SICK OF THE LAG FEST

[Tom1111]

If you had a bad route to Netflix, it could be the same--there would be millions of customers not affected, but it could be only people from your region/provider that are having problems. If it was your path to PSN or XBL...it could be the same. It could be because of problems in particular regions you are routed through to get to the service and not the service itself.

My netflix works fine, every other game works fine, this game used to work fine, if it stays shit I'll just play something else, I'm not dicking around for a game that i pay to play.

[Raist]

My netflix works fine, every other game works fine, this game used to work fine, if it stays shit I'll just play something else, I'm not dicking around for a game that i pay to play.

Missing the point. How many of those other good services are located in Montreal? You take a specific path to get into Ormuco in Montreal---NONE of their peers have more than 3 pathways in...most only have TWO. A problem in one specific region can knacker up access through a specific corridor, and depending on the nature of the event (like widescale, massive congestion, or severe weather related)--it can affect multiple service providers that are going through that same area. Anything NOT using that bad corridor may be just fine.

This is a problem dealing with the internet service providers that SE has no interaction with...no business dealing, no actionable agreement. It is simply not something SE can address. Our ISP's however have agreements in place that CAN remedy these types of situations---be that to alter the routing to avoid the problem area or work with their routing partner to resolve the issue.

Take a look at a thread that ties into this very scenario that started today:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...002-Disconnect

Appears it was an issue between Comcast and Level3 causing the problem, NOTHING to do with SE--no way for SE to exert influence over a problem between those two companies. The issue was being posted at different sites by the way, for multiple services as it was affecting traffic being routed through one specific corridor out of the south. An area you likely are not getting routed through.

It was an area I currently am not routed through (Marietta, GA and Atlanta), though I am just one state away from where the problem occurred. I sometimes do get routed through Atlanta via Cogent, but I am currently routed northward through Raleigh/Durham by TATA (a change TWC made just yesterday when my modem restarted when I was in WP-HM), so I was unaffected by the outage. But there were people on my same data center and world service that were negatively impacted---because their ISP was trying to route them through there.

The short-term workaround to restore access to the game servers was to use a VPN to alter the routing, avoiding the downed exchange until the route could be corrected.

It should also be noted that AT&T had a downed node last month in Atlanta that knocked out a lot of traffic. Our dealerships lost all access to data for invoicing and such. 17 locations in total had their hands tied for an entire afternoon because of it (took about 5 hours to repair). It wasn't Reynolds that was at fault (our software vender/service)--but AT&T that had the problem, and ONLY AT&T could fix it. About 10 years ago, a similar thing happened in Columbia---a fiber trunk got cut by construction crews. They actually pulled in equipment from the National Guard to help restore service, and it took pretty much all day to do it. It knackered up a LOT of traffic until TWC and ATT got things routed away from Columbia.

[Ash_]

-snip-

Until you rule out the known network issues that have been documented time and time again to be at the very least an important contributing factor and correctable by your ISP and/or their routing partners---you can't just dump it all on SE's shoulders.

Have you at least tried checking the status of your service provider? Some have their own internal page (like Telstra), or you can try one of the tracking sites like the downdetector group here in the US. They have a separate site just for Australia as well, called aussieoutages.com:

https://aussieoutages.com/companies

Just glancing at a handful of services/ISP's there seems to be a consistent issue along mostly the southern and eastern borders, but there are also reports coming from the west coast as well. Not talking exactly backwater towns here either---Sidney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adalaide, to name a few.

-/endsnip-

I spent over 2 hours talking to Telstra's tech support last night and they were absolutely no help whatsoever. I quote "By the way, please be aware that BigPond doesn't guarantee any set Pings times or Latency" from the person I spoke to.

I took this snapshot from pingplotter earlier in the day:


When I was talking to the tech support at Telstra, I had ping plotter running in the background again while talking to them, all those numbers remained consistent except for the last 4 just before Asura's IP; the last 4 (all SE addresses) were reading 100% packet losses. Also of concern is the high jitter next to SE's IP addresses.

Now I do agree there seems to be an issue that Telstra insist doesn't exist. They even tried telling me over twitter that the underwater cable is damaged.. but there is no news regarding any damaged cables. However SE's servers should still never reach 100% packet loss.

And just for the record, this also started happening for me immediately following the emergency maintenance, nothing else affected, not even connections to PSO2's Japan servers are affected. And that game is susceptible to intense lag more than FFXIV.

