Living in China is awsome, but ....

Chersiphron

... playing this game is like this: Lag, lag, lag, lag, and lag.
*selecting [Open door]* --- Wait two minutes --- Door opens / disconnected
Even bashing with the sword doesn't work properly. Sprinting cancels after activation, spells aren't fired until the mob suddenly dies by someone else killing it.
I've opened all ports in my router, not just for the game but also for PSN network. I play on a 10Mb hardline (connected with a cable, not Wi-Fi).

The game is completely unplayable. I've tried both EU servers and NA servers, and it seems there is a miniscule amount of better ping on the NA servers, but FAR from playable.

Is it just me? Is it just us in China? Or is it actually a server-problem? Is it like this for other countries too?
I really want to play this game but....

DeeBeet

But there's no Sea server.

OzJohnD

perhaps its the government filter ?

Chersiphron

The government filter only blocks things that they deem harmful to the public. And if its blocked... its BLOCKED... not slowed down

Rev Rielle

It's pretty bad in Australia too, not quite that bad as what you've explained (though at times it certainly is). I think it's more a latency problem for us though being so far away from the servers, rather than an inherent lag problem.

Chersiphron

Perhaps you in Australia is closer to US than us... We are just far away from everything

Chersiphron

But how is it for, for example, Indians? Indonesia? Thailand? Japan? There MUST be some Japanese people playing this game. (Or some non-Japanese living in Japan)

PBpsy

I am not sure it is the distance from the server, since the performance can be terrible even if am less than 500 miles(~800km) from the NA servers.

edit: reduced mysticism .

Chersiphron

PBpsy wrote: »

I am not user it is the distance since the performance can be terrible even if am less then n 500miles from the NA servers.

If I decrypted your mystical sentence correctly, then I understand you are less than 500 miles from the servers but still have terrible connection? I see. Well, I'm not familiar with miles... but I guess I'm much, much further away

Aeradon

Played from Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and many parts of Indonesia. There's hardly any latency difference from all these South East Asian countries.

The ping used to average 150-200 with a high of 300 before I took a break from the game which is roughly 9 months back. It was stable enough to do hardcore PVP, and was most definitely not the cause of the lag/crashes.

Just got back into the game one or two weeks back, ping average 280-350 with a high of 1200-1500, and occasionally spike up to 4000+ or 12000+, PVP is since then impossible, when playing in dungeons or facing bosses, I had to be extra wary of my positioning and play very very safe just so if it suddenly spikes, I won't die.

Chersiphron

@Aeradon : thats very interesting!

So... perhaps the distance is actually not the problem here at all

PBpsy

Chersiphron wrote: »

PBpsy wrote: »

I am not user it is the distance since the performance can be terrible even if am less then n 500miles from the NA servers.

If I decrypted your mystical sentence correctly, then I understand you are less than 500 miles from the servers but still have terrible connection? I see. Well, I'm not familiar with miles... but I guess I'm much, much further away

Ok I reduced my mysticism from my sentence. I should go to sleep. My connection is fine enough for other stuff and pvp can go into strange places even when I have >100 latency..

Chersiphron

PBpsy wrote: »

Chersiphron wrote: »

PBpsy wrote: »

I am not user it is the distance since the performance can be terrible even if am less then n 500miles from the NA servers.

If I decrypted your mystical sentence correctly, then I understand you are less than 500 miles from the servers but still have terrible connection? I see. Well, I'm not familiar with miles... but I guess I'm much, much further away

Ok I reduced my mysticism from my sentence. I should go to sleep. My connection is fine enough for other stuff and pvp can go into strange places even when I have >100 latency..

Haha, nice one. I read your post again, and it is much more understandable now Thank you!

Chersiphron

Ok, I think we can conclude that the distance is not the issue. So I'm not going to start a riot over getting Asian servers

However, it seems we have a whole other issue at hand. Crappy servers in general. Or perhaps its simply the fact that the game just went live on consoles and they were simply not ready for the amount of new people. Well... that sucks. But will it be fixed in time? I guess thats the question, then.

Sleep

A lot of people playing ESO in China are using VPN and they have a latency of 200 to 300 or so. I don't know if it works for PS4 though. If you're in Shanghai, I heard there's an internet service of China Telecom called 国际精品网 which boosts the connection speed with oversea servers.

BigInGlenumbra

Living in China is awesome? Lol

Aeradon

BigInGlenumbra wrote: »

Living in China is awesome? Lol

You obviously haven't been to China. Shanghai and Beijing are just filled with expats who don't miss home at all, the place is so developed and is still developing at a rate no other countries could that people could hardly recognise it if they were away for just 3 months. And the government's new focus on Nanjing, it's just insanely fascinating to watch it grow.

