Serious Performance Issues (latency/server response time)

[Raist]

You are sort of answering your own question (notice you are also not using Level3 there? Don't see xo.net either...).

WoW is by no means immune to the exact same phenomenon you are describing for this game, so please stop pretending like it is some perfect contrast to this game. The fact that you appear to have solid sessions to their servers and also have solid game play with them is more or less proving the point--you have good routing to them, and that is reflected in the response times. The internet is full of complaints over bad latency knackering up WoW just like it does for XIV, XI, GW2, LoL,....even Netflix and YouTube for heavens sake. There is a reason Blizzard has that post detailing how to test for latency after all...many other services will have similar articles/tools posted as well for conducting tests. It is because it is a KNOWN problem that must be investigated and ruled out of the equation.

There are known address groupings that habitually demonstrate stability issues associated to the very symptoms you are describing. Level3 is not the only ISP that has been flagged for it in the past, but it shows up quite often in forums across multiple services---including WoW. And specifically those car2 lines in the Montreal area are sort of notorious for it.

Go ahead and google latency issues for WoW if you don't believe me. I'll even provide a link for a very simple search for you:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=latency+issues+WoW

No matter what is going on at either the client or server side--if you have a flaky route, a client-server based service is going to be negatively impacted. PERIOD. If there are signs of issues in routing, they need to be addressed, otherwise you are going to be open to the negative affects that can be triggered by those problems. This has been demonstrated often in these forums as well as elsewhere in the past. Try hosting a space combat skirmish/dogfight with north of 130ms latency for everyone else, than do it again when the latency is 60-80 for everyone. The players will see and "feel" a marked difference in accuracy and such. The only thing that changed is the latency.

Oh, and by the way... Time Warner has switched me back to peering with TATA again for getting to Ormuco. Just saying....routing policies can be amended to address a lot of routing issues once they are properly investigated.

[Raist]

Glancing back through the thread just now, noticed something I missed earlier:

Just an hour spent on ANY WoW server - even one across the United States from you (I live in EST and often played on PST servers) - yield crispness and seemingly immediate response times where moving out of an AoE a the very last split second is perfectly fine, moving into an AoE buff buffs you literally the split second you arrive in it and a Warrior's Charge ability tracks you every point of the way from your source to destination - so much so that you can be stunned mid-charge at any point and you will freeze immediately at that location.

Begs the question if you are missing the cast bar factor on these moves. The animations and ground markers are not your indicators of when the move is firing...it is not notify you of the action pending, and where it will land. Your timing needs to be aligned to the progression on the casting bars. That is the indicator of when the server is calculating things. It was the same in XI...it is how we have always pulled off stutter stepping and such.

[Synovius]

I appreciate your willingness to help but this is 100% not an issue on my end nor is it something I can address. It was this way when I played on Adamantoise, on Behemoth, and now on Gilgamesh. My entire raid suffers from this nightly. With over a decade of MMO gaming, normal "lag" is very noticeable for me. The difference between 200ms and 50ms on, say, Mal'ganis (US) in WoW is extremely noticeable. That 150ms is the difference in your Cheap Shot (a Rogue stun) going off seemingly instant or for their being a slight delay upon pressing the hotkey and seeing the animation and resulting stun take place.

What we're all experiencing in FFXIV is not "lag" in this sense. Without looking at the game's networking and graphics code I couldn't begin to tell you what the culprit is. It could be WoW uses substantially better lag correction algorithms to address this very concern. Again, if I play on a WoW server and I step into an AoE buff, within 50ms (that is, to say, basically instantaneous to human perception) that buff is on me. When I step into an AoE buff in FFXIV, a solid second often passes before that buff takes effect. This has trickle effects on gameplay in FFXIV everywhere.

The best I can explain it (and the last of my explaining as I'm beating a dead horse here and you clearly just want to sweep this under the rug as "eh it's a non-issue") is that playing FFXIV at 100ms feels like playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 at 400ms while playing WoW at 100ms feels like playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 at 100ms. One is very precise and very responsive even given the exact same latency measured in ms while the other is not.

We can call this a "routing issue" and we can sweep this under the rug as a "non-issue" but it is and it needs to be addressed or this game has peaked and will begin its steady decline.

