Hey, so I been playing XIV for a while now but I get constant small lags... normally I wasn't bothered by it because I thought it was normal but keep hearing this wasn't normal.
My speed is 245.5 Mbps download and 11.6 Mbps upload.
I tray to Trace Router of SE XIV North America - tracert 204.2.229.10
But keep getting different result... from 1* to 4* So clearly something going on. I'm unsure how to proceed.
Posted Apr 19, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC
Download has nothing to do with it. It's all about the route you take to get to their (square) servers. I play from the East coast and sometimes it's unbearable when I hit a bad hop. VPN can help you take a different route to avoid the bad hop.
Ah, I'm from east. Didn't think being on Florida would make much difference for America server. :c
Well you're connecting all the way over to a server on the west coast. Ping times aren't normally do bad but when one of the hops are over congested your ping will skyrocket. Most of the time it's not their fault it's just the route that is choosen for you to route through.
Comcast likes to throttle a lot and their infrastructure isn't really that great to begin with. Even when net neutrality was a thing, they kept throttling. You can use a VPN to bypass the throttles for the most part but they will still throttle you at certain times of the day and if you start downloading a lot. In fact with comcast, if you start downloading a lot they will bring your download speeds to a crawl for a while to the point you can't youtube. My advice is to ditch comcast if you can.
Well so far i haven't had the issue but i can't currently ditch comcast because at&t would be alternative.... they hot garbage.
Change the default DNS, Comcast DNS is hot garbage.
Default DNS?
No that's just Comcast, used to get drops to basically no download speed on a regular basis with them.
My husband and I have Comcast and experience the same issues periodically. We got a VPN subscription to help. When the lag spikes for Comcast players, we flip that thing on and we're good.
Ah how does VPN Subscription work?
There are various companies that offer VPN access for a monthly fee. I'd have to ask hubby for the one we went with. But you can probably find some just by googling.
To actually answer the question, VPN subscriptions help by rerouting the the packets. The reason Comcast users have issues is always because of the route that Comcast sends and receives packets from the FFXIV servers, and it's always at a specific node. The VPN changes the pathing, so Comcast essentially gets fooled, and your ping gets dropped by a lot less, so you get less lag.
The basic idea behind using a VPN service for XIV is that it changes the route used to transmit and receive data between your computer and the data center. Most commonly because there's a problematic node between the two, and circumventing it can increase your speeds.
Some make you pay monthly, some charge you based on data usage. Traditionally, if you're only using the VPN for FFXIV, the data-based charges are cheaper since XIV uses so little. A few dollars will go a long way for this game.