Bromburak

It has nothing todo with the server but with routing from providers and peering of internet exchange points. This can be very challenging for some games and connections in general. Game servers in Europe for example always had problems with this because Data Centers are in Frankfurt and some problems were related to the internet exchange points like DE-CIX.

Blizzard had a hard time with this with WoW in the past and as well Arenanet with GW2, both had to work together with telekom to get these problems solved and to calm down million of players. One reason why Europeans always get a game server in Frankfurt because it makes no sense being routed all over the place especially not if a game is being announced on other continents like europe. As well there is impact on provider dependencies overseas. For that reason in your case no one will look into this.

Good luck Chersiphron.

Corrupted_Soul

It's laggy at times in Australia, but 100% playable. Just need a decent connection!

hamgatan

depends entirely on the provider and where their BGP routing priorities are handled.

nearly all submarine cables running off the west coast of the US dump into Japan first and filter to the rest of Asia from there. Straightest line distance reasons.

In China, the only subsea links coming into the country are as follows

- Qingdao (Single Fiber from Incheon, KR and Dual Redundant Fiber from Busan, KR, endpoint in US)
- Chongming (One US Bound Link which is on the same link with Shanghai and Nanhui, and a couple of shared trans Asia loops)
- Shanghai (One Major Trans-Asia Loop , Two major European Links)
- Nanhui (One Fiber going back to US, one to Shanghai, One in a Loop around Asia)
- Fuzhou (One Single Fiber going back to Taipei)
- Shantou (One dual Redundant Fiber that goes back to the US via half of NE Asia, One Link back to Europe and Several Trans Asia Links)

...and that's it. I'm not counting Hong Kong because it's not China and never will be.

The issue is beyond the government Packet Inspection that's happening at your gateways (and believe me it is..), you have several rather large hops of being bandied around before you even get onto US Servers. It depends entirely on your ISP's relationships and upstream providers. For example if you are in Shanghai and with an ISP that prioritizes its traffic outbound in its BGP Tables over the SeaMeWe network you may be better off playing on the EU Server because that link will hit Europe and THEN it will be routed off to the US from there over some other partner network (Hardly anyone uses OSPF in that context).

Easiest way to tell though where your traffic is going..

fire up your command prompt (cmd.exe) and type the following; tracert Bethesda.com

Paste the results back here in a post. That will give us an indication of how many routing hops you're travelling to get to the US (Note there may be results that come up with ***'s but that's just because those routers aren't responding to ICMP traffic).

It should look something like this

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.1.1.254
2 22 ms 21 ms 21 ms lo0.bng1.per1.on.ii.net [150.101.32.85]
3 20 ms 20 ms 20 ms ae8.cr2.per1.on.ii.net [150.101.33.124]
4 226 ms 224 ms 224 ms ae1.cr1.adl6.on.ii.net [150.101.33.36]
5 267 ms 254 ms 258 ms ae4.br1.syd7.on.ii.net [150.101.33.34]
6 247 ms 246 ms 247 ms te0-1-1-2.br1.sjc2.on.ii.net [150.101.33.193]
7 227 ms 223 ms 227 ms sl-st31-sj-.sprintlink.net [144.223.242.137]
8 219 ms 232 ms 220 ms 144.232.12.150
9 224 ms 224 ms 224 ms ae10.sjc12.ip4.gtt.net [173.205.61.5]
10 299 ms 297 ms 296 ms xe-1-1-2.nyc39.ip4.gtt.net [89.149.191.17]
11 296 ms 295 ms 296 ms webair-gw.ip4.gtt.net [199.229.230.206]
12 296 ms 297 ms 296 ms csc180.gsc.webair.net [173.239.0.26]
13 357 ms 296 ms 297 ms dsc180.gsc.webair.net [173.239.38.130]
14 321 ms 296 ms 295 ms www1dm.webair.com [174.137.132.100]

The way you would interpret that is my home router hits the Perth ISP router first, out through the core router on the next hop.. where it then routs to Adelaide then to Sydney. Then it leaves the country (I believe out through the PIPE network to Guam, then over a the China-US Cable Link) and lands in San Jose, heads overland to New York and then onto Bethesda's web host from there.

If you have 30 hops (Windows stops about there..) and your ms response time is quite high.. then you know you aren't exactly on an optimal link.

Chersiphron

Thank you for all your great replies!

