually nothing to do with the servers in Montreal--I have to go through Charlotte on my way to Montreal on this path. Note I just got flipped to Cogent...I was on TATA when I looked at it just a few nights ago. SE didn't change this... my ISP did.Code:C:\Windows\System32>tracert 199.91.189.31 Tracing route to 199.91.189.31 over a maximum of 30 hops 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms LPTSRV [10.10.100.1] 2 17 ms 17 ms 21 ms cpe-75-176-160-1.sc.res.rr.com [75.176.160.1] 3 31 ms 32 ms 31 ms cpe-024-031-198-009.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.9] 4 20 ms 19 ms 20 ms 24.31.196.212 5 125 ms 125 ms 115 ms be33.chrcnctr01r.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.182] 6 30 ms 29 ms 30 ms bu-ether24.atlngamq46w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [107.14.19.18] 7 24 ms 26 ms 25 ms 0.ae2.pr0.atl20.tbone.rr.com [107.14.19.11] 8 25 ms 26 ms 27 ms te0-0-0-10.ccr21.atl02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.12.109] 9 28 ms 28 ms 29 ms be2050.ccr41.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.0.165] 10 35 ms 34 ms 38 ms be2168.ccr21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.94] 11 42 ms 39 ms 41 ms be2148.ccr41.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.118] 12 44 ms 45 ms 45 ms be2106.ccr21.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.50] 13 185 ms 193 ms 207 ms be2088.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.17] 14 63 ms 63 ms 65 ms 38.122.42.34 15 47 ms 47 ms 49 ms 192.34.76.10 16 50 ms 51 ms 50 ms 199.91.189.242 17 47 ms 48 ms 50 ms 199.91.189.31 Trace complete.
When you call your ISP and they look at your "connection", what they are most likely looking at is your connection to the first or maybe second hop past your local network. They aren't looking at the thousands and thousands of potential routes you may take at any given moment to get to any one of millions of IP addresses worldwide that are hosted on other people's networks. In this case, they would be looking at hop #2 in my trace. They MIGHT look further down the line to the 3rd or 4th hop because they are still in the South Carolina area---but they won't be looking much deeper than that. In this scenario, the problem appears to show up in NORTH Carolina...so that helpdesk employee is not going to see the problem. They are often not authorized/empowered to look much deeper than your localized connectivity issues. This is something that Tier3 support CAN and SHOULD look at...as it is part of their job. Tier3 has the knowledge, access, and tools to conduct a much more thorough investigation into your specific route that is having issues.(0)Last edited by Raist; 04-25-2015 at 08:57 AM.
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04-25-2015 08:51 AM #4Player
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I'm not having issues with other MMO's (GW2, and Wildstar), only with FF14 (the one I really want to play).
Thanks(0)
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04-25-2015 09:09 AM #5Player
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If I remember correctly... they aren't hosted on Ormuco lines in Montreal, or JP-NIC in Tokyo.
Originally Posted by KANNIS
You can't simply expect one service in a different region to behave the same as one in another region. Heck...even just running across town you can run into issues that don't crop up against a server in another country. The internet is a complex web of inter-connected networks. Look at that trace I provided. 8 distinctly separate top-level subnets (network groups) along my path to Midgard. 17 total interconnections along the way--and every single one of them is a potential point of failure along the way.
Oh, and BTW.. you Comcast subscribers may simply be dealing with more issues upstream within the Comcast network again. Think it was certain spots in Missouri last week that had gone completely down and it was flat out knocking out connectivity to certain regions for LOTS of users. Here's a map showing problems reported from downdetector.com:
https://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity
That image is an archived "thumbnail" picture that may get updated periodically as time goes by. The URL above it has more frequently updated data, comments, maps, links to support, etc. The most recent map at the site is actually showing a lot of red splotches where that archived one is still only showing yellow.
You can find more companies tracked at their companies page for people not using Comcast.(0)Last edited by Raist; 04-25-2015 at 09:24 AM.
