Latency issues

[Raist]

I'm sorry, and I'm sure you know your stuff, but you don't understand 2 simple things:


1) I have no idea what you are talking about, I am not knowledgeable in the technical stuff, and I don't want to be either.
2) This is very important. I was online playing FFXIV non stop for almost a week before Wedneday, outside of sleeping (off work due to broken leg). I had zero problems. Have also been playing FFXIV since August 2013 with zero problems. On Wednesday, I am online playing FFXIV, and maintenance happens as I was online. I log in immediately as the servers are back up, and I have this problem immediately from that time since now. It is Square-Enix's fault.

I've actually been trying to explain it to you without getting too technical. The internet is highly unstable and a route can simply go down at the drop of a hat for a long list of reasons. If it was SE's fault as you keep saying, then everyone would be suffering at the same time--which is clearly not the case. People would not be staying in-game for hours upon hours with absolutely no issues if that were the case (I just spent over 6 hours farting around myself in fact, even with my latency spikes around Charlotte).

Every online game suffers from these symptoms at one time or another for players from different regions at different times. You can google popular online games and phrases like "high latency" or "high packet loss" and get hits on stories about people experiencing the very things you guys are dealing with here. It's nothing new... been fighting it myself since 1996. Granted, there have been times where we did indeed find issues client or server side, but the vast majority of times it was problems with a segment between the two--which was always resolved through my ISP, and not the company at the other end of the connection.

Traffic on the internet ebbs and flows just like traffic on the highway. And just like the way a major accident or big construction project on the interstate can completely knacker up people's commute through an area, the same thing happens with the internet. Look at the outage map thumbnail pic and the downdetector status page for Comcast I linked to earlier. The more current map at that status page shows an even more focused view of specific areas for Comcast that are having problems. If you are getting routed through there--you may very well be getting caught up in one of those traffic jam scenarios and suffering from delayed packets, or even worse: dropped packets. Either of those problems can cause dropped connections if it is bad enough.

It is a known problem with the infrastructure across North America...it's a dirty little secret the industry has been trying to hide for quite some time now. They grossly oversold local markets without upgrading their upstream bandwidth to properly support all the ramped up bandwidth they've been selling us. In 20 years, the norm has gone from 1.5mb/s up to 20mb/s, but the upstream bandwidth has not increased proportionally and we now have massive choking points at the major exchanges across the continent.

It is a problem that our ISP's have collectively created through negligence over the years, and it is up to them to remedy it. You pay them for their service, and they are simply dropping the ball. Need to hold them accountable for it.

Edit: Just pasting in something for a better visual of what I'm talking about. These are outage maps for various services tracked at downdetector. Notice how they can show problems in roughly the same regions. Traffic jams may be in full effect, possibly impacting everyone coming through those areas until the ISP's route people around the congestion.

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


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


Call of Duty - https://downdetector.com/status/call-of-duty


Time Warner Cable - https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable


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


AT&T - https://downdetector.com/status/att