Quote Originally Posted by Remyogic View Post

What they DO state is that they have passed on the data to their upstream ISP to investigate what the issue MAY be and if there is a solution. NOT that the issue IS definitely NTT. HUGE difference.

Also, I'm not ignorant to the fact that you have contacted your ISP multiple times, what I'm (apparently) ignorant to is how if your Internet Service Provider can't fix your Internet Service, that then means SE is responsible?
This is where I point out that "everyone must be having problems, so someone must already be aware of it" groupthink tends to rear it's ugly head. I will tell you point blank that 1 person reporting a problem is "the user", 100 users reporting the same problem is probably worth investigating. Usually at that point you still have to push back to get more info other than "your stuff is broken" useless type of reports.

That's why SE asks for traceroutes. Usually the people reporting the problem will be in the same geographic area or share the same ISP from the geographic area (this happens a lot in ad management, and in "why does your website take so long to load" issues too.) That then narrows things down to:
1. What is the least common denominator. This will almost certainly be the transit peering point. But who's side it's on is not something that can be figured out from end users since some routing will switch based on cost, and some based on latency (eg VoIP and streaming gets higher technical priorities, and "bulk" data like ftp, non-SSL http, and filesharing apps get sent to the bottom.

2. Not everything is directly the ISP.

Consider two different scenarios. One where one ISP sent out a batch of faulty equipment, and one where the electrical service company was doing maintenance.

In the case of the ISP's faulty equipment, that ALSO tends to be geographically situated. So for some reason, say, UPnP might be dropped once the devices fill up their NAT table. That might only affect a dozen or so people across several areas that were served by the same warehouse. But because they all did the traceroute and saw the same problem, immediately they decided the problem can't be their equipment, must be the other guy.

In the case of the electric company doing maintenance, they tend to always do maintenance when the least amount of people will be affected unless it's going to affect everyone equally, then they just do it during business hours. Anyway regardless , perhaps said electrical company was doing work all along a 50 mile stretch where fiber is laid and one of them cut the fiber. So now comcast or whoever's fiber that is, goes from having 100% capacity in a region to 25%, as their customers get routed around the damage and go via another route. This results in not affecting very much during midnight-6am, but 8am rolls around and peoples cat videos aren't loading and it's the ISP's fault. The ISP would need to figure out who cut the fiber, and so forth. In larger cities, an electrical fire can also blow through a few million dollars worth of equipment that won't be replaced for a month if there's no local spare.

Now, that said...

3. Most people are incapable, if not incompetent of diagnosing any kind of internet connectivity problem. They get told to reboot their stuff, and it just keeps working for a few more days/weeks.

Hence, when you report a problem, and the tech asks you "did you reboot it?" Don't answer that with a yes/no, answer that with the last time you rebooted it and have them log it. Then every time your game drops, call them up and have them note it again. Often rebooting the modem clears the service log, and thus there is nothing for the ISP to check and it's vital to report problems within minutes. So don't reboot it until the tech tells you to.

Another problem that I've run into. "double routers". NAT only works over a single router. NAT is "Network Address Translation", or basically it was a trick everyone started using around 1997 to share one internet connection with every computer in the house and telling the cable companies to shove it about needing additional outlets (cable companies still charge people for extra outlets, even though there is no extra service cables entering the premises.) If your ISP has provided you with a router. Don't have anything else behind it other than unmanaged switches. The reason is that double-NAT results in traversal problems as UPnP commands only hit the router closes to the PS4/PC/Mac, and not the router that is actually talking to the internet. Most of the time people don't notice a problem until two people try to use the same game behind the same router, then the upstream router only sees one request. I've even seen "session jacking" type of problems come about back when AIM was the IM everyone used, where two people talking behind the router would get responses sent to both machines. Since games only expect their own traffic, they will drop a connection.

But that last scenario is a very specific thing that happened, and I doubt that would result in more than a handful of people actually having that problem unless they are on a shared connection with their landlord/apartment Wifi, who also plays the same game.

SE can only file tickets for connectivity issues on their side. If SE tells NTT and NTT tells Comcast, Comcast doesn't know who reported the initial problem unless the Comcast customer also reported it to their ISP. So due diligence, if you report the problem to SE, also report it to your ISP. As customers, most of us have no pull with NTT, so that is something only SE can do.