Begs the question if you are missing the cast bar factor on these moves. The animations and ground markers are not your indicators of when the move is firing...it is not notify you of the action pending, and where it will land. Your timing needs to be aligned to the progression on the casting bars. That is the indicator of when the server is calculating things. It was the same in XI...it is how we have always pulled off stutter stepping and such.

I'm very aware of the fact the particle effects and animations in this game do not line up properly in many cases with the actual effect. Take Titan's Landslide, for example. The ground colors disappear but the effect goes out after they are gone. This is fine although I hope you'll recall the massive !@#%storm that was hundreds of players making videos and complaining about being knocked off the platform in Titan HM and EX despite having long-since left the Landslide effect.

[Raist]

Again....need to pay attention to the progress of the casting bar.

And not trying to "sweep it under the rug". Been working on the latency issue specifically for this game for well over a year now. Not just for myself...but more so in trying to get people on track to get their issues addressed. My issues pretty much got a permanent fix of sorts back at the first of the year, but occasionally we have to revisit things because the traffic patterns sometimes shift faster than TWC catches up and I have to shoot them an email. But, I haven't had to do that since sometime back around Easter....they've been pretty spot-on for the most part with catching it. A few times I've started generating the reports to email them, and then the modem reboots on it's own and everything is cleared up again before I actually get around to typing up the email.

A lot of people complaining about the very same things you have been were suffering from lag (that includes the landslide dilemma)...but it is beginning to sound like your issue may actually be two-fold, or perhaps just that one mechanic that you may be overlooking---the proper indicator of when an action is taking place. The proper indicator is the casting bar. If your timing is aligning properly there, then it may simply be attributable to your latency.

People with good latency that are moving appropriately according to the proper indicators seem to be doing fine.

Here is a little video I found on YouTube that demonstrates it somewhat. Pay attention to the progress bar compared to what is going on on the screen. The same principles apply to the markers and such you are complaining about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAGNizT-6xo

[Synovius]

Again....need to pay attention to the progress of the casting bar.

And not trying to "sweep it under the rug". Been working on the latency issue specifically for this game for well over a year now. Not just for myself...but more so in trying to get people on track to get their issues addressed. My issues pretty much got a permanent fix of sorts back at the first of the year, but occasionally we have to revisit things because the traffic patterns sometimes shift faster than TWC catches up and I have to shoot them an email. But, I haven't had to do that since sometime back around Easter....they've been pretty spot-on for the most part with catching it. A few times I've started generating the reports to email them, and then the modem reboots on it's own and everything is cleared up again before I actually get around to typing up the email.

A lot of people complaining about the very same things you have been were suffering from lag (that includes the landslide dilemma)...but it is beginning to sound like your issue may actually be two-fold, or perhaps just that one mechanic that you may be overlooking---the proper indicator of when an action is taking place. The proper indicator is the casting bar. If your timing is aligning properly there, then it may simply be attributable to your latency.

People with good latency that are moving appropriately according to the proper indicators seem to be doing fine.

Here is a little video I found on YouTube that demonstrates it somewhat. Pay attention to the progress bar compared to what is going on on the screen. The same principles apply to the markers and such you are complaining about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAGNizT-6xo

