Ping spikes, laggy gameplay, unresponsive skills, packet loss, teleporting enemies/allies

LZH

My problem seems to be related to packet loss. I did a Ping Plotter test and it shows significant packet loss occurring towards the end of my packets pathway in San Francisco and Dallas. It also shows very unstable and fluctuating ping happening at the last server hop before ICMP requests are blocked.


In-game this manifests as extremely frustrating combat. Skills won't fire every few seconds, my character will jar up making me lose rhythm in combat, enemies will teleport around or not respond for a few seconds, etc.

The game is essentially unplayable at a high level in both PvE and PvP.


This is unacceptable and there is absolutely nothing that I can do on my end to fix it. My network has high bandwidth and I can play other MMOs as well as FPS games with absolutely zero issues related to networking.


Please pass this on to one of your network engineers to see if there is something that they can do.


This problem has been occurring for me for about the last 7 months (I've only been playing for about 10 months) and it usually waxes and wanes. The problem will disappear for 2-3 days only for it to come raging back for the next 5-6 days and so on. The problem is present more than it is not.


I attached the Ping Plotter results to give a better description of my problem. The red lines indicate that a packet was dropped, while the black line shows ping over time.

Catnight

Oh boy... Please inform yourself before accusing the company, please!
ZOS can do nothing about the packet loss of the third and second last hop. That are internet-nodes and ZOS is not the operator of those.
About the 100% packet-loss on their servers: on the PingPlotter website its written: "Some sites, for security reasons, have their firewalls setup to not echo back ICMP packets so they can appear 'invisible' to automated hacker scanning tools."

In other words: Its totally normal that PingPlotter is showing that there is 100% packet loss and therefore infinite ping.
You will find this alsmost every time when pinging servers directly.

I also hate when nodes are overwhelmed, it happend to me here a whole times already and from here to Amsterdam you most of the time cannot play anymore after 8 PM.
If you want to accuse the actual responsible, well its AT&T Internet Services. Feel free to phone them, good luck.

LZH

Catnight wrote: »

Oh boy... Please inform yourself before accusing the company, please!
ZOS can do nothing about the packet loss of the third and second last hop. That are internet-nodes and ZOS is not the operator of those.
About the 100% packet-loss on their servers: on the PingPlotter website its written: "Some sites, for security reasons, have their firewalls setup to not echo back ICMP packets so they can appear 'invisible' to automated hacker scanning tools."

In other words: Its totally normal that PingPlotter is showing that there is 100% packet loss and therefore infinite ping.
You will find this alsmost every time when pinging servers directly.

I also hate when nodes are overwhelmed, it happend to me here a whole times already and from here to Amsterdam you most of the time cannot play anymore after 8 PM.
If you want to accuse the actual responsible, well its AT&T Internet Services. Feel free to phone them, good luck.

I'm fully aware about the last hop blocking ICMP requests. I literally mentioned it in my post.

I'm just giving ZOS more feedback that is actually tangible so that they can deal with the problem, y'know, seeing as this is their game and all. Things have been bad for months and once Morrowind drops I can't imagine things getting better...


Also, I won't claim to know the politics behind MMO companies dealing with ISP's and server companies, but the server that is having the most problems with packet loss and ping fluctuations is located in Dallas, TX which is where the ZOS servers are. So it's either a ZOS server or something you would think they would be able to deal with.

JbSmooth

there severs have been busted for ever been playing since launch and i can honestly say there has always been a bunch of issues ... its a never ending story.. they will never fix it be cause they don't know how or refuse to spend money to hire people who know how