Stutter Stepping?

[worldofneil]

If they are charging money for the water supply then yes, I will blame who I pay. A person should not sell something if they don't own it. Is it Level3's fault? Yes. It is. But Square Enix is charging money for a service that is not accessible to those it's charging. That is failure to provide services rendered. Regardless of where the blame lay, if I order something and I do not receive it I expect to get my money back for it.

Square Enix *are* providing you with the service that you're paying them for though. You pay for access to their servers so that you can play Final Fantasy XIV. Their servers are all up and (aside from some occasional maintenance) they're all running just fine so they are fulfilling their obligation.

The problem you are having is your route across the Internet to actually get to the SE servers, none of which is anything Square Enix has anything to do with as they don't control anything outside their own network (so definitely not Level 3 networks where the problems are happening).

Putting simply the Internet is essentially made up of lots of toll roads. These roads vary in size and the operators of each "road" charges various amounts to the Internet providers so that their customers can use them. You and I don't generally have to worry about any of this, we pay our Internet provider their monthly fee so we can access anything on the Internet and they sort out which roads we take to get to those places and it all happens automatically. At least that's the idea.

But in this instance your Internet provider is sending you to the Square Enix servers via Level 3. Basically, they're sending you down a small country road that's already full of traffic instead of taking an alternate route down a nice big empty highway. Why? I can't say for sure, but I feel it's a pretty good guess that it probably saves them money to send you down the small road as the "toll" on that road is probably a lot less than if they paid the toll to someone running a highway.

Unfortunately if you can't get your Internet provider to adjust your routing and moving to an alternative provider isn't an option, your only other option is to get a VPN service.

[Downdrop]

Square Enix *are* providing you with the service that you're paying them for though.

My packet loss reports would disagree with you. Packet loss that doesn't happen while connected to any other service on the internet. I won't sit and argue about it, there's a very long sticky thread at the top of Technical Support all about it. And you forgot to mention the third option, which is unsubscribing.

[worldofneil]

My packet loss reports would disagree with you. Packet loss that doesn't happen while connected to any other service on the internet.

Because the Internet isn't located in a single place. Everywhere you go will take different routes to get to wherever it needs to, and in this case, it goes via L3 to get to Square Enix.

there's a very long sticky thread at the top of Technical Support all about it.

There is indeed, full of people with the same routing problem (most of which are the same ISPs). It might be an officially created thread, but it's not claiming responsibility, it's just there so for the people that don't understand SE are appearing to do something instead of nothing (although ultimately they have no control over L3 so all they can do is tell them it's a problem, they can't fix it, SE isn't L3's customer).

And you forgot to mention the third option, which is unsubscribing.

True, although I didn't think that was much of an option

If 80% of your NA customers are in the US and 20% in CAN, you may consider a move to appease the 80%.

Not everyone on the NA servers is from NA. I play on there myself (as do my friends) and we're all in the EU. I have no idea how many people play that are outside NA, but probably enough that it should be considered. Unfortunately moving isn't really an option because of housing and having to disband/recreate a FC from scratch so we've stayed where we are and probably a lot of others are the same.

[Galibier]

Square Enix *are* providing you with the service that you're paying them for though. You pay for access to their servers so that you can play Final Fantasy XIV. /snip

I agree with you on this point. The thing is ISPs don't necessarily have a choice as to what Peer you use. The way the internet grew there are various choke points for your route and if you are your "average" internet user you just use the automatically selected route choke points and all. These choke points become more common the closer you get to your destination.

If you look at the main thread on NA issues it doesn't matter what ISP people have. People with AT&T, Comcast, Time-Warner, Verizon etc. are all having the issues. They are all hitting Level 3 nodes, because often there is no choice. The difference between someone having an issue and someone not having an issue seems to be where they are, and thus how many level 3 nodes they hit on their way in.

As for my post regarding US v CAN I was just using that to illustrate that you decide if servers will be moved via a cost/benefit analysis.