[Dokkslfar]

Still Kinda new to the game even though I own a copy of v1.0 collectors edition but what ever. Point is you dont care about my history

However reading through a lot of these kinds of post and seeing as when I play during the day the game play is amazing, after 7pm est.... ( usually don't get off of work till later than that) game play is a complete pain. still though found a post that listed several of the "servers" that FFXIV is using and getting these results, does not look like a t3 problem in my case or am I missing something?

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
|_____________Host_____ ___________ - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|---------------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|______Wireless_Broadband_Router.home -___ 0 | 369 | 369 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|__L100.NRFLVA-VFTTP-28.verizon-gni.net -___0 | 369 | 369 | 5 | 9 | 219 | 7 |
|_G0-3-3-2.NRFLVA-LCR-21.verizon-gni.net -___0 | 369 | 369 | 6 | 11 | 32 | 10 |
|___________No response from host -______100 | 73 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|_________0.ae3.BR1.IAD8.ALTER.NET -______0 | 369 | 369 | 23 | 28 | 79 | 24 |
|te0-6-0-14.ccr41.iad02.atlas.cogentco.com -__0 | 369 | 369 | 22 | 26 | 41 | 23 |
|__be2171.ccr41.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com -__0 | 369 | 369 | 22 | 25 | 38 | 24 |
|__be2148.ccr41.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com - __0 | 369 | 369 | 29 | 31 | 44 | 32 |
|__be2106.ccr21.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com -__1 | 361 | 359 | 32 | 34 | 47 | 33 |
|__be2088.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com -_1 | 365 | 364 | 37 | 39 | 54 | 41 |
|________________38.122.42.34 -_________0 | 369 | 369 | 46 | 48 | 60 | 49 |
|________________192.34.76.10 -_________7 | 297 | 279 | 59 | 64 | 156 | 62 |
|_______________199.91.189.242 -________6 | 300 | 283 | 62 | 65 | 80 | 68 |
|________________199.91.189.74 -_______10 | 265 | 239 | 62 | 64 | 76 | 64 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider
So am I missing something or is this not the servers themselves having sever packet loss?

[Raist]

Looks like you have issues right out the gate at your first hop away....response times went from 5 to 219 at your gateway. Not a good sign. Where is that...Virginia?

Further down the route though, you start seeing things get weird as you are coming through the New York area (where packet loss was first registered). Have to remember that delays and losses can stack. IF you are having a 200ms spike at the gateway, and then hit another spike further down the line they can combine and the problem shows up at that hop further down the chain. So the lag spike at the exchange from Cogentco into Ormuco (192.34.76.10) may not necessarily be entirely an issue between those two ISP's---it could be triggered further up the chain, anywhere between your localized gateway and Montreal.

But yeah... there is something kicking around on your path that is causing an issue with consistent, timely packet delivery that needs to be flushed out. Since you are on Verizon and going through areas previously documented as having problems--there are two strikes against your ISP and/or their routing partner. Then add in the fact we see signs of potential congestion or signalling issues along the path to Montreal---it looks like your ISP needs to step up to the plate and find what is causing all that extra jitter and packet loss.

For comparison, here is a trace to the same server from my location here in South Carolina. TWC-SC is the ISP, and we've worked rather diligently to clean up the routing over the last year or so. Still room for improvement, but it is day and night compared to when we started back in Beta4. Notice how tight the response times are at each hop. This happens fairly consistently, even under heavier traffic--the times may increase (up to around 70ms or so at the end in primetime), but the range still remains tight and consistent and not jumping all over the map with spikes 3x the norm or higher like we saw in your results.

Tracing route to neolobby02.ffxiv.com [199.91.189.74]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  LPTSRV [10.10.100.1]
  2    24 ms    25 ms    29 ms  cpe-75-176-160-1.sc.res.rr.com [75.176.160.1]
  3    25 ms    25 ms    20 ms  cpe-024-031-198-005.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.5]
  4    13 ms    12 ms    12 ms  clmasoutheastmyr-rtr2.sc.rr.com [24.31.196.210]
  5    27 ms    25 ms    27 ms  be33.drhmncev01r.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.180]
  6    33 ms    33 ms    35 ms  bu-ether35.asbnva1611w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [107.14.19.42]
  7    30 ms    30 ms    31 ms  0.ae2.pr1.dca10.tbone.rr.com [107.14.17.204]
  8    29 ms    32 ms    32 ms  ix-17-0.tcore2.AEQ-Ashburn.as6453.net [216.6.87.149]
  9    53 ms    53 ms    54 ms  if-2-2.tcore1.AEQ-Ashburn.as6453.net [216.6.87.2]
 10    51 ms    52 ms    54 ms  64.86.85.1
 11    53 ms    54 ms    55 ms  if-10-2.tcore1.TTT-Toronto.as6453.net [64.86.32.33]
 12    51 ms    52 ms    54 ms  if-9-9.tcore1.TNK-Toronto.as6453.net [64.86.33.25]
 13    52 ms    53 ms    51 ms  if-7-2.tcore1.W6C-Montreal.as6453.net [66.198.96.61]
 14    51 ms    56 ms    54 ms  66.198.96.50
 15    53 ms    54 ms    54 ms  192.34.76.2
 16    55 ms    52 ms    51 ms  199.91.189.234
 17    54 ms    51 ms    55 ms  199.91.189.74

Trace complete.

