Have been suffering constant lag and latency issues with AT&T for three weeks now

[Samezuka]

Hello! I figured I would give this a try since my ISP wasn't able to fix it. I have AT&T U-verse, and I was fine with their service until about one week week into April aroundthe time Patch 2.55 came out. That is when I started experiencing horrible bouts of lag that would be constant no matter what time of the day. If I sign on early in the morning, my game is still struggling to play normally and dropping frame rates. Everything looks like it's stuttering, and my character is having a hard time of walking normally. Mor Dhona and Coerthas are horrendous to be in because the lag gets insufferable in those two zones. Running the towers or ex-roulette has also been a mess since this started, and I've been avoiding any coil or ex-primals because I know I'll just die terribly with these issues. It seems like I'm always behind everyone in battle, and other players look like they're playing a game of red-light/green-light everywhere to me. At times, it's not as bad, but other times it makes the game impossible to play.

I play on PS4, so I can't use any VPN programs to help. I contacted AT&T and they reconfigured my router to open the ports for me and do port forwarding so that my other devices and firewall wouldn't be blocking my connection, but that didn't seem to help at all. They gave me a new router, and I am hard-wired to it. Again, that didn't help. In the end, I am not sure if there is more I can do for it or if quitting the game is the best option at this point. I'm starting to think maybe it's just that my ps4 is broken, but the other games appear to be working fine. FFXIV is the only one I ever play online however, so I'm hoping anyone can offer advice or if they are also going through these issues. Everyone on my server and FC seem to be playing fine and normally, which just keeps making me wonder what it is about my system that just isn't working well.

[Minako21]

Same Exact Issue with AT&T U-Verse. The game has been unplayable for the last week. Constant 1000 - 9000 MS burst pings. Its completely isolated to FFXIV. Other online games connections are fine.

[Shoru]

Yeah, for the majority of April I've been having issues with lag. It seems to come out of no where and i don't know how to fix it. I've trying both wired and wireless yet i lag either way. we called at&t and they reset the router but nothing changed. SUPER SAD especially with heavensward is coming out soon

[Raist]

Consoles frequently have issues with UPNP. They just sometimes don't like it...and it may be enabled by default on your router, which may knacker things up seemingly randomly. If you router is using it, turn it off. Then go into the console's network section and run the connection test. If it is unable to determine the NAT type, or it is reporting anything higher than a 2, then you may be running a strict NAT configuration that needs to be eased up. Settings will vary by router, but there should be some references to things like Secure NAT and such that you can try toggling. Consult your manual, or in the case of a managed router, contact your administrator.

There should be no need for any kind of port forwarding for this game. That is something to skirt around security protocols you may find at work or possibly a college campus, where they basically only allow things like generic browsing and media streaming by default. In such cases, then you may need to punch the holes. Just be warned that if you forward traffic to a specific device, you risk knocking things out of whack for other devices. When you let it be managed by NAT, you avoid that dilemma. Once your router makes an outbound connection to SE's server and notes the ports in play, NAT should track everything just fine. The exception is when the router is configured with higher levels of security in play that may cause issues. In the typical home network though, this should not be a problem.

[Shoru]

Consoles frequently have issues with UPNP. They just sometimes don't like it...and it may be enabled by default on your router, which may knacker things up seemingly randomly. If you router is using it, turn it off. Then go into the console's network section and run the connection test. If it is unable to determine the NAT type, or it is reporting anything higher than a 2, then you may be running a strict NAT configuration that needs to be eased up. Settings will vary by router, but there should be some references to things like Secure NAT and such that you can try toggling. Consult your manual, or in the case of a managed router, contact your administrator.

There should be no need for any kind of port forwarding for this game. That is something to skirt around security protocols you may find at work or possibly a college campus, where they basically only allow things like generic browsing and media streaming by default. In such cases, then you may need to punch the holes. Just be warned that if you forward traffic to a specific device, you risk knocking things out of whack for other devices. When you let it be managed by NAT, you avoid that dilemma. Once your router makes an outbound connection to SE's server and notes the ports in play, NAT should track everything just fine. The exception is when the router is configured with higher levels of security in play that may cause issues. In the typical home network though, this should not be a problem.

