Connection issues.

[Raist]

Don't get me wrong, I understand you trying to explain to everyone whats happening, but bottom line is this. No one gets lag when playing other online games, only when playing FFXIV. Which means it's FFXIV and its completely unacceptable this hasn't been fixed after weeks and weeks of thread posts on here, we want a responce cause we want to know something is being done about it or at least they acknowledge that there's a issue. No responce from any mods or admins just makes everyone mad ontop of how mad they already are. You posting this stuff explaining stuff is just going to also make people more mad as well cause what your saying won't fix there problem.

Don't think you truly understand then... or you aren't reading the information that has been put out there for over a year on these forums, and nearly a decade on others. It isn't a game specific problem as much as it is a problem with the infrastructure of the hundreds upon hundreds of networks that interconnect to form what we simply call the internet. Oh, and SE has acknowledged there is a problem... they created a sticky about it over a year ago. They have in fact worked directly with some ISP's since then (there were threads about an issue in the UK that BT worked with them to identify the problem and BT--not SE--resolved it, and others have reported their ISP's resovling their problems as well and not just me).

It basically boils down to issues with when there is severe congestion along a backbone. It can affect all traffic going through there--doesn't matter if it's going to SE's servers or Blizzard's. You simply aren't seeing it happening with other games because you aren't getting crammed into the limited paths we have to take to get to Montreal. If you live on the west coast and play on a game server on the west coast (or pretty much anywhere else in the US, save maybe for the NY/NJ or Chicago areas)-- you have a slim to no chance of running into the congested corridors taking us specifically into places like Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, or Nova Scotia. You may pick up something in Southern California, Seattle, Texas, Ohio, Atlanta, the Carolinas, Chicago, the north East---but not the handful of major paths going over the border and across Canada to Montreal.

As for the whole "it's not happening to other games/services" crowd, check out the forums for your ISP. You might find some threads in there linking to other games/services that are having issues. Here's the connectivity section for my ISP:

http://forums.timewarnercable.com/t5...p/connectivity

Just look at some of the recent thread titles posted there:

HUGE latency to League of Legends servers. (posted yesterday)

Frequent disconnects, packet loss,and lag spikes while gaming. Slow speed. (again, posted yesterday)

Speed keeps dropping (one of many threads that keeps getting back up to the top... this one is over a month old)

Constant night time slowdowns (this one started up last week)

Random lag issues (another older thread that started about a month ago that got brought back to the top this weekend)

And that's just the first page of that forum. It has tons of posts along these lines that continually come back up over and over again. You can see the same thing going on at other major ISP's as well. It isn't JUST FFXIV suffering from this problem. Just look at the Comcast and PSN maps that I put in that post I linked to earlier. Those aren't static images I put up either.. they are links to images that get updated periodically throughout the day. At times you will see them both lit up like a Xmas tree---lots of pretty red and yellow blotches all over the same areas on a recurring basis. Click the URL's above them for the source pages to each of them and read the comments the users have been posting. Click the "Companies" tab up top of the downdetector site and look at the pages and maps for other companies--you may even find one for your ISP or one of your favorite services. You will see a common them running through them---high congestion, packet loss, disconnects, unable to log in, stuttering streams... it is all over the place for all kinds of services, and seems to happen over and over in specific regions.

Why does this happen? Read the blog posts referenced in that post...don't even have to read them all really, that one post I quoted there gives a pretty good clue as to why it happens.

And once again.. for the record... I don't have these issues anymore. When I first start to see/feel the signs of it creeping up, my route gets changed and it clears up. Over and over again since last fall when I got things escalated to tier3 and things gradually got better and better to the point I have response times in the 70's most the time, or better and rarely experience the odd hiccup here and there (like a skip from a scratched DVD may be the best way to describe it). I'm in South Carolina too, nowhere near Canada, and sometimes go through the troublesome Raleigh/Durham and Charlotte corridors where we've seen players having problems. When that happens, I look at my route and if it looks like it's going south, I forward the data to them and it gets handled. Sometimes they even beat me to the punch and they bounce my modem before I can even look into it... a few minutes later, I'm up and running in the game again with a clean connection.

I had the same experiences with FFXI, Diablo I & II, Freespace Descent 1 & 2, Total Annihilation (used Microsoft's gaming platform), and a host of other things going all the way back into the 90's. And EVERY TIME it has been Road Runner/Time Warner Cable that went to bat for me and got it resolved...because it was an issue with where I was getting routed.