Delay(Titan) for people outside EU/USA/Japan

[fredtma]

I have a 4MB line, dwld 500kb/s uploads 100kb/s.
Now I am not in EU/USA/Japan and my delay is horrendous to say the least.
I play on an EU server and I cannot even do any Ex at all, Titan is the worst, I managed Garuda by pure luck with a good group.
I have played FFXI for years (5 years) and have been with this game since December 2010 and have never missed a payment but I am not getting my money's worth.
This delay I never got in FFXIV 1.0.
If you cannot cater for player outside EU/USA/Japan just say so and I'll stop wasting my time.
This has nothing to do with skills, I know the routine of all the fight almost by heart and not matter even when I avoid an attack I still get hit.

[Kyan]

I am an Australian player, and Saturday 8th of February, I did Titan Hard Mode for the first time. I had been putting it off because of fear of lag/latency/issues, and because I play on PS3. As a White mage, I didn't want to be a liability, and with the vote kick feature, I was doubly scared.

Well, I was surprised at first. I was fine. That is, up until after the heart phase... Then I experienced weird lag? glitches? like I do in Behemoth in CT - plumes and attacks are going off before I even see them on screen, and the animations happen about 2-3 seconds later. Sometimes the plumes didn't even show up on my screen, so I couldn't even see a circle to run out of, at this point.

I will have patience, I am sure that the enjoyment of customers is a high priority, but in the mean time, it is effecting my enjoyment of the game and limiting what I feel comfortable doing.

[Ed_N_Ants]

I'm in the usa and I get the same exact thing I run 30 down and 5 up so it's not my connection... It's actually the server that is the issue and the way that they have the delays set up... People have been talking about this since titan hm came out...

[Krisom]

Hey, Fredtma. The "EU Servers" are located in Canada(Montreal?) along with the NA servers if that explains anything.

[Karnage720]

Doesnt matter how fast your connection is, the lag in this game is crap. I dont understand why.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3295072427 thats my speed and i still lag like crazy

[Asphe]

What matters is your complete chain of connections to the server, regardless of what your ISP says you have. Much of those figures are sales/marketing anyway.

Try doing a continous ping to the datacenter (don't do it forever, just while you're troubleshooting)

NA Data Center 184.107.107.176
JP Data Center 202.67.53.202
EU Data Center 209.130.141.243 (or use the NA one, unless you're far east of Montreal)

When you get 'problems' ingame, it'll show up as a longer ping times (say from 50ms going up to 1000ms range) and packet loss. Long ping times means you're slow in dodging the darn plumes while packet loss means you keep losing connection temporarily at the worst possible time. And those are just the numbers to reach the data center, there will be a slight additional delay to reach the actual servers.

Your PC is fine, FFXIV servers are fine and even the ISP connections serving both are fine... but the connections between those ISPs... that's the problem here and those companies selling 'fast connections' are basically buying better connections which you have to pay for, naturally. Perhaps you can complain to your own ISP (and SE too) so they will improve the connection/peering. This certainly affects our gameplay and their business.

I'm playing via some proxies/VPNs...

Osaka - Tokyo: 75-100ms and usually less.
Singapore - Tokyo: 200-300ms
San Diego - Tokyo: 150-250ms

... then I go to Wisconsin (i.e. Cogent) and it's around 500-2000ms or worse. Note, that if I'm using the Sargatanas server (NA datacenter), my connection gets worse when I move from San Diego to Wichita. As in, it gets WORSE, as I get physically CLOSER to the datacenter. Makes sense doesn't it.... -.- It gets better when I'm in Detroit though, but that's a sacrifice noone should need to make.

None of this is under SE's control. Still, I suppose they could persuade (give money to) certain ISPs to improve things (*cough* SOE -> Cogent *cough*) if enough of us are annoyed enough to post here...

