Seriously

[worldofneil]

There is a large portion of the player base who are experiencing difficulties.

Large proportion... based on what? A few hundred people posting on the forums? Compared the hundreds of thousands playing the game?

It's pretty easy to assume that the forums in general are a vast minority of the general player population. Most players just play the game (problems or not), and never go further.

Perhaps, but we don't know that for sure. All we (and SE for that matter) can base anything on is actual data. If other people have this problem and aren't complaining in the correct places, it can't be that big of a deal to them.

Can you at least agree that the currently most reported issue on the forums right now is lag/network connection related (and by a pretty decent margin)?

Nope I agree completely, but...

If you can agree it's the hottest issue reported by paying customers, can you agree that it's probably something SE should prioritize in trying to resolve?

They can't resolve something they can't fix. Whether people like to hear it or not, SE don't have control the Internet and how your traffic to them is routed. We already know from other threads that certain ISPs do filter traffic (older BT Internet contracts in the UK for example) so even if the ISP says the traffic isn't filtered, that isn't necessarily true (the person actually talking to customers, isn't the person in charge of traffic routing, they're just giving you the information as they've been told which may/may not be up to date).

Even if the traffic isn't being filtered, that doesn't mean it isn't somewhere else on route either as it'll have to pass through multiple networks to get to SE. People keep posting traceroutes to show their path to SE, but all that shows is the path, it's not a good guide to the actual flow of data. The ICMP ping times are a completely different protocol to the TCP/UDP packets that the game uses when playing. ICMP traffic is rarely filtered because by design it's there for diagnostic purposes, TCP/UDP traffic are both filtered all the time.

Which brings me on to:

it also wouldn't hurt to have some type of communications to their customer base about hot issues they are looking at.

I will completely agree that SE's support team is pretty sucky, I myself have a ticket open from JULY where I've been trying to update an email address because it won't change it on the website and even though I have access to old and new emails so could easily verify with them, they bounced it around different departments for a while and eventually it got sidelined and nothing has happened with it for a few months now so I've given up in it ever getting resolved. Given the complaints on the forums about support it seems clear that newer tickets are still having the same lack of "support" too.

But in this whole "lag" issue, I can actually understand their silence. They cannot make a statement addressing the lag without also accepting blame for it. Their original response about it was that they understood that some players were having problems and they'd try and resolve it with Internet providers. Well I have no idea if they've done that or not, but that's all they can do, give the ISP as much information as they want, it's still up to the ISP to change it and if the filtering issues are happening somewhere else up the line, it might be out of the ISPs control then anyway (and/or they won't care as it's too much hassle by this point).

The only thing SE could realistically do would be to either throw a lot of money at major Internet backbones around the world to prioritise their traffic (not even sure they'd do that) or create multiple data centres around the world to minimise the network traffic, but ignoring the fact that the cost would be insane compared to the percentage of people with a problem (yep I went back to that again), even if they magically did that, it'd be a complete nightmare for everyone to change worlds and transfer onto local servers.

Unless of course you really believe that everyone is lying about this problem, or you somehow think it's user error.

Nope I do believe it's a problem, I've only ever been trying to point out two things:

1) The percentage of people affected doesn't appear to be as big as people are making out (which if I'm wrong I apologise, but unless there's some actual evidence what am I supposed to think?). If there are considerably more people, then where are they?

2) SE doesn't control the Internet, they can't magically reroute your traffic.

worldofneil - you do make me laugh. If you took your assumptions and math workings.....then not one single issue would be a problem as the percentage would be so small.

Again, I never said this wasn't an actual problem, just that people are overexagerating the size of it.

The solution here seems clear, all the people that apparently have this problem, but haven't posted on the forums, tell them to get on here and post.

Not would you be able to throw it at me with a "told you so", but it'd demonstrate to SE the problem is bigger than it currently looks (although not sure they'd consider the subscription costs of those people worth the cost of local data centres etc as the game has already cost them a fortune with 1.0, but you never know...). They're certainly not going to do anything drastic like that without a lot more people though!