Connection issues.

[Raist]

That's nice and all, but you notice that people around the world are having these problems, right? Also Someone pointed out that the lag spikes happen around 7pm EST - 12am EST, which matches what's been happening to me lately on the Leviathan server. It's been consistent for the last few days. Always around 7pm, and the lag stops at 12am. And it matches what other people have been saying, too. Other people's characters would stop for a few seconds, then move, stop, and so on. This is obviously something to do with FFXIV itself, if multiple people from different parts of the world are having the same problems.

I'd appreciate it if you not make it out to be some major conspiracy

Please.. before you set out to try to make someone look like some sort of conspiracy theorist, at least take a few moments to look at the facts that have been presented. Especially when some of it has already been gathered and presented or linked in the prominent threads on the issue. It really makes you look bad when such information is even presented in the very posts/threads to which you are responding and it appears you haven't even bothered to read any of it (details that would explain your very argument were linked to not only in the post you replied to, but also another just a few posts up).

Take a look at the "world" via some of the maps here to see how this is impacting specific regions in tandem around the world:
https://downdetector.com/companies

Just in case no one even bothers to look at them, I will paste some of them here. These aren't static images... they will update periodically. See if you can spot anything they may have in common or any patterns forming with any particular service as you go through the week that might coincide with troubled times for you with any particular online service:
**it should be noted that even coming from Europe, you may get routed into the US before getting sent up to Montreal. It can and DOES happen.

https://downdetector.com/status/att


https://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity


https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable


https://downdetector.com/status/netflix


https://downdetector.com/status/playstation-network


https://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live


And just for good measure, here are some links to tools providing statistics--some of them allow you to zoom in on specific stats, industries, and regions:

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html
(Real Time overview of usage and calculates current usage compared to average usage. Can also toggle a view comparing average latency vs current latency stats)

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html
(Tracks HTTP hit and active streams over time, data (including peaks) goes back 6 months)

http://www.akamai.com/html/technolog...try/index.html
(tracks usage by industry type, can filter by region, shows current usage against average use, and has a graphs for last 24hrs and 365 days)

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz2.html
(compare latency between two locations against across different routes (Akamia sells optimized routes for a premium). Interesting tool for the debate about altering routes)

http://www.internethealthreport.com/...spx?Period=RH4
(another interesting tool...can compare connectivity between some upper tier ISP's. When latency spikes are detected over 90ms, the boxes get color coded. Note this is ISP to ISP, not client to endpoint)

http://lg.he.net/
(a great tool...can select routers in specific regions and "probe" them to get ping, trace, and BGP Routing details)

***just an interesting quote from that article I linked to about the routing protocol:

Why do you need to understand BGP?

When BGP is configured incorrectly, it can cause massive availability and security problems, as Google discovered in 2008 when its YouTube service became unreachable to large portions of the Internet. What happened was that, in an effort to ban YouTube in its home country, Pakistan Telecom used BGP to route YouTube's address block into a black hole. But, in what is believed to have been an accident, this routing information somehow got transmitted to Pakistan Telecom's Hong Kong ISP and from there got propagated to the rest of the world. The end result was that most of YouTube's traffic ended up in a black hole in Pakistan.

More sinisterly, 2003 saw a number of BGP hijack attacks, where modified BGP route information allowed unknown attackers to redirect large blocks of traffic so that it travelled via routers in Belarus or Iceland before it was transmitted on to its intended destination.

In case you were unaware, earlier tonight the northeast corridors that more than 2/3 the traffic between the US and Montreal must go through were experiencing high lag and packet losses for several hours across multiple providers (it got REALLY bad around Newark for a while there). We're talking big names like AT&T, TWC, Comcast, amongst others. The backbones were overloaded again. As a result, it was negatively impacting multiple games and assorted services including but not limited to XBL, PSN, COD, Battle.net (as in Blizzard's services), FFXIV, ESPN, Hulu, NetFlix, and even 1Channel. It was happening in mass because a lot of people were getting crammed through those specific segments all at the same time trying to get to multiple places at once...all during primetime.

So, it's not a "conspiracy". People have been posting the statistics month after month demonstrating where all the congestion occurs. It's not even theoretical--it has been data collected and presented by the companies that manage these networks. These same statistics and concerns have recently been presented before the commission conducting oversight in the TWC/Comcast merger, as well as repeatedly before Congress over the Net Neutrality debate. People have also been posting that it also happens in the same regions to other services--not just FFXIV, but also LoL, WoW, GW2, Netflix, YouTube, the list goes on and on. And yet.. while there are people experiencing all these problems maintaining stable connections, there are people all over the place also not having ANY problems at all. People across the Atlantic Ocean even... not just people here in North America. It all depends on who gets routed through bad exchanges/segments and who doesn't.

We are hitting peak usage spikes that are double and at times close to triple of what they were 6 months ago. That's the internet as a whole... not just one game or one service. That is everyone hitting multiple services all at once during peak times for their region, and the exchange points are bottlenecking. Then congestion controls kick in to delay packets trying to stave off congestive failure. If line quality gets bad enough, the very TCP/IP protocol in use will flag you with a slow start (effectively throttling your receive window, slowing your throughput). Also, if conditions get bad enough out there along your route, shaping protocols will start to ignore lower priority traffic trying to recover bandwidth. If that gets far enough out of sorts, they start dropping packets.

It is up to the network admins to monitor, capture these exceptions, and adjust accordingly to resolve such issues. Period. SE has nothing to do with that process, nor do they have much of any way to influence it (unless it happens with their ISP or their own network). The problem is either such admins are not aware of how bad it is getting, or something is preventing them from moving forward with investigating/implementing countermeasures. That is why it is important for us to hold accountable the companies from whom we purchase our internet service--they've been getting away with it for decades, creating this grand mess. Collectively, we are ultimately their bosses--we are paying their bills and their payroll. We should expect and demand more for the money we have invested in their service.