[Resolved] Horrendous connection issues for West NA

I, among other people, are getting horrendously high ping in NA servers despite literally living in NA.
I have found out that the server location for NA is located in the East. So, us towards the West or in the West have to deal with high amounts of ping. These ping values range from bare minimum 170, to a whopping 300+.

There needs to be another server or a server relocation to give better connection to the entire NA region rather than just the East.

Would you mind posting (or DMing me) a traceroute from your location to na.vaultf4.com?

More often than not this is due to poor routing at the ISP or inter-provider level. This could be for any number of reasons. For example, we've had players in the southeastern US, have their traffic get routed from Louisiana to Californa, then Chicago, and finally our servers in Quebec, giving similar latency to what you are describing.

Unfortunately our provider has no more central location; the options are either where they are now or the other extreme on the west coast, and last time I went provider shopping nobody else came close in offering the services we have now at the prices we pay.

I'm also wary of adding an additional instance at this time - it's not completely out of the question but player counts being what they are, my strong suspicion is that this will either:
- fragment the NA players and leave us with two sets of half-full servers that are even harder to get started
- Everyone will still continue to pile into one of the two options and the other will just be a ghost town, and people will still complain.

We're definitely getting closer to it being viable, but not quite at the point where we regularly maintain two full NA servers at any given time.

(Our 24h averaged player count for each of the NA standard servers is currently ~10 players)

here is this when im rubberbanding constantly.

Interesting. What I see here are a few elevated ping times to certain stops along the way, namely the first Quebec node at 358, but also in a few before that that jump into the 100s. It's not conclusive but based on this I suspect the problem is earlier in the chain of connections. Quite a few of our players are routed through be105 and then to be103 so this would be a more widespread problem if that was the actual source of the issue.

It might be informative if you run a few more of these tests while the problem occurs.

Specifically, here's what you can look for:
Over several runs that all log high ping values in those 3 column(s) :
- If the high values are consistently at the same entry in the list, that's likely where the problem is.
- If the high values are sporadic and all over the place, the problem is between you and (inclusive) the earliest node where they start to appear. Note e.g. the 114 on line 4 as an outlier when you should be able to hit that sub-30ms without issue - and it was a solid 18-17-17 in the private traceroute you DMed me earlier.

The good news is that if it's anywhere between 2 and 8, it's a Comcast problem and you can take it up with your ISP's technical support to at least try to get them to do something about it. (It's much harder to get anyone further up the chain to take action because they're backbone carriers and don't deal with end-user-facing issues, they mostly only answer to ISPs and other corporate users)
This would also mean that even if we added a west-coast server, it wouldn't fix the problem for you, because it's being introduced in Comcast's network before your traffic makes it out to the "broader internet".

the strange thing about this however, is that I literally dont experience any issues in west coast servers. I get a solid under 70 ping consistently, never rising above. If im lucky I shoot down to 15 for quite a while.

VintagePC said:

This would also mean that even if we added a west-coast server, it wouldn't fix the problem for you, because it's being introduced in Comcast's network before your traffic makes it out to the "broader internet".

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