@Coezzy

I found a good tutorial to help you see how you can traceroute:

https://kb.intermedia.net/article/682

And here's what you should do:

Before deciding what to traceroute, when trying to diagnose network problems, is check first your Active Connections. For this, you will use a different command, which is "netstat -a"

Basically, it displays a bunch of connections, and they can have several states. This part is not so relevant but what you have to look for is for addresses that belong to ZOS, so I'm tellling you what you should be looking for (I edited my netstat to only display the relevant lines, yours might look slightly different if you're not on Mac):

Active Internet connections (including servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp4 0 0 192.168.1.100.54317 198.20.200.161.24125 ESTABLISHED
tcp4 0 0 192.168.1.100.53804 198.20.200.23.24504 ESTABLISHED

So what this tells me is that I currently have 2 connections ESTABLISHED with ZOS, on 2 IP addresses:

- 198.20.200.161, on port 24125
- 198.20.200.23 on port 24504

I know they are from ZOS, because when I did a Whois query, I got these results:

NetRange: 198.20.192.0 - 198.20.215.255
CIDR: 198.20.208.0/21, 198.20.192.0/20
NetName: ZENIMAXMEDIA

So you should expect and test any IP address within the NetRange. I know that the Game Consultant App uses only one IP Address (198.20.198.110) for testing connectivity, which I think its the announcement/status server. You can try that one if you want.

But all IP Addresses I've seen so far to which the game connects, are ranging from 198.20.200.23 to 198.20.200.162 (which doesnt mean that all of them are actually operating or open, or even assigned).

But they are all part of the same network (198.20.192.0/20). This means that no matter what, your connection should always be routed through the exact same servers, no matter what address are you tracerouting to, within this specific network.

So, bottom line is, when you try to login for example, just after putting your pass in the login page and try to login, you can type "netstat -a" to get a list of all active connections, you should then start seeing 198.20.200.XXX addresses being listed. You can also repeatthis operation while on the character loading screen or while at the game, and you may get different IPs at different stages or/and even if you go to a different zone (unsure).

Then you should proceed to do a Traceroute to those addresses. You should do this operation several times, in order to ensure that after a few trace samples, no matter what, you will always get the same result! If you always get the same result, it should/could be a good sign (there are however more variables to consider). But your aim here, is to discover if you get at some point an incomplete in some traces. That is a sign of loss of connectivity. There are better ways to test connectivity, but for that, ZOS has to setup at least one server in their network to allow ICMP packets. The ones I traced, none was allowing me to do so.

During today I did several dozen of traces, at different times, to about 15 different IP addresses from ZOS that I got on my netstat. Sometimes I would get the full route being "completed" and sometimes I would get the route being interrupted and not proccceding. And those that were not being completed, I tried yet again later, and then they were going through Telia and AT&T successfully.

If at some point you get 3 lines with just * * *, you can then stop the trace because it means you got into... "untraceable servers"... (CTRL+X should do it if my memory serves me right, havent worked on windows in a while)

Also be patient about it and try it at different hours!

I really hope that these tests can help clarifying your particular issue, it might be the same as mine or not, but we'll never know if you dont do it.

Also, would like to provide some "good" feedback I got, and this will maybe make you understand how burocratic all this can be... My ISP is Vodafone Portugal, which is ofc, part of the Vodafone group right? but... Vodafone UK, which leases its infrastructure to Vodafone Portugal is a different company, so in practice, even though I'm a client of the same Corporation as a whole, I'm only a client of Vodafone Portugal. I got a reply from the Admin of that server that is apparently having "problems", and he cordially asked me to report the situation to my ISP (even though the Router with problems is also part of the Vodafone Network), so they could forward it the problem to them. It's very silly... I know... but thats how these things work, and thats why sometimes its really hard to get these things "fixed". It gets even worst, if they are companies that compete with each other. The burocracy is insane LOL

Any questions or doubts, feel free to ask


PS-Just one more thing. For now lets not assume its your ISP fault or not... Maybe it really isnt... maybe they contract a carrier service, and the problem may reside on the carrier network and not on your ISP. And being a ZOS issue is also not out of the deck! maybe it is, maybe its not, but we need to do some "X-rays" and some TAC Scans on the network to try to determine where the illness is

@Coezzy
I recommend using "PingPlotter" (https://www.pingplotter.com/), the freeware version is sufficient. Point it to "launcher.bethesda.net" (159.100.230.100).


