Regarding ingame server lag serious issues

[verdemon]

The server seems to be chosen at character creation and/or world selection.

My main on Midgardsormr connects at 199.91.189.26 which gives me problems. Created a new character on Exodus. This one is located at 199.91.189.38. Just logged off after playing for an hour straight.

So if you can't wait to play you might try making a new one until you get a "good" server. Also this goes to show it is SE and not the ISP, at least in my case.

[Miburo]

Been having the same issues. 199.91.189.30:55029 is what looks like is my connection number thing. I'm not entirely sure I'm looking at the right thing though, haha.

I'm really glad this thread exists. Now I'm a bit more hopeful something might actually get fixed. Thanks guys, good job.

[Ricje]

Was 199.91.189.26:55022 for me last night. Then when I logged in just now it was different ( 199.91.189.74:54994).
A friend of mine is currently on 199.91.189.22:55029 and he isn't experiencing any problems at all

Edit: Now it shows 2 IPs. One being 199.91.189.74 with 54994 as port, the other is 199.91.189.38 with 55030 as port. the 74 one already had over 4% packet loss within a minute, the other started getting packet loss after a minute.

Both are currently showing packet loss equal to what I had yesterday when I tried it.

Edit:
After about an hour:

199.91.189.38:55030;

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |
|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|                             192.34.76.2 -    3 | 3703 | 3601 |   99 |  102 |  183 |  101 |
|                          199.91.189.234 -    3 | 3675 | 3566 |  101 |  102 |  264 |  102 |
|                           199.91.189.38 -    3 | 3707 | 3606 |   98 |  101 |  104 |  102 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|

199.91.189.74:54994;

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |
|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
|                             192.34.76.2 -    3 | 3688 | 3587 |   98 |  102 |  190 |  100 |
|                          199.91.189.234 -    3 | 3692 | 3592 |  100 |  101 |  253 |  101 |
|                           199.91.189.74 -    3 | 3708 | 3612 |  100 |  100 |  103 |  100 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|

[Stoy]

You connect to a series of servers based on your IP's geo-location, it varies slightly due to the programming and the load-balancing system involved and the connection-time-out interval appears to be set to quite a high number (this is bad). Port number has nothing to do with anything, it is simply a method of getting client connections connected to a server in a balanced manner (see: Port Exhaustion, however you can have multiple clients on the same port in this scenario). Any port after 49152 is dynamic, FFXIV seems to use the range 54992 > 55551. Regardless of which port you are connected to you will be connected to the IP of "a server" - but not exactly, as I will go on to explain.

So... Ormuco is a "high bandwidth" company, offering their bandwidth as a cost, perfectly legal. As far as we are concerned, we are connecting to a host in Canada, HOWEVER the official FFXIV game servers we connect to are NOT hosted within the Ormuco premises. The bandwidth Ormuco holds is transparent and can be assigned to whichever service (paying client) that they decide to. So a fraction of their bandwidth (based on payment amount) will be assigned virtually over a secure gateway to the official FFXIV servers most likely based in Japan (SE HQ?). MMO companies do this because they are scared of letting their server-side software fall into the wrong hands.

So to conclude what is happening;
Paying Customers "Us" (Clients) > Ormuco's bandwidth >~ Location with the Physical Servers.
There is a delay between Ormuco and the Physical Servers, but you cannot see it as the transparency of the network is hiding the fact that the servers we appear to be connecting to are not in the place we are connecting to (see: IP Layer Transparency - Firewalls and Routing). They also have some very bad load balancing between the physical servers, one gets COMPLETELY full (Priority Activation) before balancing onto the next (causing the server to lag hardware wise).

This is far beyond our realms of fixing, in my personal experience working as a network administrator on another very popular MMO this does not end well for anyone involved and usually ends up with the servers being hosted in their respective regions AS THEY SHOULD BE, pay for the package where you lock out the Network Provider from accessing the servers.

Heed my words.

[Leela]

Since Monday I have the same issue described, every 2 minutes or so everything and everyone but me freezes, I can still run around and cast, type, open menu's etc.

This will last for about 2 seconds and sometimes big once last up to 10 seconds, then everything unfreezes and all the effects come at once.

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

|                                      WinMTR statistics                                   |

|                       Host              -   %  | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |

|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|

|                         --------------- -    0 |   52 |   52 |    0 |    0 |    1 |    0 |

|                  ---------------------- -    0 |   52 |   52 |   14 |   14 |   21 |   15 |

|                  ---------------------- -    0 |   52 |   52 |   20 |   21 |   28 |   20 |

|                  ---------------------- -    0 |   52 |   52 |   20 |   25 |   32 |   21 |

|     	           ---------------------- -    0 |   52 |   52 |   20 |   25 |   32 |   22 |

|           rt2-rou-1022.NL.eurorings.net -    0 |   52 |   52 |   19 |   20 |   56 |   20 |

|          asd2-rou-1044.NL.eurorings.net -    0 |   52 |   52 |   17 |   21 |   64 |   18 |

|        asd-s6-rou-1041.NL.eurorings.net -    0 |   52 |   52 |   17 |   18 |   37 |   18 |

|    te8-5.ccr01.ams05.atlas.cogentco.com -    0 |   52 |   52 |   18 |   37 |  214 |   60 |

|te0-7-0-4.mpd21.ams03.atlas.cogentco.com -    0 |   52 |   52 |   18 |   19 |   28 |   18 |

|te0-6-0-6.ccr21.lpl01.atlas.cogentco.com -    0 |   52 |   52 |   30 |   30 |   31 |   30 |

|te0-4-0-3.ccr21.ymq02.atlas.cogentco.com -    0 |   52 |   52 |   99 |   99 |  102 |   99 |

|                            38.122.42.34 -    0 |   52 |   52 |  102 |  103 |  105 |  103 |

|                   No response from host -  100 |   10 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |

|                             192.34.76.2 -    3 |   48 |   47 |  113 |  116 |  154 |  113 |

|                          199.91.189.234 -    3 |   48 |   47 |  114 |  114 |  124 |  114 |

|                           199.91.189.33 -    3 |   48 |   47 |  114 |  114 |  118 |  115 |

|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|

   WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

This sudden issue is making it really hard to play, and taking away the fun, during boss fights I'm continuously nervous that is's gonna happen at a bad time, I'm even adjusting my healing style and saving cool-downs for lag spikes, and not for boss abilities....

[Whippet]

There has been a network maintenance last night time to see if it fixed the problem

[Ricje]

-snip-

Found the middle man found his number, called them and explain the whole situation, they asked me SS and all, and they will have a conference with SE and their employes surely tomorrow to talk about this issue

Cuz Middleman didnt seem to know about the problem

Let's hope what he said was true and that they sort out the problem today

[Paintballrulz]

Sadly it didn;t fix anything , the worst part in this issue is we , the players , most likely know more than SE themselves , because if they knew what we knew they could probably find a fix really quick but it's been 4 days now and not even a word about it and the proof they know nothing about it or how to fix it was that Network maintenance , it didn;t fix anything.

[Horatium]

Actually, a server have multiple network devices (with different IPs) that's why you see different IPs on same server.
That means, they have a routing table, which route us from their router on different ways to the same server, maybe some devices are broken (or not working properly). They have to find out the problem, because they work there...

We are only guessing here, but i hope someone from their NOC read here and see some ideas... but i hope they dont think like this: "we have no problem here, you have problems with your ISP, deal with them"

[Ricje]

I actually tweeted the link to this thread to them last night but it seems they just don't care :|