Oh my lots of technical stuffs lol Basically I connect my PS4 through a cable to my cable box in my room that has a ethernet port in the back (the router in my house is downstairs) and things had been fine for awhile. Until recently, i have moments when I'll move my Garuda and she will move then stop and move again. The same problem is also evident with the players around me. Trying something new, i connected directly to the router but yet no change. My download/upload (for the most part) is fine but something is messing with how smoothly things are going for me. In terms of my NAT type, it always comes up as a type 2.

[Alaric]

I have also had this for the last 3 weeks. I'll stand in mor dhona or really anywhere and everyone will pause for 1-2 second then almost port a few feet in front of them. As the game lags the sound never does lag.

Iv done a number of checks on my PC which is pretty high end and iv had AT&T out 3 times. They can't find anything wrong. Iv logged on and showed them the lag spike so they know I'm not crazy.

I really hope it's something on the games end cause I'm Lost at this point on what to try.

[DasianSensation]

Hey, I havn't been having trouble with AT&T (I have comcast), but I've also noticed a huge jump in Zone loading times through April for no apparent reason. I.E, I went from having ~5 second load times for everything, to ~40 - 60 seconds or more. This really needs to be addressed or it's going to be horrible.

[SixthHero]

I've been having issues as well. Even while soloing I run up pings of 4000+. I'm already on the fastest broadband AT&T offers and this is the only game on my PC having this problem.

[Lunchy]

I've been having this issue for the last three weeks as well. Been playing since release and haven't had any issues like this since launch. I will have lag spikes where everything stands still for 1-5 seconds then everything fast forwards to catch up.

[Raist]

I've been having issues as well. Even while soloing I run up pings of 4000+. I'm already on the fastest broadband AT&T offers and this is the only game on my PC having this problem.

This game hardly requires more than DSL light bandwidth to run...it is the latency that is the problem. You usually run into latency issues due to congestion along your route, which is something your ISP would need to address.

Also, that 4000+ you stated as your ping... where are you tracking that? If you are looking at the numbers up in the corner of the game interface, that isn't your ping but the number of bytes sent/received per second. 4000 bytes would be 32kbps of bandwidth. That is more in line with what you might see when you are surrounded by a lot of players and such (pulling in all their character data). But even so, that is falling in the bandwidth range of 56k dial-up. The game simply doesn't require much bandwidth in most circumstances. The reason they call for broadband speed is more for zone load times and patching (large data pulls) and for the lower latency (because of the twitch play factor). Latency is the "speed" factor that matters most here, because it is the metric that impacts response times.

Typically anything over a 2000ms round trip time (2 seconds delay) would be registered as a time-out/lost packet. Such long delays would trigger the TCP/IP protocol's error correction to retransmit the packets...which again would be indicative of things like over-congested node, stalled router, signalling issue--basically line quality issues that your ISP would need to get involved with to address. This game runs on roughly a 300ms latency boundary, so if you are able to maintain 150ms on average the game should be reasonably playable so long as you aren't having out of order or dropped packets that are triggering retransmits.

Oh, and you AT&T customers may want to bookmark this link--it tracks outage reports, customer comment feeds, and provides links to some online support options for AT&T:

https://downdetector.com/status/att

There are additional ISP's and other services available at their companies page as well:

https://downdetector.com/companies

If you browse some of the more popular services, you may see a pattern forming across the maps. There are specific regions that routinely have issues for a lot of these services. It's due to problems with the exchange points where multiple ISP's are switching off for peering/transit to other networks. When a major hub gets overloaded it can impact multiple services at the same time.

See if you can spot any sort of pattern forming amongst these archived maps for some of the services tracked there (these images are updated periodically and are used for the thumbnail images on each service's landing page--they may change if the page is reloaded later):

AT&T - https://downdetector.com/status/att --- TWC https://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable
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https://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity - https://downdetector.com/status/verizon-communications
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XBL - https://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live - Netflix - https://downdetector.com/status/netflix - PSN https://downdetector.com/status/playstation-network
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