[pandabearcat]

For all East Coast Verizon customers - esp VA - READ THIS!

Use WTFast. Just download and use. No email, no credit card, no sign up necessary.

I went from being unplayable to completely smooth. I am not a paid shill, seriously do this. It actually let me raid again and saved me from so much frustration. No need to buy premium or whatever either. This works, even though your latency -may- actually go up by a few ms, it completely removes all dropped packets, which is what is causing this ridiculous lag.

[Rover1983]

For all East Coast Verizon customers - esp VA - READ THIS!

Use WTFast. Just download and use. No email, no credit card, no sign up necessary.

I went from being unplayable to completely smooth. I am not a paid shill, seriously do this. It actually let me raid again and saved me from so much frustration. No need to buy premium or whatever either. This works, even though your latency -may- actually go up by a few ms, it completely removes all dropped packets, which is what is causing this ridiculous lag.

I downloaded and installed this application and it made my computer crash, restart constantly with a blue screen error and could not get my computer to start. Luckily pulling the battery got it to go into safe mode so I could remove this piece of shit trash app. Do NOT download this shit. At least from my experience, it made my shit crash and burn.

Week 3 of continuous lag every day from 5pm PST- 8PM PST. The times that I have the most playing time, I cannot play. My cancel sub buttons becoming more and more in sight because of this horse shit.

[Rven]

Just another victim of the infamous lag monster here, with a bit of a twist. I currently play with two characters on Sarg:

Character 1: Frequent lag spikes, rubber-banding, 90k's and the whole deal really as the time transitions to normal waking hours and prime time. Started after HS launch blah blah~...

Hop on Character 2: *Completely* smooth gameplay. Same zone/time/game area/ISP as Character 1, and it's literally night and day in comparison.

Not sure what the cause could be but I would have trouble believing that character 1 is being assigned a different route than character 2, or that my ISP somehow *really* dislikes character 1 and purposefully sends him on a bad trip. Any advice guys?

[Raist]

Each world is hosted on multiple IP addresses and at least each client runs on different port assignments--it is possible either one or both of these parameters could be assigned in the character data. There are also VLAN's in play along the routes as well.

It is actually quite possible for a different character to be routed slightly differently, and that opens the possibility for you to run into issues on one and not the other. There also exists the potential for an ISP to erroneously flag traffic from one session as a lower priority (ie: suspects traffic to your modem on one port is P2P or something and chokes it down).

The point is, it is hard to know without bringing in someone with the proper resources to see what is going on with your sessions. Something g your ISP should be able to assist with. Mileage may vary thouh depending on their policies. You may fair better contacting them through online sources than the phone.

As others have already pointed out you can do some tests with a VPN...most all have a way for you to use them for free, either in a trial period or restricted usage per day/week/month. If you can find a tunnel that stabilises things than there is a routing issue for your ISP to investigate.

[Alexika]

Look, I am sick and tired of this crap. We pay our ISPs and SE for a service. Neither of them seem to care. SE could be going to bad for us, the little guy, who can't seem to get our ISP to care about anything.

Raist, you post all these fancy sayings and images but not one part of your posts actually tell us WHAT TO SAY to our ISPs to get a resolution. Some of us are layman and need more than your continued repetitive explanation with no insight on how to get it resolved.

I am also sick of the people coming in here and just saying oh get WTFast and it resolves it. That's great. Too bad I can't use it on my PS3/PS4 so for the last 9 months or more I have had an unplayable game every night from 7 to 11 PM, I mean horrendous packet loss with 10+ seconds of no data exchange. And no, I don't have some boony ISP, it is FiOS and I pay for great speeds. Speeds I literally get everywhere else, no lag in any other game or service.

So, for the love of all that you hold holy, please someone give us real direction and someone with some pull actually get things rolling, because this unacceptable. I can't raid because of this, I am not getting 2 services I pay for. You can say SE is not to blame, but they are, they are aware that some of their users have an issue and stay silent and don't get something done. They have more resources and pull with gigantic international companies that could give two craps about the rest of us.