SICK OF THE LAG FEST

[Iudicium]

Raist, can you please make a guide for what you're talking about? I've seen your posts in numerous threads, always saying the same thing. I don't doubt that others besides myself don't know how to diagnose and tests our connections as you do (specifically, in reference to SE's servers). I tried to contact my ISP (Rogers) about this issue and even they don't have a clue what I'm talking about when I mention things like "tier/level 3" and so forth.

All they can tell me is that it looks fine on their end. All I can observe, as a user, is that I didn't have these problems until 2.4 and they have persisted since. Specifically, lag spikes in instances and near constant 90Ks in FL.

[Raist]

Raist, can you please make a guide for what you're talking about? I've seen your posts in numerous threads, always saying the same thing. I don't doubt that others besides myself don't know how to diagnose and tests our connections as you do (specifically, in reference to SE's servers). I tried to contact my ISP (Rogers) about this issue and even they don't have a clue what I'm talking about when I mention things like "tier/level 3" and so forth.

All they can tell me is that it looks fine on their end. All I can observe, as a user, is that I didn't have these problems until 2.4 and they have persisted since. Specifically, lag spikes in instances and near constant 90Ks in FL.

There's lots of them that have already been put up... both on these forums and elsewhere. Will just link to some that have been put up by other services to get you going. These describe using Tracert (also called traceroute in other systems, but it's basically the same tool, process, and result). There are also GUI based tools that can graph a nice visual of your routing/connection over time like WinMTR or VizualRoute and such...but this is the old-school way of doing things, and often the preferred method for a lot of IT folks simply because it is the most consistent across different operating systems. You can generate nearly identical reports in nearly all manner of systems be that on PC, MAC, Linux/Unix, terminalling into a router/server, or even on a really old dinosaur still running DOS or AS400.

Notice that some guides out there will give you commands that dump the results to a text file. Most the time the approach taken for doing this will not display the results on your screen and you will have to open that text file to see them. If you don't append the folder/path in your command it will just display the results on screen. If you right-click in the DOS window, you can click "Select All" to highlight all text, or you can select "Mark" to click/drag to highlight specific text. Once text is highlighted, pressing your <ENTER> key will copy all the highlighted text to clipboard so you can paste it into notepad or an email.

http://blog.iweb.com/en/2009/09/how-...-osx/3111.html
This is a short and simple post from iweb. Yes... the same iweb that hosts the EIDOS websites amongst many others, and also provides internet and peering services in some areas.

http://www.liquidweb.com/kb/how-to-use-traceroute/
(another web hosting company, another one that does a lot of different things like iweb)

https://us.battle.net/support/en/art...g-a-traceroute
This one is from Blizzard. Including this mainly because it also includes a list of server addresses for their games (not just WoW, but also Starcraft, and Diablo 3--and also for different countries). People can also run tests against some of these servers for a comparison.

Providing tests to multiple, established, popular services that may also be exhibiting similar issues can be a very compelling argument for getting escalation to a higher support tier with your ISP. So you will want to test other things besides FFXIV... other game servers, things like google/youtube, twitch.tv, etc. can help shed more light on the situation. Note that when submitting and/or going over this information with your ISP, you want to be dealing with their Tier3 support. Some may not use that generic term, but may instead refer to them as engineering and such--basically, you want someone higher up than the first group that answers the phone when you call the local or 800 number. If they have a forum or a support email contact at their website, you may find you cut through a lot of the red tape right away, but if you are stuck with using the phone you may have to demand to speak to their supervisor if they give you the run-around or play dumb. They ALL have a higher tier than that helpdesk, and it's not uncommon for there to be a tier higher than that. You may have to push to higher tiers a couple times before you get someone who will actually take action--but you should eventually hit one.


When testing for XIV, you want to make sure to use the IP your client is actually using (the ones posted at different sites aren't always accurate). To get the actual IP your client is using, while in the command prompt window you can simply run netstat after you've been logged fully into the game for a little bit. It may return some idle connections--you want to look at the established connections, as they are the ones in use. The servers in Canada start with 199, and most of the ones in Japan start with 124 (there are other subnets out there owned by SE, but the world servers are hosted on IP's starting with 124). You can also get this IP from various Windows tools like Resource Monitor (resmon from the search/run) by looking in the network and/or TCP sections).

