Ping Pong

jrgray93

I've been gone a couple of months and just came back to find... my ping has doubled?

Wut.

I used to run with 40-70ms ping from around Cincinnati. Now I'm getting 120-150 on average. My internet is the same, my system is the same, my router is the same. I still ping 1ms to the closest Speedtest.net server. I can still ping other areas of the country (even those reportedly near the ESO servers) and get 40-70ms.

Something has changed between me and the ESO servers. I also play from a second location from time to time, with worse internet. It's entirely different hardware with a different ISP. It is now almost unplayable from the second location.

Anyone else notice a dramatic worsening of ping in the last couple of months? Is it just me? I mean, I always knew ESO ran on Windows Server 2000 machines, but this is killing me.

Nestor

My Latency is consistently in the low 100 Ms range in the game. Figure 40 to 60Ms to get off the cable modem plant to the Internet Core, this is about right.

As for getting 1Ms Pings to a speed test server that is more than likely because it is in the same headend or switch room as your router.

jrgray93

Well, the 1ms was just to illustrate that nothing has changed in my home. The 120-140 isn't terrible. I'm just curious as to why is is, on average, double what it used to be.

Nestor

I never checked it before a few weeks ago, I don't know if the Latency display in the UI is new or something I just never looked for before.

For the record, I don't notice any in game weirdness or lag until the latency gets to 180 to 200 Ms or more, and I have seen it as high as 300 or more and the game is still OK for a brief period. Although prolonged 300 range latency will usually get me disconnected from the game.

However one thing you can do is kick everyone off your router, either by disconnecting their wires or shutting down the wireless or using Mac Filtering to only allow you to connect, then see if anything changes. I did have a friend who started having issues all of sudden in online games. It turned out his neighbor had canceled his cable modem service, but was leaching off of him for netflix streaming, for his entire family.

If you have a cheaper router (Linksys WRT54G anyone?), it may not handle multiple simultaneous connections that well. The WRT54 basically pukes if there are more than one connection going on. This game does create more than one connection so that could be a problem that would not be uncovered by a latency display. Most mid line or better routers are fine in this regard.

jrgray93

Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm actually using a wired connection to an ASUS RT-N66U with my networks / clients monitored and no SSID broadcast.

Elsonso

How are people getting ping values (are we all getting them from the same place and same remote machine)?

What does ZOS consider to be an acceptable value?

OrangeTheCat

I don't know my ESO ping. All I know is that when I play GW2 the game is fast and responsive but when I play ESO it is laggy as all get out.

I'm certain it is the delay between the client updating the screen and the response back from the ESO server (I guess what else could it be) but it is so noticeable when my screen is telling me my character stepped out of the red area and is a full "body length" or more out of it and yet I still get hit. Or the palpable delay between invoking an ability with a key press and then the wait for it to actually do something.

Same network, same router, same PC, etc, totally different experience.

Nestor

lordrichter wrote: »

How are people getting ping values (are we all getting them from the same place and same remote machine)?

I don't know if this is from a UI Addon or not, but in the options for the UI, you can choose to show your Latency and FPS. It displays right on top (bottom?) of the chat window. I forget where in the stock options and choices I selected this, but its in there.

Note I don't have any addons that are supposed to show my Latency and FPS so I am betting its a stock thing recently added by a patch.

Rev Rielle

Nestor wrote: »

...
For the record, I don't notice any in game weirdness or lag until the latency gets to 180 to 200 Ms or more, and I have seen it as high as 300 or more and the game is still OK for a brief period. Although prolonged 300 range latency will usually get me disconnected from the game.
...

Playing from the Asia/Pacific region the latency here never goes below 270 ms, and is more often around 300 ms. It is certainly playable but it takes some adjusting to (e.g. you have less time to react to block an attack; you have to be more 'predictive' and less 'reactive').

I know it's not a perfect analogy, but the change in latency to around 300 ms you describe likely indicates an underlying temporary connection issue, and that is why you might get disconnected. Not so much because of the actual latency itself.

In the last few months or so the latency doesn't seem to have changed much at all - if anything - from over this side of the world.

whsprwind

I've also noticed that certain times can be much laggier than most

For me it's around 10pm-12am JST where the ping gets noticably higher like they're doing some backend work or something

Dagonna

I'm with jrgray93, I think the lag has become worse. I can get high 90s to low 100s ms latency. However, the latency will ebb and flow and just mushroom to the 200s, 300s. and then back to 100. Occasionally I see a red 999, and then back to a nice 100. Yet my system and networking have not changed since the betas in early 2014. I see this at about any time, day or night, and at times when I know that no one else in the house is streaming Netflix or otherwise hammering our internet connection. All other Internet access such as Netflix have no issues. I have not played other MMOs for comparison purposes. My guess is that the holidays and vacations have caused extra load on the servers over the past 3 weeks.

RinaldoGandolphi

I have no lag anymore, and have reduced my ping significantly.

1. the In-game latency monitor is not accurate, so don't even bother relying on it.

