Quote Originally Posted by Downdrop View Post
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.