I really do appreciate your willingness to help but, at the risk of sounding conceited, I've been raiding for a very long time and am currently in world top raiding FC and my static in particular is working on AS4 atm. We are all very, very aware of castbars, when to move, when not to move, how to take advantage of the horrible performance, etc. This is not a player issue here. I'm fully aware that when I get down to 1s or even 1.5s on my Firestarter, I shouldn't use it because it's going to throw me into the GCD without any AF stacks or even the damage from the Fire III despite the animation and particle effect going off. You are right that, in FFXIV (and not in WoW for example), we have to react perhaps a full second or two before a cast finishes because, if we don't, the game will consider our characters as being present at our previous location when the cast goes off instead of our new location we are standing at when we get hit by whatever ability came out. Lots of abilities in this game suffer from the same issue. For example, to bring back the Charge ability for WoW Warriors, it is a long-distance charge similar to Shoulder Tackle by Monks in FFXIV. In WoW, however, if you are really good, you can time a stun mid-charge even though the entirety of the charge's animation takes place over about 1-1.5 seconds. If you were to stun this Warrior with a very well-timed stun mid-charge, the Warrior would be stunned in place IMMEDIATELY where you stunned them. Contrast that with "charge" type mechanics in FFXIV. Taking our own job of BLM for example, if you are standing in an AoE and you use Aetherial Manipulation to someone who is outside of that AoE, even if you are visually WAAAAAAAAY out of the AoE (by 200-300ms at least), the game will still consider you as being present at your source location instead of where you actually, visually were when the AoE went off. I've died like this in the past many times wherein I've Aetherial Manipulated to someone and after my movement has already stopped and I'm standing next to my AM target, I die and my corpse is lying some 25 yalms away from the AoE that exploded. It does not matter if I have flawless routing directly to Gilgamesh for this with 10ms latency. The same effect would occur because the game does not seem to update positions as often as other MMOs. The same issue with AM occurs with Dragoon jumps, Monk Shoulder Tackle, Ninja teleport, DK charge, and any positional abilities like these.

And, FWIW, the video you showed about "casting while moving" is something I do every single raid. I am always "stutter stepping" between my casts when I have to move. The fact that this is possible does not mean it's a good thing. If it were the case that this were possible solely because code existed to allow for movement yet complete casts after a certain % of the cast has completed, that would be one thing. But the reason this is possible is not solely due to that - it's due to the fact that even if I move when my Fire IV is at only 70% full, the cast will usually complete successfully.

Further, how is it that you think I am suffering from "lag" in this game and that's actually my issue when you say you don't experience this performance issue at all yet my connection to the server is better than yours both in total hops as well as latency? My impression that you are simply conditioned to accept and deal with the poor performance whereas many of us who came to FFXIV from other MMOs were immediately (and still) blown away by the poor performance of this game's servers.

[Raist]

That trace was to a WoW server... not an FFXIV one.... not seeing where your route for XIV is performing any better. In fact, haven't seen a trace from you to an FFXIV server at all.

The game automatically polls multiple times per second...every 300ms in overworld, forget what it was in instances but do recall something about they were going to increase the frequency during instances a while back. It also sends positional updates when you submit actions as well.

The reason stutter stepping works is we are sneaking between the automatic updates. Once you submit an action, the server is sort of on auto-pilot for that action until something happens server side to interrupt it--be that something calculated server-side, or something that happens in our client (positional update shows we moved, submit an action from another location that hits the server before the casting finishes on the server side, etc.). If you get in synch with the delays, you can pull off some crazy stuff. Not only does it allow us to cheat on our movement...it also affords us a means to force awareness of our movement as well.

The reason why it might be a latency issue is that if you feel you are in synch with the delays but are still getting hit, then your latency may be worse than you thought. If you consistently clear the target area 50% through progress just fine, but do not when it is 75% through... then you have unwanted latency. In a more perfect world, you would likely be able to stay in the target area on up to 90 or even 95% (have to allow for a slight bit of input and processing lag still). The trick is figuring out just where that threshold is and adjusting to it if the window is really tight...which is what a lot of people had been failing to do. Many weren't even paying attention to the cast bar...they were talking just like you were earlier and judging it by the animations or the state of the marker, either one of which can be out of synch by varying degrees under different conditions---the progress bar is a much more consistent item to synchronize with.

And as I have stated multiple times...I don't experience these performance issues like you do. Yes, there can be a noticeable delay from hitting a button and seeing the feedback on the screen---but that can happen with any service that is relying on a response from a server. Heck, you can even feel it sometimes in a standalone environment that doesn't involve sling-shotting to a server and back. An eye blink takes right under 1/3 a second on average. 125ms is 1/8 a second...so it would require extremely low latency for a more true instant response feel from a server nearly 900+ miles away. What little delay that is perceptible to me simply is not game-breaking for me. I can dodge AOE's and keep Eno up just fine in all kinds of crazy situations--even in the expert roulettes. When I do start to actually "feel" any real lag, it often is hardly even annoying really until I start crossing about the 200ms mark a lot if any issues start creeping up (by the time I start crossing that line though, my ISP is usually on it and things get changed---sometimes my modem reboots mid-instance even, but it happens so quick I manage to get back in quickly and finish).