[fredtma]

I am fed up, I hv done all content in this game bar titan & coil5.
I handing in my gloves until they fix the delay, I'll be on FFXIII-3 if you need me

[Raist]

Try doing a continous ping to the datacenter (don't do it forever, just while you're troubleshooting)

NA Data Center 184.107.107.176
JP Data Center 202.67.53.202
EU Data Center 209.130.141.243 (or use the NA one, unless you're far east of Montreal)

Wrong IP's. Not sure where you guys keep getting them from. Guessing it's a blog that was put up during v1.0 or during earlier beta testing. Those are NOT the game server IP's we are currently using. The one listed for the NA datacenter is an EIDOS webserver that hosts sites for the EIDOS game library and forwarders to other SE sites. Ping/nslookup some of the site names if you don't believe me: eidos.com, justcause.com, deusex.com, sleepingdogs.net.

The NA/EU game servers in Canada start with 199, and the JP ones start with 124. You can find your particular IP by loading resmon after logging fully into the game and finding the FFXIV.EXE entry in the networking/TCP sections to see what IP's you are connecting to. Alternatively, you can open a CMD prompt and run the netstat command and look for the 199 and/or 124 IP's with an active connection going when you are fully logged into the game.

[Asphe]

It's the gateway, not the individual game servers.

As you connect to the patcher, then the DC, and so on, you go through a few IPs. Using the gateway just simplifies things. If your connection is screwed up getting to the gateway... then everything else downstream will be messed up already e.g. depending on where you are, the patcher's IP will vary according to the CDN chosen for your IP.

The 3 IPs are for square-enix-montreal.com, eu.square-enix.com & jp.square-enix.com Kinda easier to just remember 3 IPs right?

Sure, you can give Ramuh/124.150.157.36 or Leviathan/199.91.189.21 for say Japan/Canada. Ping the JP/NA IPs above and those two servers. Any difference? That's probably why those 3 IPs are all over the 'net. KISS.

PS Besides, it lets me measure the difference if any, for times when my connection to the server specifically is messed up, yet I can connect to other servers. I'll know if Aegis is having difficulties, but the other servers are fine.

[Raist]

Actually.. 184.107.107.176 isn't used for gameplay anymore... at least not when I've logged in since Beta 4. I tracked the IP's I was hitting in case I needed to whitelist them in my security, and the important ones have always been starting with either 199 or 124. That 184 IP is i-WEB, and is noted as being at a physical location a good 15 minutes across town or something (mapped it out once in another thread), so you may take a considerably different path getting to it. Did you not look at the two different paths I posted earlier in the rubber-banding thread?

Also need to be looking at the proper IP... that IP is for a webserver hosting sites for games in the EIDOS brand, and forwarders for other SE affiliated sites. It's not connected to the FFXIV game servers, physically located in a different section of town, and runs on i-web lines and not Ormuco. So, you aren't getting an accurate indication of your connection to the game servers.

To find the proper IP, open resmon from the run/search line or netstat from a command prompt while you are fully logged into the game and look at your active connections. Resmon will list the ones ffxiv.exe is currently connected too, while netstat with no switches will just list the states of all recent connections that have yet to time-out completely (many may show they are in wait state). What you are looking for are IP's starting with 199 for the servers in Canada and 124 for servers in Japan.

Notice the considerably different paths to both IP's from this laptop.. it's different from the 4th hop forward:

Tracing route to 184.107.107.176 over a maximum of 30 hops	Tracing route to 199.91.189.25 over a maximum of 30 hops
							
