Reporting Issues Resulting from the North American Data Center Relocation

[Gongan]

Type of Issue/Feedback: Lag at the same time every night
Name of your Internet Service Provider (ISP): Comcast
State/Country: Mississippi, USA
Date/Time: It occurs consistently around 11 PM CST and continues into the night
World Name: Cactuar
Frequency: It's happened every night that I've started playing this late [Edit: Started getting this lag again about 8 PM CST and my VPN once again fixed it and once again when I turned it back off I had lag again. Seriously ridiculous that this is the only game I need a VPN to play without lagging. It's not like I live in another country from the server. I live in the US.] [Edit2: It's happening again today 6 PM CST. This is earlier than usual. Yesterday's was earlier than usual. It seems to be getting worse. Once again VPN fixes it completely. Logging in without VPN causes lag to resume. This is incredibly frustrating. Can something finally be done about this? It's only been 2+ years.][Edit3: My brother was on today around the same time. This gave me the opportunity to wait for some lag to kick in for both of us. It happened, so I logged out and logged back in with the VPN and sure enough he was lagging still and I was no longer lagging on the same internet. This just further confirms everything I've been saying. Luckily I've found a much cheaper VPN that's quality isn't too much worse than my previous, but my previous was draining me of so much money I wasn't comfortable buying the physical CE anymore. I ended up canceling it and buying a digital collector's edition. There's monetary value in this issue being resolved. I'd have had that extra cash to spend on your products instead of it going to some third party VPN service. Maybe that can motivate some change.]


Some background on why this upsets me so much. I used to suffer from the Level 3 routing issues during Heavenswards and have been paying for a VPN every since. It's the only game/MMO I've needed a VPN to be able to play because it used to occur during prime raid time (about 8 PM CST and on into the night). I found threads about it and learned I wasn't the only one. The VPN would fix it completely.

I didn't play a lot between when the data center relocation happened and Stormblood launch, so I hadn't noticed/found the new window for when the lag hits. I had experienced it once or twice during that time, but hadn't realized it and wasn't sure if it was just my internet because I wasn't playing consistently at the time. When Stormblood launched, I was only staying up to about 8 PM CST so I didn't run into it during this time either. Now my sleep schedule has changed and I've been playing at 11 PM CST and on into the night and I began to notice a trend. It was 2 or 3 nights in a row and I'd tell the person I'm playing with that I'm lagging. I noticed the time was about the same every night. This last night I made sure to not only turn my VPN on and continue playing, but to also turn it back off and see if lag continues. Sure enough with the VPN it was fixed completely, without it continued to lag.

I was worried when I saw the data center relocated in California. I know the move was just for space and not for anyone's latency, but California is the same place that League of Legends servers were located when they kept having a bunch of issues with east coast Comcast users. League of Legends is the only other game I've had this issue with, but they actively looked to remedy it for their users. Sure enough, I've found the new window that it begins lagging and can be immediately fixed with a VPN, so I'm 100% positive it's not on my end. I hoped that at the very least I would no longer need to pay a separate subscription for a VPN after the relocation, but my worries about California as a location became true.

It's really wearing on me. I really don't want to, and may soon decide I can't keep paying for a separate VPN just to be able to raid during prime raiding hours. If that happens, I may be likely to move games completely and stop investing so much time and money into this one. I think it's getting extremely ridiculous that nothing has been done about this issue. I hoped so much that moving the server would fix it. It had such huge potential to make so many of your players happy. Not only with issues like mine. The move had the chance to make ping better across all of NA and fix routing issues, but instead we just moved from one coast to another. It was a bit of a slap in the face even if that wasn't the focus of the move.