Lag?

[Raist]

It usually is an issue either at the exchange points to our ISP's routing partners or within the networks of those routing partners. You don't ride your ISP's network all the way to the XIV servers. One of the most common partners where we find issues is with Level3. One of the biggest top-tier peers in the market, so it's not uncommon to find they carry the larger percentage of our ISP's traffic.

The problem often boils down to our ISP's not arranging for enough upstream bandwidth to properly support all the higher bandwidth tiers they are selling us. Some are still running with the same number of ports at the same speeds they had in place 10+ years ago--but they have more than doubled the size of the bandwidth plans they sell to us. For instance, 40Gbits of upstream may have been just fine to support 4000+ subscribers in a region at 1.5-10Mbit bandwidth tiers 10-15 years ago---but now they've all been upgraded to 6-30Mbit plans, still going through the same 40Gbit exchange point. It is a recipe for disaster if they all consume content en masse--something we see often during major entertainment events like streaming a major sporting event and such...or when a bunch of new games are released/expanded within the same time frame (like when Destiny launched--a bunch of other stuff hit the wire around the same time, wreaking havoc all over the map).

Need to put the pressure on your ISP's Tier3 team to investigate the routes and correct the congestion problems they find--be that working something out with their routing partner, or switching you to someone else that has lower utilization along their routes. It CAN be done. My routing changes peers a couple times a month on average in an attempt to stay ahead of the congestion. I live in South Carolina and I consistently stay between 40-80ms response times for the most part (when it starts hitting around the 120ms mark, my route gets altered). This is done by my ISP, nothing to do with SE---I went to TWC Tier3 with the issues I was having and THEY resolved it...never went to SE to have them fix it, it was all on Time Warner.

There is a pretty simple way to test and demonstrate it. Use a VPN service--it bypasses certain shaping rules that can have a negative impact and/or can dramatically alter the route you take (in some cases, a tunnel may still hit the same congested routing segments--but you can chose a different location to tunnel to, thus avoiding the bad routing segments). Most all of them have a trial period--some even have an ongoing free plan that provides a small amount of data or time per day/week/month (like tunnelbear (500 a month) or CyberGhostVPN (3 hours free), etc.). If you can maintain more stable gameplay through one of their tunnels---it virtually proves there are issues along your route. And the beauty of it is that you can demonstrate the difference on demand.