Yoshi P addresses lag. Its time to deliever...

[ReplicaX]

Level3 is a pain in the backside to deal with. Yes, SE can push from their end (and I suspect they are) but it's going to take a lot of hoping and praying that Level3 actually does anything.

Yes they are and so is Cogent. I have personal experience dealing with both managing a Top 10 popular game server. With allotted bandwidth to handle high polling/tick rates. They both are horrible companies to deal with.

[Autymnfyres]

Yes they are and so is Cogent. I have personal experience dealing with both managing a Top 10 popular game server. With allotted bandwidth to handle high polling/tick rates. They both are horrible companies to deal with.

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I appreciate ReplicaX and some of the other posters here who take the time to share their own tech knowledge and personal experiences about this very frustrating topic. Really, it has helped a bit. However, others muddy up the forum with general overall defensive posts for SE that in no way help anyone who IS, HAS or CONTINUES to deal with the lag problem.

Now - since we've been 'properly educated' by some other caring FFXIV ARR forum gamers -- tell me this please:

Are these two companies - Level3 and Ormuco - the ONLY ones available for SE to contract with for this substandard service? Is there a monopoly or can SE in fact do what other powerful, product-oriented companies do IF they care about their end-product customer? Can SE present a simple consequence of contractual obligation and determine they will take THEIR business elsewhere?

Or is it that they are actually completely knowledgeable about the lag issue (and they are since we have so many threads in this forum and over in Tech), and they have decided NOT to address it? There is no 'they are WORKING on it'. If they cannot give we, their customers absolutely ANY information to provide a reasonable response to our not being able to play their game regularly without undue interruption, then they are not being responsible to US.

Regardless of whether the 'problems' may well take a long time to 'fix' - we'd like to know and have a timeframe, a reasonable timeframe so we can make our gaming decisions. Of course there are all sorts of variables in the situation. And most of our players are not demanding "FIX IT NOW THIS INSTANT", though that would be the most satisfying.

What I'd like to know is whether the North American subscriber population (*although I know it happens to players elsewhere as well...) has anything to look positively about in the reasonably near-future. Are there any forth-coming actions by SE that will provide an avenue for decent FFXIV ARR gaming within the parameters that other major mmo companies provide for North American gaming customers for the majority of the time during their subscriptions. Perhaps the North American subscriber base is not monetarily worth addressing the fix. I'm fairly certain most companies about to put out a name brand product in a major consumer market do a myriad of pre-production research projects with which, technological concerns are most definitely included for the geographic area concerned.

Are there temporary, short -term tech problems when gaming in most mmo's - I'd say I have experienced that. But those types of problems are either short-lived (a week or two...) or the communication from the company is forthcoming. This includes other issues as well such as RMT - which as an aside, apparently is another thing that SE 'can't help', cannot efficiently stop. I've heard so many explanations, descriptions, conspiracy theories and discussions about the gold sellers in these game forums, ingame and in real life conversations that I'm tired of. Yes, there are particular situations unique to each mmo gaming company related to the gold selling. However, if the other PAID subscription base competing games can manage to keep it at a low level of annoyance - and THEY DO, then SE should be held to the same bar. Period.

[Clavaat]

-snip-

In regards to your point about other Data Solutions/CDNs: I don't pretend to know exactly what their contract states, however the game is only 5ish months old. If SE signed a contract with Ormuco, it is certainly longer than this, so no they cannot work with anyone else. That being said, up until this issue, neither Ormuco nor Level-3 were causing any issues. SE may be able to threaten a breach in contract case and sue them if this goes beyond a specified amount of time, but we have no way of knowing what that is (see my post about workflow conditions in tech).

As ReplicaX stated, this started occurring when SE increased the polling rate. This is what everyone wanted and, in theory, was an improvement on the system. However, bugs like this occur, as Level-3 could handle the upgrade. The only guarantee I can give you that they are working on it is money: SE would -not- want to bleed money by paying for what they are not getting out of Ormuco's communications, and thusly, Level-3's. FFXIV has pulled SE out of sheer bankruptcy into profits, and they would not squander that by losing customers because of someone else's actions. That being said, SE doesn't have a team to go out and fix a Data Solutions issue, so they have to wait for Ormuco/Level-3 to find the problem and fix it, or rollback to 0.3s polling which would anger people again.