Some ISP's may also want a pathping result for more detailed information--the process is the same, you just type the word "pathping" instead of "tracert". By default in Windows it pings each hop 100 times, so it can take quite a while to finish. You can also simply use "ping" for a quick snapshot just to test generic stability, but the default setting only does 4 pings and you often need about a dozen or more to capture the spikes. You can insert a counter with the -n switch like this:

ping -n 25 neolobby02.ffxiv.com

Running that will ping one of the lobby servers (currently 199.91.189.74) 25 times.

Basically what you are looking for in any of these are two specific signs: a case where the same hop exhibits either a very wide variance in response times, or an intermittent * result (means it took more than 2 seconds to respond and it stopped waiting for the response, basically it dropped the packet). A consistent triple star event typically means that either routing rules are discarding the tool's ICMP ECHO request (for various security/stability reasons), or security is denying you access. It can also mean that node has gone down as well if it gets stuck there and gives nothing but *'s until the test finishes. But... when a hop sometimes *'s out and then responds at other times, that is pretty much a dead giveaway that there are congestion issues (or possibly a flood attack is in progress).


It is important to remember that internet usage is not a constant thing. It is full of ebbs and flows, but that also means it runs on a pattern for a given region where it will be clear at times and congested at others and we can track this pattern over time. You may get a lot more traction if you can capture results both while things are good and bad. This is a very clear indication that they have an issue with their utilization (ie: congestion) that needs to be addressed. So many providers have been squeaking by with their "up to XX speed" phrasing to skirt around their responsibility for the slow downs during peak usage hours--but that just doesn't cut it now. For many it isn't a difference of 5Mb during peak times and 10mb in off-peak... for some it goes from a creep to a crawl and becomes virtually unusable at times. We NEED to capture these exceptions and push them to address the problems or it will just get worse and worse. They've been getting away with it for nearly 2 decades now... enough is enough.

[DarkkenMoneybags]

So I contacted TWC for the 11th time and finally got a tier3 tech on the phone. I was straightforward on this lag issue I provided him with WoW, FFXIV, Destiny servers & Netflix pings and trace routes. He starts off after seeing the test results on his end telling me I have a cable leakage coming from somewhere in my apartment or the outside box. He is sending out a Tech Specialist saying he will have to replace wire/coaxial ports and/or rebuild/reconfigure the outside cable box. Hopefully this fixes my issue.

[Zephyr-Umbra]

It's disappointing the game is having these issues, i only recently resumed playing and i noticed the last couple days i've been having these periods of delay, for instance attacking a mob and my attack animation going off, but the damage not counting or showing until like 15 seconds after, and this goes for all skills and damage on my end, yet i still take damage real time from mobs, last night after work this same thing happened to me for like 20 minutes and then suddenly worked perfectly. I mean i only resubbed on like Sunday night but i've already had two or three instances of this happening. And i know it's definitely not my connection, i have 40mb down on average and 5 mb up on average. However my issues seem minimal in comparison to some of the others posting here. I hope SE gets on top of this.

[AniKai]

ping -n 25 neolobby02.ffxiv.com

Just did that... and holy moly...

--- neolobby02.ffxiv.com ping statistics ---
39 packets transmitted, 25 received, 35% packet loss, time 42785ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 127.863/130.159/133.846/1.529 ms

Whereas for google.com (and pretty much everywhere else)

--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
74 packets transmitted, 74 received, 0% packet loss, time 73105ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 16.671/18.311/26.705/1.639 ms

:O !!!

[Roy_M]

I m having huge lag spikes 3 days ago my ISP is "suppose" to call me today to see what s going on :/

[Soots]

Been having 90k errors all day since yesterday. I tried using that ping test and typically my results are fine until the request times out multiple times when i begin to D/C.

[Darksummoner198]

Hello. Please reframe of using language such as those words please might end up with something more then just Lag!.

[Kiyyto]

Who are you, the word police?

You are far more offensive than anything anyone else has done.

[Faelandaea]

LOL Kiyyto I am glad you understood to reply to that because I couldn't even understand what Dark said to even be a sentence. must have been Google translate at it's worst or something

AniKai - what i am seeing on your pings is weird. You do have a packet loss on the game server, but your ping times to Google are almost double. On that far right number, the lower the better. 42,785 ms to FFXIV vs. 73,105 ms to Google - huge difference. And really to any server in the world your highest ping times even with lag should be down in the lower hundreds. I just pinged Google and my time is 34 ms. FFXIV gave me an average of 168 ms. If pinging Google is yielding a crazy ping time like 73,000 +, there are some serious ISp issues going on there and your ISP telling you that nothing is wrong is pure BS - they need to fix the internet service you are paying for.

//EDIT// - To correct spelling and grammar because, well, my typing sucks.