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04-25-2015 10:09 AM #6Player
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Originally Posted by Raist
I'm sorry, and I'm sure you know your stuff, but you don't understand 2 simple things:
1) I have no idea what you are talking about, I am not knowledgeable in the technical stuff, and I don't want to be either.
2) This is very important. I was online playing FFXIV non stop for almost a week before Wedneday, outside of sleeping (off work due to broken leg). I had zero problems. Have also been playing FFXIV since August 2013 with zero problems. On Wednesday, I am online playing FFXIV, and maintenance happens as I was online. I log in immediately as the servers are back up, and I have this problem immediately from that time since now. It is Square-Enix's fault.(0)
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04-25-2015 03:49 PM #7Player
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I've actually been trying to explain it to you without getting too technical. The internet is highly unstable and a route can simply go down at the drop of a hat for a long list of reasons. If it was SE's fault as you keep saying, then everyone would be suffering at the same time--which is clearly not the case. People would not be staying in-game for hours upon hours with absolutely no issues if that were the case (I just spent over 6 hours farting around myself in fact, even with my latency spikes around Charlotte).
Originally Posted by Spiroth
Every online game suffers from these symptoms at one time or another for players from different regions at different times. You can google popular online games and phrases like "high latency" or "high packet loss" and get hits on stories about people experiencing the very things you guys are dealing with here. It's nothing new... been fighting it myself since 1996. Granted, there have been times where we did indeed find issues client or server side, but the vast majority of times it was problems with a segment between the two--which was always resolved through my ISP, and not the company at the other end of the connection.
Traffic on the internet ebbs and flows just like traffic on the highway. And just like the way a major accident or big construction project on the interstate can completely knacker up people's commute through an area, the same thing happens with the internet. Look at the outage map thumbnail pic and the downdetector status page for Comcast I linked to earlier. The more current map at that status page shows an even more focused view of specific areas for Comcast that are having problems. If you are getting routed through there--you may very well be getting caught up in one of those traffic jam scenarios and suffering from delayed packets, or even worse: dropped packets. Either of those problems can cause dropped connections if it is bad enough.
It is a known problem with the infrastructure across North America...it's a dirty little secret the industry has been trying to hide for quite some time now. They grossly oversold local markets without upgrading their upstream bandwidth to properly support all the ramped up bandwidth they've been selling us. In 20 years, the norm has gone from 1.5mb/s up to 20mb/s, but the upstream bandwidth has not increased proportionally and we now have massive choking points at the major exchanges across the continent.
It is a problem that our ISP's have collectively created through negligence over the years, and it is up to them to remedy it. You pay them for their service, and they are simply dropping the ball. Need to hold them accountable for it.
Edit: Just pasting in something for a better visual of what I'm talking about. These are outage maps for various services tracked at downdetector. Notice how they can show problems in roughly the same regions. Traffic jams may be in full effect, possibly impacting everyone coming through those areas until the ISP's route people around the congestion.
XBL - https://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live
PSN - https://downdetector.com/status/playstation-network
Call of Duty - https://downdetector.com/status/call-of-duty
Time Warner Cable - https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable
Comcast - https://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity
AT&T - https://downdetector.com/status/att
(0)Last edited by Raist; 04-25-2015 at 04:18 PM.
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04-25-2015 07:36 PM #8Player
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Originally Posted by Raist
I've actually been trying to explain it to you without getting too technical. The internet is highly unstable and a route can simply go down at the drop of a hat for a long list of reasons. If it was SE's fault as you keep saying, then everyone would be suffering at the same time--which is clearly not the case. People would not be staying in-game for hours upon hours with absolutely no issues if that were the case (I just spent over 6 hours farting around myself in fact, even with my latency spikes around Charlotte).
