Disconnection/crash 12/12/2016

[Cherie]

I am not as technically adept in this field as a number of you seem to be so allow me to make some observations and ask some questions for my better understanding of the situation.

Observations

1: I have 2 other on-line games, Tera and Blade and Soul on my PC. I have no trouble accessing these games though Tera players are complaining of similar problems. I have not been able to access FFXIV for over 6 hours.

2. I can access games on my XBox One without difficulty. Could not log into my PS4 for a while but seems to be ok now.

3. All other Internet access is fine.

4. My service provider is Comcast Xfinity utilizing Blast level access.

Questions

1. Does Comcast use L3 exclusively or do they employ a number of similar systems?

2. Is this problem exclusive to NA or are other areas having similar problems?

3. Does SE have any control over which ports they use or are they completely at the mercy of the ISPS.

4. With the same ISP (Comcast) Why am I having problems with FFXIV exclusively? Is it a matter of location feeding L3 or what?

As I have said before I am not a technocrat, just a consumer paying for a service I am not receiving. It would be in SEs best interest to compose a detailed explanation from their technical dept explaining what is happening. I may be old fashion but it was considered good form for a company to provide a reasonable explanation for failure to provide for services already paid for and what they are doing to correct the situation. Serious responses welcomed.

I am not best with explaining but... my previous employment was a tech help desk (which isn't saying much because those numbers aren't always very helpful).

The general consensus as to what the problem is at the moment is part of the internet infrastructure is under a attack and/or not functioning properly for other reasons. What that means...is a very specific part of the internet isn't accessible to people with particular ISPs. So sure, you can play other games and access the internet otherwise fine BUT if you try to access web servers located in or around montreal, canada (where the ffxiv NA servers are) you might find those websites to be slow or not working. Now people in Canada might not actually have this problem as the way they access those websites may be through a different more local route.

It's a lot like phone service where part of the cellular network can go down in particular areas. Not everyone uses the same towers so other people might be fine. So it's based on what towers the carrier uses... etc Same with ISPs, not all of them use the same route to get to particular webservers. You never directly connect to anything usually. So if one of those links in the chain gets damaged then your whole connection suffers (but just to that particular area when connecting to it).

So yea, it's a wierd and very specific problem... Likely it's some very bored hacker peoples messing with level3.net which is a important connection hop most NA ISPs use to connect to the game servers. I understand why SE isn't very open to explain what is going on because it's hard to explain and likely to be misunderstood as it requires some basic understanding of how the internet works behind the scenes (IE, how "hops" work and how you actually connect to a server).

I hope that helps. I suck at explaining so I apologize! /grovel