Basically, again as was stated earlier, typically when the route is good... the game tends to be good. This has been shown to be true many times for others as well. So, all things being "equal" at the other end (same network, same hardware, same software, etc. on their end)---if a lot of people are having it good, and you are not, what is the difference? In a LOT of cases we have seen issues present in the routes for the troubled players that simply do not exist for those that are not having a hard time.

At that point, it seems pretty elementary my dear Watson. Focus on the signs of smoke to see if there is fire, and if found snuff it out...get the route stabilized and see if game play improves. For many, the quick and dirty fix was testing a VPN...when that resolves it, it pretty much clenches it that something within the networks between the user and the server is causing issues. Knowing that, you have a starting point for investigation....once one can rule out their local hardware, that should involve one's ISP as they are the ones that first take over on the other side or your private network.

Many have followed such logic and pushed for the escalation, gotten it, and have been met with success. Regardless if it makes sense or not, it sets a precedent of sorts. Bad routing negatively impacts gameplay. As long as that condition persists, gameplay will be negatively impacted. Thus...it needs to be investigated and flushed out if suspected.

Oh yeah... also.... Fuse.net, Cincinnati. Ohio has been shown in the past to run into issues with congestion and various other issues in the past---circular routing, bad channel alignments and signal ingress, screwy weather patterns---you name it, they have likely experienced it if it can negatively impact a network. And it tends to get progressively worse the closer you get to the lake. Cleveland has had it's share of nightmares in recent years. Just saying, there is a lot of history for your region...and not all of it favorable for getting to the other side of the lakes.

Looked them up...appears to be Cincinnati Bell under the hood:
Cincinnati Bell downdetector page
(among other things, has links to their social media, main website, etc. in case support is needed)

[Train88]

If your router is older than 2 years, this may be signs it is dying.

Since you have a pretty reliable way to generate this lag, you may want to connect the modem to the computer if at all possible. If you do not get lag to have solved your problem. If you still get lag you may want to phone your isp and ask them to verify your signal quality. This signal quality is their responsibility.

Also if you're playing over wifi, don't play over wifi. The nextdoor granny's microwave oven will kill your signal. If there is anything you can do to improve your wifi signal it may help a lot, assuming there is no possible way for you to use a cabled connection.

That's all i got for internet connection, hope it helps.

[Synovius]

I'm not sure what to say, honestly. I posted a tracert to Gilgamesh that showed the connection at 39ms. I'm fairly certain my latency is actually very low - sub 100 low. I'm not sure what trying to get a better route would accomplish as I already have very low latency.

Maybe I'll make a video and, in it show both WoW and FFXIV and my latency to the server in both and then I'll demonstrate exactly what I mean about how crisp things seem in WoW (even with a much higher latency) and how sluggish and unresponsive things seem in FFXIV.

[Raist]

Tracing route to 199.108.62.157 over a maximum of 30 hops

That is a WoW address, not FFXIV.

Edit:
Was just farting around in some looking glasses and spotted some packet losses from various paths that went through the Toronto area. Did some poking around some more and there's some "funkiness" in general around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario from all kinds of different vectors. Losses weren't earth shattering by any means but was getting a lot of spiking in the 350-650 ranges whenever cutting through some of the Toronto corridors. A good bit of traffic from the western side of New York can sometimes get shunted that way if things aren't fairing well on the other side of Syracuse or Albany.

So there could be some weird delays happening along the way depending on how you get routed. Perhaps just enough for TCP's error correction to trigger a retrans here and there. Could be a tricky one to catch though....took almost 2 minutes for it to show up when I let a ping from the laptop to neo2 to just run continuously. Could be nothing... could be the start of something. Time will tell.

[Synovius]

Oh my bad. Do you know the IP then for Gilgamesh or a server from the same datacenter?

BTW, our SCH in the raid lives within a 1hr drive of the data center for Gilgamesh and he experiences the exact same issues with responsiveness that I do.

EDIT: I pinged the NA data center and it my latency is 32ms.

http://i.imgur.com/ArutVZh.png

I then did a tracert to the datacenter and it came back at 37ms.