Connection issues.

[Tusembobel]

Europe, Lich server.

[Drayton]

I'm a PS3 player and same issue... Players and mobs will freeze for 5-10 seconds then skip around, especially in dungeons. This all started a few days after 2.4 ... I checked with my provider and everything and all seems good on my end. My roommate plays on a PS3 as well and on the same sever as I (Cactuar), she is having no issue... This is really bumming me out =\

I've had the same thing, and I'm on a PS3, also. I thought it was a bit of lag, which I never seem to get, but I was laying in to a mob for a good 15 to 20 secs before everyone else around me started moving. I thought I was about to disconnect.

[Tusembobel]

I have just done expert dungeon and it was HELL. Just a set of static screens. Good thing I got an OK party so we managed to do it. Maybe it has something to do with free weekend, but what if all those ppl will buy the game and come to servers?
I'm quite an old geezer for a gamer and for me Squaresoft always was equal to outstanding quality, but what we have here? Seems no one even cares for those in need of guiding light, not a single answer or post from SE employee.. It IS very disappointing. If problem stays I'll defenitly quit the game.

[Raist]

You aren't hearing from an SE employee about it because this is a user-to-user forum first and foremost (Welcome to "Technical Support" Forum! sticky). They don't post much in here beyond directing us to their established KB/FAQ answers or if there is breaking news on a hot topic--which the higher ups rarely give them the OK to share with us before it gets posted officially in something like the Lodestone.

It is also because in the majority of the cases, it isn't something wrong with the servers or their connection. Granted, there are cases where there has been corruption in character data, and early on we had issues with lobby queues and such... but that was more or less resolved with big infrastructure changes a good while back. Occasionally they still have issues with the servers, and they put notices up about it in the Lodestone--but they are fairly isolated and not the widescale fiasco we had back in the fall of last year. There are also issues that Sony needs to address with their PSN and PS3/4's themselves (BIG kerfuffle with the 2.00 firmware update, which they have acknowledged and are pushing to address some issues with 2.01 update--such notices go up on both the downdetector site and Sony's own twitter feeds).

The bulk of the problems seem to be coming from our problems in routing to SE's network. The routing partners and our ISP's have arrangements for getting us from our networks to Ormuco's (SE's ISP). They are simply straining under the load far more then many are aware of...despite all our efforts to get the word out, posting links to articles, graphs, monitoring/testing tools and guides--everyone still wants to blame everything on SE without even so much as testing their routes for signs of congestion/packet loss, which often proves to be an issue for them. Here is one such recent post I made the other day in another thread, and there are many others like it from multiple users on these forums:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post2567884

Such things your ISP can and NEEDS to address--whether that is found within their networks or their partners, they have the means to resolve it on your behalf as their paying customer... be that working with their partners to improve things at the peering/transit exchanges, or switching you to another routing partner, or even breaking you off to a different local node (which, as a side effect may change your routing partner--it depends on how their metrics are set). Case in point, TWC has once again moved me this week from TATA over to Cogent, and aside from the bad jitter we still haven't remedied in our localized nodes the route is pretty tight and my gameplay on Midgard is just fine (and, barring some times SE actually had issues they had to address, it has been for over a year now, since my ISP has been working to address such issues for us in our area):

C:\Windows\System32>tracert neolobby02.ffxiv.com

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    30 ms    21 ms    17 ms  cpe-075-176-160-001.sc.res.rr.com [75.176.160.1]
  3    18 ms    26 ms    25 ms  cpe-024-031-198-009.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.9]
  4    19 ms    20 ms    17 ms  24.31.196.212
  5    21 ms    21 ms    23 ms  be33.chrcnctr01r.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.182]
  6    26 ms    29 ms    26 ms  bu-ether44.atlngamq46w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [107.14.19.46]
  7    29 ms    26 ms    27 ms  107.14.19.11
  8    27 ms    26 ms    28 ms  te0-0-0-10.ccr21.atl02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.12.109]
  9    27 ms    26 ms    28 ms  be2050.ccr41.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.0.165]
 10    37 ms    34 ms    35 ms  be2168.ccr21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.94]
 11    40 ms    40 ms    44 ms  be2148.ccr41.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.118]
 12    46 ms    45 ms    45 ms  be2106.ccr21.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.50]
 13    51 ms    49 ms    51 ms  be2088.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.17]
 14    63 ms    62 ms    64 ms  38.122.42.34
 15    49 ms    49 ms    49 ms  10.2.2.1
 16    47 ms    48 ms    52 ms  192.34.76.2
 17    50 ms    47 ms    50 ms  199.91.189.234
 18    49 ms    49 ms    48 ms  199.91.189.74

Trace complete.