Every online game suffers from these symptoms at one time or another for players from different regions at different times. You can google popular online games and phrases like "high latency" or "high packet loss" and get hits on stories about people experiencing the very things you guys are dealing with here. It's nothing new... been fighting it myself since 1996. Granted, there have been times where we did indeed find issues client or server side, but the vast majority of times it was problems with a segment between the two--which was always resolved through my ISP, and not the company at the other end of the connection.
Traffic on the internet ebbs and flows just like traffic on the highway. And just like the way a major accident or big construction project on the interstate can completely knacker up people's commute through an area, the same thing happens with the internet. Look at the outage map thumbnail pic and the downdetector status page for Comcast I linked to earlier. The more current map at that status page shows an even more focused view of specific areas for Comcast that are having problems. If you are getting routed through there--you may very well be getting caught up in one of those traffic jam scenarios and suffering from delayed packets, or even worse: dropped packets. Either of those problems can cause dropped connections if it is bad enough.
It is a known problem with the infrastructure across North America...it's a dirty little secret the industry has been trying to hide for quite some time now. They grossly oversold local markets without upgrading their upstream bandwidth to properly support all the ramped up bandwidth they've been selling us. In 20 years, the norm has gone from 1.5mb/s up to 20mb/s, but the upstream bandwidth has not increased proportionally and we now have massive choking points at the major exchanges across the continent.
It is a problem that our ISP's have collectively created through negligence over the years, and it is up to them to remedy it. You pay them for their service, and they are simply dropping the ball. Need to hold them accountable for it.
Edit: Just pasting in something for a better visual of what I'm talking about. These are outage maps for various services tracked at downdetector. Notice how they can show problems in roughly the same regions. Traffic jams may be in full effect, possibly impacting everyone coming through those areas until the ISP's route people around the congestion.
XBL - https://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live
PSN - https://downdetector.com/status/playstation-network
Call of Duty - https://downdetector.com/status/call-of-duty
Time Warner Cable - https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable
Comcast - https://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity
AT&T - https://downdetector.com/status/att
Again, you didn't read my number 2.
It's not a "hiccup". Game is constantly unplayable, 100% of the time, taking effect the moment the last maintenance ended. Immediately at that point. I was online at that exact moment and witnessed it.
It's Square-Enix. Whatever they did, whatever they maintenanced, whatever switch they pressed, Ii want it unmaintenanced, unpressed, and the performance of version of the game that I had pre Wednesday.(0)
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04-26-2015 12:52 AM #9Player
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no.. I read it, that's why I tried providing an analogy you might be able to grasp since you don't seem to be digesting how things work on the internet. I'm not just blowing smoke here. This information has been posted here time and time again...and people have posted back that they found issues and got it resolved. For whatever reason you are just not seeing the logic and insist on blaming SE for the problem without even considering any other possibility for what may be at fault here. Let's see if we can simplify it even further for you.
Ever been in an accident that rendered your car undrivable? Or maybe there was a mechanical failure, dead battery, or you got a flat tire? You had to first identify the problem, than go through the process necessary to get it fixed before you could drive it again.
Ever suffered a power outage because of a bad storm or maybe an accident took out a telephone pole or a transformer simply blew because it was old and worn out? You either had to contact the power company to report the outage, and/or had to wait for someone to inspect/repair the downed line/pole before your power was restored.
The same exact principles apply to the internet. When you have 17 potential points of failure on your path to the server, any one of those can go tits up at any given moment, for a host of sometimes bizarre reasons. When you have millions of people cramming themselves into narrow corridors on the internet, sh!t happens with absolutely no warning sometimes. Though, some of it is somewhat predictable... like when March Madness is in full effect, or the World Cup, or any other major entertainment event is pending you can expect all that extra streaming bandwidth to wreak havoc in specific corridors. Then there are these script jockies like Lizard Squad and Anonymous that like to launch attacks on servers to make statements, often announcing them publicly (they were monkeying with PSN last week, btw). You can also have a major storm system moving through an area so you might expect some communication disruptions throughout that region. Ever see the power companies bring in extra trucks and techs when hurricanes and tornadoes are in season?
