ESO Latency Spikes - Possible Cause

cr4mf157 · July 2017

I thought I might throw this up here since it's a quick snapshot of what I sent to CS before they flagged my problem as "solved" since they couldn't do anything about it.

That second hop is just my CM600 modem which can't be configured to respond to ICMP. The last hop is the ESO servers, which are purposefully configured to not respond to ICMP. There's no packet loss on the Cogent nodes, but that's not always the case. During peak hours there's often some there as well.

By all rights, I should have about a 50ms response from the server. The best I've ever seen in game is 100ms, but that's only for a few seconds at a time. Thanks the the wild latency of the Garland node and the omnipresent packet loss, it's usually fluctuating back and forth from 250ms at best to 999+ and bringing with it all of the skill delay and rubberbanding one would expect.

MrLuchenkov · July 2017

Personally, I've requested and obtained a full refund of both my Morrowind Upgrade (I had just came back and bought it a few days ago) and my ESO Plus membership. I will be reporting this pervasive issue on as many boards and websites as possible.

I'd advise that people in a similar situation do the same. Without financial pressure, they will not give this issue the proper attention it deserves and they will simply brush it off after a few weeks.

cr4mf157 · July 2017

I'm extremely frustrated by this too. I've cancelled my sub and will find something else to play until such a time that things work better. That said, the evidence we have available suggests that this is the fault of AT&T (and possibly Cogent as well), not Zenimax. The solution, in turn, almost certainly lies with AT&T. While the impetus for fixing the problem is going to have to come from Zenimax applying some pressure to AT&T, it's probably going to take some time.

I would be a lot more understanding if they would publicly acknowledge the problem, but if I had to guess I'd say they are waiting to do that until they know it can actually be fixed. If it turns out that it can't, they would do better from a public relations standpoint to simply lose all of the customers afflicted and ignore the problem. The limited bad publicity they might get from us complaining impotently on internet forums would be far less than if they admit that a crippling networking issue prevents many of their customers from using their product and they simply can't do anything about it.

Granted, they could just do away with this mega server nonsense and establish a few different servers like many games do, but I think they've already tripled down on the way things are, so that's not likely going to change.

Creegz · July 2017

I wouldn't be surprised if it's with Cogent or AT&T but really I mean this should be something that is understood that this service is being run through their networks. It's a failure on their part towards Zenimax if the problem does in fact lie with AT&T/Cogent throttling/dropping packets.

That said having synchronized servers elsewhere might be nice, even if it's just a filter leading to another place, somewhere else we can be brokering the connection would be dope.

Lirkin · July 2017

I wonder if this is what is going to happen more with the relaxing the net neutrality rules.