C:\Windows\System32>tracert 199.91.189.30

Tracing route to 199.91.189.30 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  LPTSRV [10.10.100.1]
  2    25 ms    28 ms    13 ms  cpe-075-176-160-001.sc.res.rr.com [75.176.160.1]
  3    78 ms    20 ms    27 ms  cpe-024-031-198-009.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.9]
  4    17 ms    20 ms    18 ms  24.31.196.212
  5    20 ms    22 ms    26 ms  be33.chrcnctr01r.southeast.rr.com [24.93.64.182]
  6    27 ms    30 ms    26 ms  bu-ether14.atlngamq46w-bcr00.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.82]
  7    24 ms    23 ms    26 ms  107.14.19.99
  8    29 ms    27 ms    26 ms  te0-0-0-10.ccr21.atl02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.12.109]
  9    25 ms    25 ms    27 ms  be2050.ccr41.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.0.165]
 10    36 ms    33 ms    34 ms  be2168.ccr21.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.94]
 11    41 ms    39 ms    44 ms  be2148.ccr41.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.31.118]
 12    43 ms    45 ms    48 ms  be2106.ccr21.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.50]
 13    50 ms    49 ms    49 ms  be2088.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.17]
 14    62 ms    64 ms    63 ms  38.122.42.34
 15    47 ms    50 ms    48 ms  10.2.2.1
 16    50 ms    49 ms    48 ms  192.34.76.2
 17    49 ms    49 ms    51 ms  199.91.189.234
 18    48 ms    49 ms    48 ms  199.91.189.30

Trace complete.

[Tusembobel]

Just imagine I'm simple user and I do not even know what tracing is. But. I did some tracing for m/self, and u know what? Things get really bad with string starting with Ormuco word.. I just hope the original cause was heavy load due to the free login weekend; cause, frankly, there were not any problems at my early morning time, which is the time most of the Europe is slumbering in their beds.

[JayHiro]

NA server, Siren

[Vejjiegirl]

getting a lot of lag again this week, I did a ping test here are the results.

[Raist]

getting a lot of lag again this week, I did a ping test here are the results.

That IP isn't even used for the game. It hosts websites for various Squenix/EIDOS titles. The game servers in Canada all start with 199. You can get the actual IP used by your client by running netstat (from DOS window) or resmon (from Run/Search box) while fully logged into the game. Alternatively, you could test against the lobby servers. Here are the registered DNS names for them:

neolobby01.ffxiv.com
neolobby02.ffxiv.com
neolobby03.ffxiv.com
neolobby04.ffxiv.com
neolobby05.ffxiv.com
neolobby06.ffxiv.com
(odd numbers are Japan, even are Canada).

Some of this may change though once they get the new EU data centers up, but for now this is the case.

Should note though, that even though you were hitting a website server hosted on iWeb in a different section of Montreal, you are showing signs of too much jitter in that sample for a gaming connection. It's fine for generic web hosting, but for live streams that depend on timely, orderly delivery of packets to avoid retransmit requests, 5ms jitter against an average of 44ms (~11%)--and look at the min/max swing: 38ms to 61(over a 50% swing)--is too much variance. You may very well find there are some issues in route to Canada at play for your connections.

Would be a better idea to run a series of tracerts to both the game and other services--and also during both good and bad times as well. When you do run a ping test though, you may not want to use the default counts. Sometimes you get lucky and catch a bad spike in just a few hops, but it's not uncommon for it to take around 10 or more to see the troublesome ones--doing the longer ones may also reveal a steady pattern, like 1 spike every 7-10 times. You can use the -n switch to set a count, like this:

C:\Windows\System32>ping neolobby02.ffxiv.com -n 25

Pinging neolobby02.ffxiv.com [199.91.189.74] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=58ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=62ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=48
Reply from 199.91.189.74: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 199.91.189.74:
    Packets: Sent = 25, Received = 25, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 58ms, Maximum = 63ms, Average = 60ms

This is more along the pattern you want to see. Min/max only has a 5ms gap, and the average is close to right in the middle of the two. The average jitter from ping to ping is just under 2ms (1.75), which is just under 3% of the average response time (2.92%)--it could be a touch better, but it's far better than what that sample to the webserver was showing.

[Raist]

Oh... and just for comparison sake, here is a ping to that same address, but instead of using the IP address I used the URL of one of the sites that points you to the same IP:

C:\Windows\System32>ping www.justcause2.com -n 10

Pinging www.justcause2.com [184.107.107.176] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=45ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=49
Reply from 184.107.107.176: bytes=32 time=42ms TTL=49

Ping statistics for 184.107.107.176:
    Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 42ms, Maximum = 46ms, Average = 43ms

In that short test, the average jitter was again just under 2ms (1.8) for around 4% of the average (4.19%), and again the average falls close to the middle of the Min/max range. Still would prefer it to be a bit tighter, but it is still much more manageable.

[Kassatsu]

I've been having lag issues since 2.35 patch always between 7pm-12am est and 2.4 has just made it worse. Several people in my FC had the same issue. Made a ton of post various thread and nothings been done about it so I doubt they care enough to bother. Most of my FC has been having the same issues since 2.4 now and its only getting worse each passing week.