It's kind of the same thing here--your ISP may simply need to get more proactive in detecting and managing the congestion. It is a fairly simple thing to check for...either you can do it yourself or your ISP should be willing to check it for you. All you need is a valid IP for the service you are having issues with, and run some traces and such to see if there's anything out of sorts along the route. They may even be able to simply monitor your router/modem to capture where you are connecting while playing and take things from there. They have tools to detect and repair these kinds of problems, but you need to bring in the right people (Tier3), and if you can provide decent information (like a trace report) it helps support your case and prods them in to action much faster. Here's an article from Blizzard about doing some of this basic testing for their games:
https://us.battle.net/support/en/art...g-a-traceroute
There are many more articles like this out there... because it is a known problem that is frequently checked when these issues come up. I just like to post that one because it also provides server addresses for their games that you can also run tests against for a comparison. You can get the IP of your world service by running netstat or resmon once you are logged fully into the game, or you can test against the lobby servers by their DNS names (note that some of the lobby servers may change once the EU servers go online):
Canada
neolobby02.ffxiv.com
neolobby04.ffxiv.com
neolobby06.ffxiv.com
Japan
neolobby01.ffxiv.com
neolobby03.ffxiv.com
neolobby05.ffxiv.com
Frontier server that the launcher connects to:
frontier.ffxiv.com
Patch/version manager:
patch-gamever.ffxiv.com
Secure login server:
secure.square-enix.com
All of those addresses are embedded in the executable files, and if your ISP monitors your connections throughout login and gameplay, they should see you hitting some of those. Or, you could just provide them the list up front to do testing against if you aren't willing to do any of the legwork to prod them along. Unfortunately, some of them have a very laissez-faire approach to their customer service and you need to push them to take action. Generating some of these reports and submitting them is often an effective way to push them into taking action--but you may need to demand to speak to a supervisor or to get transferred specifically to Tier3 support before you get someone actually willing to look at the data.
The points are, there are known issues with congestion across the internet that can just crop up seemingly out of nowhere at any given time. Sometimes, they just refuse to clear up on their own and you need to bring it to someone's attention to get it resolved in a more timely fashion. There are simple tests that can be run either by yourself or your ISP to confirm it. And yes... these things ARE the responsibility of your ISP to detect and correct for you--and not SE. In fact, in much of these cases, SE is virtually powerless to do anything about it. You are the the one with the binding agreement with your ISP, who in turn has the binding agreements with their routing partners. You need to hold the ISP accountable to test and maintain the stability of the service you are paying them to provide you, not SE.
Now, if you've gone through the motions and confirmed your route to the server is stable enough, then you can move on to the less common problems. Local security, changes in your system that may have injected a new problem (not uncommon for Windows or other software updates to cause problems...Microsoft, McAfee, Avast, AVG...many companies suffer this problem), a failing router that just can't effectively manage two other people streaming to a set-top box while you are playing, corrupted data because your game crashed unexpectedly (could apply server-side as well), and so and so and so forth. You may in fact find everything is fine leading up to the server, in which case you would need to open a formal ticket with SE at the support portal for a proper investigation. This is a user-to-user support forum, and not for requesting support directly from SE (read the sticky welcoming you to this forum for clarification on that point). We are simply players trying to help other players understand and rectify issues based on our past experiences.
But you are just digging in the heals and dumping everything on SE and not willing to entertain the possibility that it might be something else at fault. Things that are far more commonly found to be the sources of instability. If you aren't willing to take the time to try to flush out the more common problems, then you may simply be SOL until it magically resolves itself somewhere down the line because someone else eventually took their time to track down a potential source for the problem and got the proper people to look into things.
The choice is yours... try to do something about it yourself, or sit on your duff and wait it out.(0)Last edited by Raist; 04-26-2015 at 01:06 AM.
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