@Hyperplexed
What kind of VPN have you tried? Frankly there are some gory details I was to lazy to mention

1) The location of the VPN server is crucial.
a) You want that the VPN server stays close to the Mageserver at Frankfurt/M Germany to avoid that another ISP is throttling between the VPN server and the Megaserver
b) You want that the VPN server stays close to an important peering hub like the DE-CIX at Frankfurt/M Germany to assure that your ISP is routing the traffic straight to the server.
c) You want that the datacenter hosting the VPN server has a powerfull internet connection.

2) You can connect to a VPN server using the ports 1194/UDP or 443/TCP.
UDP 1194 is faster but less reliable and there is the risk of "throttling".
TCP 443 is slower, encapsulating TCP-over-TCP is a mess but nobody will dare to throttle HTTPS.


@ZOS_MollyH
As far as I remember, ArenaNet added to the GW2 client the option to connect to the servers using the HTTP port 80. From a pure technical point of view, doing so is terribly bad. But it might help to resolve the issues with ISPs throttling the ip traffic of ESO by mistake.

@Hyperplexed

Just to ask, if to determine that my ISP is at fault, would I be looking at the ms values located in the tracert command, cause I would post them but not sure if it will show any sensitive information about my network.

Basically for my ISP it shows :
1. <1 <1 <1
2. ***
3. 24ms 189ms 28ms - This being for my ISP
4.

Would I now look at the ms values to see if im being throttled, like the 189ms is standard for me due to my distance from the server.

Also I noticed the the IP for the natstat -a (159.100.230.9:https) gives a TIME_WAIT instead of Established and this belonging to Zenimax, not sure if that is anything to look into.

These however are just my first 2 tests but will continue to do these steps and monitor any changes.

@Coezzy

There are a number of things that you must analyze, being the ping values one of them yes. but unless we can see all your trace, its little to no information what you posted. Its like, you took an x-ray, and instead of showing us the full picture, you have cut a little piece of it. Its not enough to make a proper read.

I know these issues can be frustating Coezzy, you have my simpathy, because I'm feeling the same way. and the cherry on the top in my specific case is that (and this is actually 100% ZOS responsability) I can't do Molag Kena without crashing... either in normal or veteran. This issue is known since the IC PTS, and yet, after a month of IC going live, I'm still unable to do it. I am just as you considering in quitting the game... and to be honest I'm not sure if I'll spend any more money on this game, because ZOS is failling to much in solving the crash issue. The only reason I bought the IC DLC was to be able to access the IC dungeons, since I'm unable to finish one of them, whats the point?

However, in this particular case I do believe that the problem may not be ZOS responsability, so I'm doing whatever efforts I can to try to fix this particular issue, because I too, feel that the game is atm mostlyunplayable, if whenever I go through a loading screen, I get kicked from the server.

In any case, you can see a full list of TCP/IP connection states in here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#Protocol_operation

@DeTosc
I just tried some generic Free VPN service... thing is I'm not going to lease any VPN service just to play ESO... overkill. If problem persists, I'll just move on and play something else

Can't login.

ISP is Unitmedia (see also forums.elderscrollsonline.com/de/discussion/219718/verbindungs-probleme-ueber-unitymedia)

Traceroute looks like this:
Tracing route to 198.20.200.162 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms DD-WRT [192.168.1.1]
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 7 ms 9 ms 10 ms 7114A-MX960-01-ae10-1060.wib.unity-media.net [81
.210.137.105]
4 111 ms 119 ms 110 ms 84.116.197.2
5 112 ms 112 ms 110 ms uk-lon01b-rd1-xe-1-2-2.aorta.net [84.116.132.17]

6 22 ms 21 ms 22 ms 84.116.136.157
7 91 ms 91 ms 91 ms 84.116.140.174
8 119 ms 111 ms 112 ms us-chi01a-ri2-po-0-0-0.aorta.net [213.46.190.90]

9 * * * Request timed out.
10 139 ms 143 ms 140 ms 64.129.234.190
11 * * * Request timed out.
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.