  0  G75VXLAP [10.10.100.10]					0  G75VXLAP [10.10.100.10]
  1  LPTSRV [10.10.100.1]					1  LPTSRV [10.10.100.1]
  2  cpe-098-025-064-001.sc.res.rr.com [98.25.64.1]		2  cpe-098-025-064-001.sc.res.rr.com [98.25.64.1]
  3  cpe-024-031-198-005.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.5]		3  cpe-024-031-198-005.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.5]
  4  xe-6-0-0.rlghncpop-rtr1.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.66]	4  xe-7-0-0.rlghncpop-rtr1.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.40]
  5  107.14.19.42						5  107.14.19.44
  6  so-1-1-1.c1.buf00.tbone.rr.com [66.109.1.113]		6  ae-2-0.pr0.dca10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.169]
  7  ix-17-0.tcore2.AEQ-Ashburn.as6453.net [216.6.87.149]	7  te0-16-0-23.ccr41.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.10.209]
  8  if-2-2.tcore1.AEQ-Ashburn.as6453.net [216.6.87.2]		8  be2113.mpd21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.170]
  9  64.86.85.1							9  be2148.ccr21.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.118]
 10  if-10-2.tcore1.TTT-Scarborough.as6453.net [64.86.32.33]	10  be2108.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.134]
 11  if-9-9.tcore1.TNK-Toronto.as6453.net [64.86.33.25]		11  38.122.42.34
 12  if-7-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net [66.198.96.61]	12  192.34.76.10
 13  66.198.96.58						13  199.91.189.242
 14  te7-3.dr9.mtl.iweb.com [67.205.127.214]			14  199.91.189.25
 15  72.55.128.44							
 16  184.107.107.176

For reference, these are the notes I've scribbled about the IP's I've tracked while in the game or getting into the game:

124.150.157.158 SE IP, often in IDLE_WAIT
199.91.189.74 Ormuco (Montreal, 1GB Tier 2, Fiber?)--Lobby? Only see in use before launching (was primary in Beta4)
199.91.189.31 Ormuco, seems to be linked to Midgard somehow now since launch--shifts here when in Duties and such? .74 still seems primary?
199.91.189.25 Ormuco, seems to be current primary for Midgard connection--stopped using .31 after SE revamped clusters? new flow seems to be .74 in lobby, .25 in game.


199.59.148.147 somehow tied to twitter service? (seen when hiting FFXI threads, dig shows Twitter?)
124.150.158.117 seen during sign-on, getting connection errors after updated--new .exe conx blocked, confirmed SE IP, whitelisted as Launcher 1
124.150.157.190 seen again after launching and connection errors after updating...new .exe conx blocked, SE IP confirmed, whitelisted as Launcher 2
124.150.157.126 seen during SE AM signon

embedded in ffxiv.exe:
frontier.ffxiv.com -> 124.150.157.190

Never saw that i-web hosted web server show up at all when logging in or playing the game.

Just out of curiosity, I watched it again just now while logging in. Here's the progression of active connections when I'm getting in-game:

124.150.158.117 at launcher before logging in.
124.150.158.117, 124.150.157.126 when submitting user/pass/token for login.
124.150.158.117 when still in launcher with maintenance notice.
199.91.189.74 connected when hitting Start from Title screen, still only conx active when sitting at Character Select.
199.91.189.74, 199.91.189.25 active when game loading after selecting character (multiple connections to .25 with different port ID's).
199.91.189.25 open with multiple connections on different port ID's while sitting in Wineport on Midgard server. All other IP's had shifted into Idle_Wait and dropped by then.

NEVER was a 184. IP opened... it was ONLY 199 and 124. That is Ormuco in Canada on the 199's and SE's servers in Japan on the 124's. The 184 webserver on i-web's lines was never touched.


And here's a little info gathered on the IP's in question:

http://myip.ms/info/whois/184.107.107.176
"17 websites found on this IP"
Here's a link to the list:
http://myip.ms/browse/sites/1/ipID/1...84.107.107.176

http://myip.ms/info/whois/202.67.53.202
"24 websites found on this IP"
Here's a link to the list:
http://myip.ms/browse/sites/1/ipID/2.../202.67.53.202

http://myip.ms/info/whois/209.130.141.243
"1 live website used this IP (209.130.141.243) Before -
finalfantasyviipc.com (#301,230) used IP on 17 March 2013

It's possible they may pull them in for use in distributing updates, but they do NOT appear to be used for game play. And THAT is what needs to be investigated... the connections affecting game play.