2. In my location(perhaps parts of the east coast to the mid-west) there is a Black Hole router between me and ZOS servers owned by one the CDN backbones. It will not accept packets any larger then 1440 bytes or else the packet gets fragmented.

However, since snakeoil salesmen and router vendors market on the idea of "stealth" and ICMP is bad (both of which are false), the router that won't accept packets sends back an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Fragmentation Needed (Type 3, Code 4) message containing its max packet size, allowing the source host to reduce its packet size appropriately, but since routers you buy advertise themselves as "stealth" these messages are dropped and the MTU is not negotiated correctly. Some routers implement MSS Clamping, but not all of these methods are implemented correctly and are not reliable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_MTU_Discovery

In a nutshell, go into your router and drop your MTU to 1440 and use the NetSH command in Windows to also lower your MTU to 1440 and watch your lag disappear. This game now runs as smooth as it did at launch prior to them putting in the lighting patch.

Here is how to use the Netsh command to change your MTU value in Windows

http://www.richard-slater.co.uk/archives/2009/10/23/change-your-mtu-under-vista-windows-7-or-windows-8/

You will have to log into your router and find the MTU setting in it and change it to 1440, each one is different in how to do this but it has made a difference for me because that Black Hole router is no longer fragmenting my packets.

That router is not owned by ZOS, its not their fault, has nothing to do with them, and its unfair to expect them to fix it. Im sure the owner will get around to fixing it at some point, but its not the first nor the last Blackhole router i have found on the Internet. Itds pretty much the reason i always run an MTU value below the default, because you never know when you may get a network path that don't like those large packets.

Welka

It's your punishment for leaving the game for 2 months! :P

Welcome back

Jaxsun

Yes, its worse

Elsonso

This is interesting information, @woodsro‌.

Before people change their router and Windows setting to 1440, from what is probably 1500, they need to make sure that MTU discovery is not working and, if not, that 1500 is not the maximum MTU for the path to the server.

Since pinging one of the ZOS NA megaserver IP addresses is generally unproductive, it is hard to tell what the max MTU is for the route. It cannot be determined whether all ICMP traffic is being blocked, including the ones used for MTU discovery, or just the ping traffic.

Bottom line is that unless you know what MTU is and what the different values mean to you and how you use the internet, I would refrain from playing with it.

RinaldoGandolphi

Thats fair enough, but a lower MTU is better in some ways. There have been studies on this and the bottom line is:

Lower MTU= lower latency but slightly less throughput(download speed)

Higher MTU - more throughput but higher latency.

http://www.speedguide.net/articles/mtu-what-difference-does-it-make-111

Its always prudent to run a slightly lower mtu then the 1500 standard to avoid fragmentation issues. Almost all consumer routers block the ICMP codes required for PMTUD to work. This is why they use MSS Clamping, but every one does this differently.

At my work MTU is not an issue because I am allowing the ICMP codes to function so PMTUD works properly. Lowering your MTU won't hurt your connection, in fact often times it will make it faster.

On Comcast web pages load much faster on a 1440 mtu then at 1500.

As long as you don't go below 1370 your probably fine, thats the lowest i would go though. YMMV.

Nestor

lordrichter wrote: »

Bottom line is that unless you know what MTU is and what the different values mean to you and how you use the internet, I would refrain from playing with it.

The biggest issue with MTU is setting it larger than one of the devices in the path can handle. So, setting your router to 1440 and not setting Windows to 1440 would be very bad. However, it may not be the solution for everyone as not all devices in the path have this problem. Most devices in the Internet Core and with ISPs work with Jumbo Frames (9000 Byte Payload, typical setting is a bit larger than this).

So, it would only be edge devices or customer prem devices that could have an MTU issue. Note, if you do have an MTU mismatch along the path, network speeds are drastically affected, not just slightly affected. In other words, the game would be barely playable, not just have some latency.

You can see how bad it gets by setting the MTU on your router to something like 700. Note, you may need to Factory Reset the router to undo this as the MTU Mismatch may make it so you can't even connect to the router. So I would not experiment on my active router, just an old one I don't care about if you are curious about how MTU mismatches can affect your network.

Tonnopesce

Strange fact i've buied a mid end laptop for my wife (intel i5, nvidia geforce 840 mobile 4 gig of ram and the ethernet is slower than my pc ) and i get on wi fi like 40 ms ping and the download speed for the patches go at 1.2 mbs.......
with my rig (i7 2x geforce 660 ti 32 gig of ram better ethernet and wired) on the same router i get 80 ms ping and the download goes at 550k......... WTF..
how is it possible!!!!!!

RinaldoGandolphi

Nestor is right as I said you set the value both in windows and your router.

There are black hole router on the internet today, devices that don't like big packets. TCP/IP was built very resilient, it will fall back on other methods if pmtud is blocked, its just much slower.

Lag, connection hangs, etc are symptoms of broken PMTUD connections that pass the 3 way TCP handshake then stall while transferring.

Bottom line is if you want to adjust your mtu, your going to have to experiment and find the best value for you. 1440 seems the best for my, a colleague of mine uses 1395, its really just a game of tuning and finding the best value.