@BigInGlenumbra Yes, China is awsome. I love it here.
@Sleep I have VPN, but I tend to get lower speeds with it. And yes, dont think I can use it on the PS4.
@hamgatan Hmm, I'm on Linux. ... but I did a traceroute. Got this:

traceroute to bethesda.com (174.137.132.100), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 dns1.online.tj.cn (111.167.80.1) 69.629 ms 69.690 ms 69.963 ms
2 dns13.online.tj.cn (117.8.146.13) 5.193 ms 5.442 ms 5.993 ms
3 dns13.online.tj.cn (117.8.201.13) 5.385 ms 5.942 ms 5.916 ms
4 202.99.66.197 (202.99.66.197) 8.984 ms 9.514 ms 12.206 ms
5 219.158.102.53 (219.158.102.53) 23.609 ms 24.150 ms 24.125 ms
6 219.158.104.246 (219.158.104.246) 47.063 ms 46.123 ms 46.398 ms
7 219.158.23.10 (219.158.23.10) 53.523 ms 219.158.3.62 (219.158.3.62) 53.516 ms 219.158.4.250 (219.158.4.250) 45.784 ms
8 219.158.97.34 (219.158.97.34) 80.324 ms 85.484 ms 84.916 ms
9 219.158.98.62 (219.158.98.62) 206.729 ms 207.145 ms 219.158.98.86 (219.158.98.86) 271.179 ms
10 xe-1-1-4.lax21.ip4.gtt.net (173.205.56.181) 204.335 ms 203.680 ms 205.957 ms
11 xe-4-3-3.nyc39.ip4.gtt.net (89.149.128.134) 256.277 ms xe-2-0-2.nyc39.ip4.gtt.net (141.136.111.106) 258.780 ms xe-4-3-3.nyc39.ip4.gtt.net (89.149.128.134) 254.211 ms
12 webair-gw.ip4.gtt.net (199.229.230.206) 342.280 ms 328.946 ms 293.707 ms
13 csc180.gsc.webair.net (173.239.0.26) 269.123 ms 254.796 ms 255.078 ms
14 dsd180.gsc.webair.net (173.239.38.134) 293.346 ms 293.837 ms 293.567 ms
15 www1dm.webair.com (174.137.132.100) 318.187 ms 317.459 ms 316.557 ms

It seems decent enough... although, 316 ms

Anyway, I'm moving to Beijing after the summer. Maybe it will make a difference. I guess there is not much I can do anyway. Changing ISP seems to be my only option if my connection is slow again.

Anyone have experience with what ISP in Beijing gives best connection to ... well, either NA or EU? :P

hamgatan

Your link leaves via China Unicom (Tianjin), which im going to take a pot shot guess is going to exit China via the Qingdao Trans-Pacific Cable Network (which China Unicom has a stake in)

That initial DNS hop at the start is concerning though (that id say is the great firewall of China - 60ms response off a dns server locally is shocking, unless its under some super heavy load).

Honestly your ping times aren't too bad for China, GTT rates their own IP backbone from LA to Hong Kong at around 150ms +50ms for ISP redirected traffic directly off that, but then youd have other hops in between. I don't think changing ISP'S will help much. If you cam bypass that dodgy DNS server first and foremost that would be a good starting point.

IXI_WiCKeD_IXI

Maybe ZoS just doesn't like communist countries

coryevans_3b14_ESO

PBpsy wrote: »

I am not sure it is the distance from the server, since the performance can be terrible even if am less than 500 miles(~800km) from the NA servers.

edit: reduced mysticism .

It's the amount of "hops" not distance.

GreySix

BigInGlenumbra wrote: »

Living in China is awesome? Lol

Lot to see and do there. It's one of the places I haven't yet got an opportunity to visit, but really looking forward to.

Krision

Imagine a place that is 50x worse than china.

This place is a 3rd world country called Brazil

Sithisvoid

Guys let's try to show our ignorance less and stop spamming OP with political nonsense he is a gamer with a technical issue we should help him as best we can without judgement.

DenMoria

Chersiphron wrote: »

... playing this game is like this: Lag, lag, lag, lag, and lag.
*selecting [Open door]* --- Wait two minutes --- Door opens / disconnected
Even bashing with the sword doesn't work properly. Sprinting cancels after activation, spells aren't fired until the mob suddenly dies by someone else killing it.
I've opened all ports in my router, not just for the game but also for PSN network. I play on a 10Mb hardline (connected with a cable, not Wi-Fi).

The game is completely unplayable. I've tried both EU servers and NA servers, and it seems there is a miniscule amount of better ping on the NA servers, but FAR from playable.

Is it just me? Is it just us in China? Or is it actually a server-problem? Is it like this for other countries too?
I really want to play this game but....

it's China. Even when I travel to Beijing on business, the internet access is deplorable. Sorry you're having trouble.