Intermittent Lag

[Raist]

In my experience with Time Warner, it is usually two-fold. There is a problem with their oversold markets that causes injected lag, but usually not game-breaking in and of itself (for the most part, but it can at times compound an issue occurring further down the route). It's not uncommon to see things like this happen during basic testing:

3 22 ms 103 ms 30 ms cpe-024-031-198-009.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.9]

That is a major gateway for the markets rooted out of Columbia... the second hop from my modem. When doing more focused tests, we can frequently capture about 5% packet losses when there is a lot of traffic moving through South Carolina. We can also track the same kinds of things in Charlotte and Raleigh, as well as Ashburn, Chicago, various hops in NY/NJ, and a host of other locations in Texas, California, Ohio... it's quite a list just within TWC's networks. Here's one such potential sign of trouble around Chicago that showed up towards the end of the trace/ping batch file I run to gather data for them. This is the last TWC hop before I get put into Level3:

8 3534 ms * * twc-telus.pr0.chi10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.9.70]
(yes... that is correct, one response took over 3 seconds, and then it timed out twice on one tracert pass)

And that leads us to the other side of the coin for TWC. There are issues with their routing partners. Lately for us here in Florence, most of the time pretty much anyone but Cogentco really isn't up to the task for this game. TATA is still manageable as a temp fix...but almost EVERY time they put me on Level3, it goes to crap within a week and we have to get it changed again. They just stuck me on them tonight...and my latency has already gone from normal times of <60 to 80+...if it does it's usually crud I'll be pushing 160+ by Sunday and I'll have to take them to task Monday to get them moving to get me switched off again. If I don't, by Wednesday I'll be flirting with 230 or so.

They are in the midst of updating some markets, so it is gradually getting better... but it is still not anywhere near where it needs to be. Go lurk on their forums in the Internet->Connectivity section and you will see all kinds of chatter about the things that are wrong with their networks as well as what kinds of things to look out for. There is a LOT they can do to remedy many of the issues their customers are having with this game and other services as well...we've seen them become more proactive and improving the experience in the past when people are providing them actionable details on their problems (which unfortunately means you may need to do some homework and testing of your own to prod them along).

But, in most cases you will ultimately need to be dealing with Tier3 to get some real action taken. It sounds like you've spent a lot of time with the locals. While there may be some localized signalling issues (bad amps, stray signal ingress from local TV broadcast and LGE towers or other devices, improperly terminated/choked lines, bad modems down the street putting noise on the circuit, etc.), once you move beyond your local plant...it is more or less out of the hands of those local techs. If you can't seem to make any decent headway over the phone...go to the internet. There is a lot of good user-to-user advice at the TWC forums, and there is also a dedicated section over at dslreports specifically for addressing TWC problems, as well as twitter, facebook, and email options for getting in touch with people that can get things escalated (can get links from the TWC forums, or you can use the generic help email to get the ball rolling: TWCable.Help@twcable.com).

When you contact them, make sure to have at least one valid address used by the game for them to do some testing with. If you don't have the IP your client actually uses, you can give them the names registered for the lobby servers since they will get them into the proper subnets and ASN's to conduct a more proper investigation:

Current Canadian Servers:
neolobby02.ffxiv.com
neolobby04.ffxiv.com
neolobby06.ffxiv.com

Current Japan Servers
neolobby01.ffxiv.com
neolobby03.ffxiv.com
neolobby05.ffxiv.com