Southern Hemisphere lag issues

[Akary]

Solution? Play wow, they care about their paying customers from AU/NZ

Yeah if playing by yourself is fun.

[Zebyxus]

Yeah if playing by yourself is fun.

It is for a bit, then you start wondering why you're cursed with no friends in the game :P

Anyway, my ISP has confirmed they don't throttle or 'shape' my data rates until I've hit my cap, which for most months I come nowhere near hitting.

[Raist]

It is for a bit, then you start wondering why you're cursed with no friends in the game :P

Anyway, my ISP has confirmed they don't throttle or 'shape' my data rates until I've hit my cap, which for most months I come nowhere near hitting.

Your rate may not be throttled down... but all internet traffic is shaped. All the time. It's a necessary function for congestion control. Certain types of traffic are assigned a priority index, and when utilization reaches a certain point (or the transfer protocol detects congestion), packets may get delayed or in worse-case scenarios dropped (and hopefully retransmitted--depends on the protocols in use).

That is where we are seeing so many issues. Segments are getting overloaded or other problems are causing bottlenecks along the path to the server, and congestion controls are kicking in. If the game's packets are not flagged the proper priority level (either an error on SE's end, or an issue with an ISP's policy--be that ours or one of their routing partners), then they may be delayed or dropped. If the congestion controls are not able to stem off the rising tide and utilization gets too high, then we run into a hard limit of the hardware and suffer the effects of congestion failure. Sometimes there is a quick recovery of the conditions, sometimes it takes days or even weeks depending on how bad it is along that route and how quick the admins are made aware of the problem and how long it takes for them to implement changes (if they even do anything at all).

Whichever the scenario may be (SE not flagging packets properly, an ISP failing to assign proper priority, or other policy/hardware failure to mitigate congestion), there are things our ISP can do to at least reduce the impact. They can revisit peering/transit agreements to increase throughput through troubled regions, adjust routing policies to avoid the troubled areas, or (like O2/Orange did for it's UK customers last year) work with a content provider to craft a custom solution specifically for their traffic to assign a higher priority to their packets in general. Comcast, by the way, was doing the opposite last year and was choking some popular streaming services to preserve bandwidth--but they got caught by Level3 and shamed for it and had to back off on it. The incident is a big driving point in the Net Neutrality debate.

So, in summation: Your traffic is indeed getting shaped--just not in the sense that so many think about it (throttling for torrents and such). There are steps a last-mile ISP can take to get around congested paths once such paths have been properly identified. But, it will take putting pressure on their Tier3 support to make it happen. While it should not be necessary, collecting data on your particular sessions (tracerts and such to both your game servers and other services for a comparison, possibly even some modem signal and event log reports as well in case there are signalling issues locally that need attention) will go a long way towards demonstrating your issues and help you put pressure on them to take action. It may not feel right, but sometimes you have to go the extra step and go after them on their forums/twitter/facebook in order to get the attention of the right person to affect the needed changes--but there IS someone within their organization that can look into such matters and escalate it to a solution of some sort.

[Epp3s]

Been having the same lag issues for a while now as well. I'm on the East Coast in USA, (Behemoth) and connect to the SE server in Montreal. You'd think I'd be close enough to it, but during peak gaming times, usually around 7-8pm EST, I get significant packet loss and lag.

Tracing the packets, it seems there is one server somewhere after NYC, that keeps dropping packets. So one of my last hops that travels to that server keeps giving me lag in the game. I hope that I don't have to mention that it's really annoying...

I use Verizon FIOS and after contacting my ISP, they said there is nothing they can do personally. So I really hope Square can get things sorted out with that bad hop that seems to be tripping many East Coast players up.

Thanks,
V.