Hmmm, so the gist of the thread is, "get your hand in your pocket, upgrade and lose the ghetto connection".

lordrichter wrote: »

Well, @Yarlenzey did not say what they do in ESO, but the fact that they are in Australia certainly does not help. When the FPS and Latency numbers do a dance together, that tells me to start looking at problems closer to the player than the megaserver.

If I had to guess, I would suggest that their computer is underpowered or has a problem, they share internet with their neighbors (broadband), they might be using wifi to play the game, and the traffic from Australia to the megaserver is being routed through some yurt in rural Mongolia using kite string. Oh, and they play too much PVP in this game.

Your response suggests that you don't have to guess; you probably know what you're talking about.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Australia IS a yurt in Mongolia. Our tiny consumer market has no clout.

Steam tells me I have around 6000 hours of time logged, I have formed my unqualified opinion largely by paying attention to what is going on when performance drops. Everything I see suggests that it's related to the volume of players. My uneducated guess is that the current lag issue is caused by new and returning players attracted by the current witches festival event, thus increasing the factors contributing to this (my) problem.

All those "Request Timeouts" folks are seeing in Tracert tell me one thing:

"those hops block ICMP Destination Host Unreachable and ICMP Time Exceeded codes"

Why they do this? I have no idea. It doesn't increase security, the same "so called" network reconnaissance can be accomplished with DNS, we going to block all DNS requests too? I find network administrators that don't really understand TCP/IP protocols and how things work are the ones who set things up like this. I am sure they will blocking ICMPv6 too despite it being integral for proper network performance and reliability.

The following ICMP codes should always be allowed on internet facing servers to ensure things work right for IPv4:

ICMP Echo request (ping)
ICMP Echo Reply (ping)
ICMP Destination Unreachable (Makes sure PMTUD works correctly, along with various packet route information and errors)
ICMP Time Exceeded (Tracert and TTL packet values, TTL exceeded, and TTL Fragment Reassembly Time Exceeded)

The other ICMP codes you don't need unless you have specific use case scenarios for them and others such as ICMP Source Quench and Alternate Host Address for example have been depreciated.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/icmp-parameters/icmp-parameters.xhtml

You don't see Google or Level 3 Networks for example blocking those ICMP codes because doing so makes things slow and not work right...ping google.com or ping 4.2.2.1(Level 3 DNS) you will see the work correctly.

Did you know if you allow ping and use Netflix, Netflix will actually ping your WAN address from multiple locations and measure network latency and then serve you your content from the path with the least latency for a better experience? If you block ping it just simply resorts to regional servers which in many cases is not the optimal path and thus folks complain about buffering and other issues....

simply put there is a time and place to block ping and ICMP, but ESO game servers is NOT one of those cases, and it in fact hinders proper network performance and reliability.