Tracert

[Setheasy]

Hi all. I'm looking for some help with Tracert. The last 2 weeks, I've been having big lag spikes, and connection issues 90006. It happens on my 2 characters on 2 different data centers. I ping my wifi and the primal data center using cmd prompt, no dropped packets. I ran a Tracert to Primal, and I get 1-2 * on line 7, and 2-3 * on line 16, with request timed out half the time.

Can anyone tell me what this means? Is it my side or SQE side?

Thanks!

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Tracert (trace route) shows samples of the hops on the route towards your destination (i.e. the IP/Server). If you have an occasional asterisk (*) that means a request may have timed out during the attempt, but that would not terminate your connection on the spot.

If a hop has 3x * (request timed out) consistently, that means that reaching that traffic going through that node could be impacted somehow. Your line 7 and 16 can differ completely from another's, as it depends on your internet service provider selecting the route for you via their configurations to reach the destination IP of the server. If the two different data centers are of the same region, it could be that they actually are in the same building and thus it makes no difference.

It would help if you could provide either a screenshot or a paste of the commandline from line 3 or line 4 onwards (basically without your personal IP/internet service provider information) to get a better idea what could be happening here.

[Setheasy]

Thanks for the info and help! Havent had to ever worry about this before, so troubleshooting the issue is a learning experience. The 2 data canters were on Famfrit and Materia, so NA and Oceania. Not sure if its relevant to this, but recently i havent even been able to launch the game unless its as Admin, otherwise I get a "Unable to complete version update" error. Pic below for log.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

The tracert snip pet shows nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional timeout here and there is normal behaviour.

Based on the list of server IPs on IsFFXIVUp [ https://is.xivup.com/adv ], hop 16 is related to FFXIV, but is probably just the north american login/character server. Longer loads there are normal and generally don't affect gameplay.

Going by a reddit thread talking about error codes, I learn the following:

90006 is network error from your ffxiv client end where client can't communicate to server.

90001/90002 is network error from server.

Assuming your errors are 90006 ones and nothing in your home network has gone wrong like bad/damaged/broken cables, defective devices or extreme amounts of bandwidth/internet speed being hogged by people living with you and using it, it could very well be, that the issue is mainly some nodes in route to the server have mad hiccups at some point.

Without a VPN or significant manual networking, this is controlled by your internet service provider on where your traffic goes through. Have a similar case with twelve99 nodes in Europe thanks to Telekom. Basically, it's out of your and SE's hand.

If the issue comes up frequently enough, it may be worth considering to invest into a VPN service and let connections to FFXIV route through that tunnel. I've been using ExitLag like this to great success, but you have many options regarding that.

It's a stable experience and may even improve your overall latency.

[Setheasy]

Well shoot. Was hoping there was a way to fix this without having to pay even MORE money on something like a VPN. The fact that this is the only game with this issue is strange, all other online games work fine no matter where their servers are. Thank you for your help with the issue.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Well shoot. Was hoping there was a way to fix this without having to pay even MORE money on something like a VPN. The fact that this is the only game with this issue is strange, all other online games work fine no matter where their servers are. Thank you for your help with the issue.

Life's hard. But honestly, neither Square Enix/Creative Studio III nor you are at fault here. Internet Service Providers are a fickle mistress. Though I can't recommend a paid VPN enough. They don't all cost like 10$ monthly either, there is likely cheaper alternatives that also work for general use. It's worth looking into for a good deal + is good for online privacy from trackers.