Has Square Ever Made A Mention of Adding Data Centers In The US?

[Kosmos992k]

Hmm....what a surprise. Level 3 issues again. Almost every time a large group of players in NA have terrible lag and server tracert/ping times it is something to do with Level 3.

The problem is simple though. Level 3 is a major backbone provider, neither players no SE has a direct contract with them, we all have a contract with our ISP. Our ISPs on the other have have peering agreements, or contracts, with Level 3 and other backbone providers. So Level 3 are insulated from the impact of their screw-ups, because end users and providers like SE are already at arm's length away from them.

If you try to tell your ISP, they will check their network, and find no issue, and you get no where.

Funny how the internet, a technology fundamentally developed to be fault tolerant and dynamic so that it can automatically re-route around any problems is reduced to a crawl because backbone providers introduce large single points of failure with little to no way to route around it. In an ideal world the TCP/IP protocols and intermediate routers would reroute traffic around the problem, dynamically, with no noticeable effect on service. Unfortunately we are not in an ideal world.

[Ama_Hamada]

I live a lot closer than you do to the NA data center and I'm having bad lag problems too.

They can blame level3 all they want and maybe level3 is just the suck when it comesto internet backbones, but then they also aren't doing anything to solve the problem.

I think it is a server side where the data is just processed slowly on the server end. it does not feel like lag I seen everywhere else, as it seems like it is a constant thing. Like I can heal someone, or use LB, and use the resources to do the action, Mp, stuff on cooldown, so on, but the chain procs does not happen, LB empty but no effect, people get healed but they die anyway. I posted a question here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4008083
In regards to this issue. it is annoying in PvE but game breaking in PvP. it needs to be addressed.
Here is something else I found why I posted that and i think it is based on this lag as well:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4007704

I do not know for sure what the exact cause of it, but in the end of things it is caused by SE, maybe they shouldn't have the data centers in Canada? or maybe the servers are just simply slow in processing information?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

If the servers were slow it would effect everyone. It doesnt.

Everyone likes to blame servers for every bit of lag they get, when its almost never actually the servers lol.

[Kosmos992k]

If the servers were slow it would effect everyone. It doesnt.

Everyone likes to blame servers for every bit of lag they get, when its almost never actually the servers lol.

Indeed. If folks do a simple tracert to their world server, they'll notice the longest response times are generally Level 3 - assuming that it is a Level 3 issue again...

[Adire]

If the servers were slow it would effect everyone. It doesnt.

Everyone likes to blame servers for every bit of lag they get, when its almost never actually the servers lol.

Routing issues don't necessarily mean everyone will get the same lag at the same time. It definitely doesn't necessarily mean it's our ISPs' faults either.

When the only common factor involved in everyone's situations who have this common issue is Level 3, that's a strong hint that maybe Level 3 is the culprit more often than people realize.

I have laggy days in FFXIV when I'm not lagging anywhere else, in any other game far more often than I'm lagging in one of those games and not lagging in XIV.

[Kosmos992k]

Routing issues don't necessarily mean everyone will get the same lag at the same time. It definitely doesn't necessarily mean it's our ISPs' faults either.

When the only common factor involved in everyone's situations who have this common issue is Level 3, that's a strong hint that maybe Level 3 is the culprit more often than people realize.

I have laggy days in FFXIV when I'm not lagging anywhere else, in any other game far more often than I'm lagging in one of those games and not lagging in XIV.

2-3 months ago, if memory serves, Level 3 had a regional outage when a fiber link went bad. That impacted several major US ISPs, and lots of people were affected, but you could VPN to get around Level 3. So it wasn't the local ISP, SE ISP or SE server, it was Level 3's infrastructure.

[Ama_Hamada]

are you telling me a "VPN" will fix this:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4007704

[Paladinleeds]

if anything I'd say EU could do with another datacentre, or Australia/NZ (though Aus/NZ do technically have 3 datacentres to choose from, but I understand they're mostly Japanese servers. Not sure how you'd fix that. I guess they could start a branch of the mostly AUS servers and pipe them into a new datacentre offering affected players free transfers back to the JP datacentres). Europe only has one datacentre, and that datacentre has the least amount of servers out of any datacentre period. So it's a tie between EU and AU/NZ that needs a new datacentre IMO.

[Felis]

Europe only has one datacentre, and that datacentre has the least amount of servers out of any datacentre period. So it's a tie between EU and AU/NZ that needs a new datacentre IMO.

I doubt all EU servers are full. And even if, new server would be cheaper than a new datacentre that don't fill up.

[Kosmos992k]

are you telling me a "VPN" will fix this:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4007704

No, I'm suggesting that it would fix the OPs ridiculously long ping times. Where did you get the idea that VPN would fix the kind of issue you raise?

However, just to play along with your question, the network lag time involved in the use of LB abilities would not be significantly altered by physically moving the data center across the border. Network latency is affected more by the number of routing hops than the actual distance - unless you're literally playing on the NA Servers from the other side of the world (sorry Australia). In addition, the polling interval on the server for character position and actions will have a far greater impact than any normal network lag.

Consider that the player hits the button for the LB, that takes about a quarter of a second from the decision to the reaction of pressing the button, that goes to the server, so add whatever the total network lag is, the server does something with it, and updates all the clients, incurring not only the processing time on the server, but also the network lag of the return trip, and then your client displays the result. Including the fluid motion of battle and random lag that is subtle enough to not really be a spike, and you have a fairly wide margin of timing error. To the player, it can feel fairly sluggish because of that.

Games overcome this either by going peer to peer, leaving everything on the client side - which means it's open to the possibility of client side exploiting/cheating; or by allowing the client to handle some more of the work, using predictive movement of other characters on the client side to make it appear that everything is happening in real time (But, again it's open to exploit on the client side). That works much of the time, but if the movement predictions are wrong, when the attack is processed by the server, and the client updates, the action can change jarringly - "Hey! I swear I was TOTALLY out of the AoE in time!" On their screen they probably were, but...

SE's client server model puts more on the server and less on the client in order to avoid exploits.

The truth is that unless game clients communicate peer to peer, the network lag of the process will inevitably impact time sensitive actions. FFXIV is emphatically a client server game, not peer to peer, no matter what you do there will always be inherent lag, that can be masked to an extent, but will never be removed.

The most that using a VPN service would do is reduce the total network lag by reducing the number of hops, but there will still be some network lag, server lag and client lag. Even if the polling interval on the server was as low as 200ms, that's still 12 frames of action at 60fps, which doesn't even include the overall network lag, or client processing. I honestly don't see how you expect a MMO to truly perform like it is a real time combat game such as Tekken.

Many of the issues in that topic you linked sound to me like they are impacted more by animation lock than anything else.