[Yukiko]

In regards to your point about other Data Solutions/CDNs: I don't pretend to know exactly what their contract states, however the game is only 5ish months old. If SE signed a contract with Ormuco, it is certainly longer than this, so no they cannot work with anyone else. That being said, up until this issue, neither Ormuco nor Level-3 were causing any issues. SE may be able to threaten a breach in contract case and sue them if this goes beyond a specified amount of time, but we have no way of knowing what that is (see my post about workflow conditions in tech).

^this!

The solution is to change game mechanics, even just temporary, but its been refused from SE because content will become incredible easy!

[ReplicaX]

As ReplicaX stated, this started occurring when SE increased the polling rate. This is what everyone wanted and, in theory, was an improvement on the system. However, bugs like this occur, as Level-3 could handle the upgrade.

It would suck if the polling rate had to be rolled back as it has helped many players.

Also to make something clear on my previous post for folks. Changing the polling rate on the server maybe a simple command or change in code. However, its affects are no easy task to balance out the best result. Which is why SE has been monitoring server performance and likely using other collection methods.

[Autymnfyres]

Thanks Clavaat. I wonder if you or anyone surmises that SE might actually had or did any testing/information as to what 'might' happen if/when they did the 0.3s change? I find it absolutely unbelievable that they had no inkling at all of the issues that would occur.

If in fact they didn't -- they just went ahead and did a little 'adjusting' without firm data or if they saw in the very next few weeks information which would provide that data -- why not change it back? Because of some forum POLLS????

[Tiggy]

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Are these two companies - Level3 and Ormuco - the ONLY ones available for SE to contract with for this substandard service? Is there a monopoly or can SE in fact do what other powerful, product-oriented companies do IF they care about their end-product customer? Can SE present a simple consequence of contractual obligation and determine they will take THEIR business elsewhere?

The internet is a large system, and many of the individual pieces are very localized and expensive. In most cases there may only be one company nearby that you can work with. Much in the same way most people only have 1 cable provider to choose from in order to get a cable modem. It is very possible there is a local monopoly and they simply don't have a choice. This would mean their only recourse would be to move the servers to some other location in the world. This would be costly in both time and money.

Or is it that they are actually completely knowledgeable about the lag issue (and they are since we have so many threads in this forum and over in Tech), and they have decided NOT to address it? There is no 'they are WORKING on it'. If they cannot give we, their customers absolutely ANY information to provide a reasonable response to our not being able to play their game regularly without undue interruption, then they are not being responsible to US.

Regardless of whether the 'problems' may well take a long time to 'fix' - we'd like to know and have a timeframe, a reasonable timeframe so we can make our gaming decisions. Of course there are all sorts of variables in the situation. And most of our players are not demanding "FIX IT NOW THIS INSTANT", though that would be the most satisfying.

It isn't likely they are ignoring it. It is more likely that SE is contractually obligated to keep this information between just themselves and the companies involved. It's a public relations issue that tends to be in these contracts. That means we won't hear anything about it, and one day it will probably just start working better.

RMT - which as an aside, apparently is another thing that SE 'can't help', cannot efficiently stop.

On Balmung it has improved drastically over what it was near launch. One tell every 3 days isn't nearly as bad as the ten I used to get when I ported to a town.

All in all there isn't much they can probably tell us. We've seen them take the positional update and improve it to .1 so we can clearly say that we know they are aware of the problem. We just need some patience in waiting for the companies to fix their networks. SE themselves can only push those companies but so hard. In the end SE isn't the one that actually has to fix the problem, and that's going to cause unknown delays in getting it resolved.

[Seif]

Movenent prediction is a real thing look it up. Causes minor issues with pvp fps games but there's no reason why it wouldn't be perfect for xiv.

[Ed_N_Ants]

What lag ?

[Chichicha]

What lag ?

Where is the Lag ? Square Enix ?