Request for information: ISPs and P2P throttling

[KMarsara]

I can only speculate as to what the issue is as I don't have root access to Tata racks and Ormucos fiber.

I have no doubt that the Square is aware of the issue and that the servers going down for maintenance is, in part, to alleviate the latency spikes. Though the client is owned by Square, their servers and their fiber nodes are run by another company. The bonus to this is that Square doesn't have to field or staff techs to monitor and maintain servers. Square also doesn't have to buy servers so they save money. The drawback is when something goes wrong, they are helpless to actually correct the issue. All they can do is field master tickets on Tata and Ormuco CRM databases.

The maintenance scheduled for 9/11/13 is quite long. This actually tells us that there is going to be hardware changes and upgrades. 2-3 hour maintenance are more software (client) side. 8-12 hours signifies that hardware on the MPLS and servers are being modified.

If the fix today doesn't correct the issues users are seeing, there are a couple of things to try:

1.) If using wifi, attempt to hardline the connection. Does the congestion clear up?

2.) Be sure to open and forward the ports Square has detailed in a stickied thread in the tech support Forums.

3.) You may clear the issue using a third party program such as PingZapper or the like. I prefer to not use this method. Using a third party program leaves you at the mercy of the program and the company who services it. This is a band aid for the root problem. You would essentially be treating the symptom, not curing the disease.

4.) VPN's have been reported to help clear the issue. This is a gamble as VPN's work just like Tata does. Multiple users and the connection slows down and lags. The VPN may be able to re route you on a different route path essentially avoiding the high traffic data centers and ports.



I had a few questions about your data. Are these polls before or after PingZapper? The reason I ask is that you have an extra hop through a data center that I haven't seen on any trace routes I've found on the Forums:

13 61 ms 62 ms 109 ms te8-3.dr10.mtl.iweb.com [67.205.127.238]

This data center is run by iweb: http://iweb.com/about/vision

I haven't seen this hop on either my own, or others trace routes. I've also noticed that your ping times are relatively low and are pretty close together (60-120ms). I wonder if this is because of the scrubber, or if you're routing through another data center that Square may have picked up.



Verizon, though meaning well, is inaccurate in stating the issue is with the Game Provider. Looking over your parsing data, I see that you have low ping times. I don't see a whole lot of fluctuation. What I do see is the glaring time out requests. Your connection to the server port (Tata) is either congested or is dropping due to load. Yours is an excellent example of how the server you're connecting to behaves when congested or not specd to handle the amount of volume it's seeing.

Your issue unfortunately cannot be corrected by any via client side means. This is an issue with the actual server load and shows that the racks are congested and cannot negotiate with the amount of users it sees at this time. Until the server provider expands the servers (partition/addition) and redistributes the port assignments, the issue will persist.

Apologies for the long post!

you are just so awesome finally someone that can shed some light into this problem

[Kahlmodra]

Time Warner Cable
united states - Plano, Texas
Signal breaks every 2 hours when playing FF XIV. Any other time, it's solid.

[Yolandi]

- Name of ISP : VOO
- Country of Residence : Belgium
- When does the problem occur : Always :/

[Jacin]

Marishi-Ten
"I had a few questions about your data. Are these polls before or after PingZapper? The reason I ask is that you have an extra hop through a data center that I haven't seen on any trace routes I've found on the Forums:

13 61 ms 62 ms 109 ms te8-3.dr10.mtl.iweb.com [67.205.127.238]

This data center is run by iweb: http://iweb.com/about/vision

I haven't seen this hop on either my own, or others trace routes. I've also noticed that your ping times are relatively low and are pretty close together (60-120ms). I wonder if this is because of the scrubber, or if you're routing through another data center that Square may have picked up."

Those ping times are all pre-Ping Zapper. I didn't bother running ping or tracert with Ping Zapper because the game was running without issue. If the problem persists after maintenance is over, and I suspect that it will due to there being no mention of a lag fix in any of the notes I could find, I'll run ping a tracert with Ping Zapper up and post those as well. I went ahead and bought 30 days of time for it, only $3.99, non-recurring billing, and it works.....so I figured what the hell.

[White_Glint]

- Frontier
- United States (Indiana)
- Seems to start after 8 PM EST

[Nonolepyro]

ISP:Orange
Country:France
Constant lag but it becomes worse and unplayable beetween 6pm GMT+1 and 9am GMT+1. As a healer it makes Primal HM fights impossible due to 2-3s delay in every actions and 4-5s freezes

[Jadi]

Hi guys,

Network guru JD here. I see you guys posting ping results here and things like that. Keep in mind that ping (ICMP) is a different kind of network protocol than what the game uses (UDP). Also this does not indicate a problem on SE's end really at all.

This information is meaningless to post because it's not the same kind of data and it doesn't follow the same rules, SE does not control your network speed, SE can not improve jitter (PDV), the route packets take to SE (the number of hops) is not under their control nor the speed and latency of those hops.

What SE hopes to resolve here is that encrypted UDP packets for the game may in fact look very similar to encrypted UDP packets for P2P so strict ISP's could in fact be flagging this data as P2P traffic and doing QOS filtering to it (reducing it's priority) or blocking it out right.. so unless your testing exactly the same kind of data in the same way then your not going to see accurate results.

What you should do is exactly what they ask for, give them the information so they can contact the ISP for whitelisting.

[Noah_]

snipped

thank you for the insightful info, but this does not explain why many of us had no issue at all during early access and open beta, only started to have this issue AFTER they added more server, so if our ISPs are seeing their data as P2P, they sure did not see it as such before the server add, wouldn't it be easier for SE to change their "encrypted UDP packets", instead of having to contact each of these ISPs....

[CrisGer]

I had extreme lag for the first time this morning..so bad i could not move at times I thought it was due to server overload as the world was full....still may be part of it but there may be ISP blackage going on too if the packet info is off and rings P2P bells. I hope it can be adjusted if so.

[Neviskio]

Posting again, my game has gotten way worse and now is unplayable.My isp confirmed they don't consider ffxiv as p2p, no throttling, all ports open, they keep asking me to bug you guys since it's your problem(I kinda agree, no other mmo has more than 20 ping for me and 0 delay)

I now have a permanent 5 sec delay, people warping and rubberbanding, since last maintenance it has gotten 10x worse...Ping is always around 100 thugh when I do my ping test even when game is unplayable.

- Name of ISP: air2bite srl
- Country of Residence: Italy
- When does the problem occur: It occured sparingly now it's all the time latency, a bare minimum of 5-6 seconds on everything, people warping, plenty of r0..
- ticket number: Ticket#2013090910000022

I'm really pissed right now -_-