Latency and bandwidth are two different things. The game needs just shy of 1mbps upstream and downstream bandwidth to properly support up to 12 players.
Latency can spike at any point along any of the routes between you and any one of the other players, Bungie, or any of the cloud services in play (like AmazonWS or Microsoft Azure). Every hop through a different network device is a potential point of slowdown/error/failure, and your ISP is ultimately responsible for the list of hops you take on the other side of your local network hardware to get to anywhere on the internet. As such, the majority of potential problems can actually be tracked down, escalated, and possibly resolved through your ISP's Tier3 support.
Make sure your local network is optimally configured and maintained (they have guides in the help section), then reach out to your ISP's tier3 support to look for any potential routing issues while you are playing and experiencing issues. Their are recurring issues at the peering level with several top tier ISP's. Not uncommon to find congested exchanges causing a lot of our online gaming and/or streaming issues. Such things fall to the relevant ISP's to resolve amongst themselves... completely out of the hands of any of the end users or content developers.
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Edited by vmondude: 4/18/2017 11:31:04 PMI'm sorry but there's no way that this is all down to isp service. I understand there are bottlenecks and packet loss etc. along the way but this game is disgraceful sometimes. It goes from one extreme to other with every match. One minute everyone in my team is having good gun fights with damage being done properly to each other, then next game no one can get through a one v one without no damage taken or laggy damage and so lost battles. It is usually at its worst when the banner and trials are running together.that can't be coincidence, every single time.
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Edited by RAIST5150: 4/18/2017 11:38:57 PMDepends on where you are, where you are geting routed through, and through whom you are routed. Take a look at some of the problems getting reported for services here (many have them plotted on a map so you can see the regional distribution of complaints): http://downdetector.com/companies Here are some links directly to some maps...perhaps you can spot a pattern forming: http://downdetector.com/status/level3/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/att/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/comcast-xfinity/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/verizon/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/playstation-network/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/destiny/map/ http://downdetector.com/status/overwatch/map/ Players try to synch to the authoritative player-host's console 30x a second--a 33ms refresh. We try to synch to Bungie and/or the assigned cloud service acting as the activity host 10x a second--100ms refresh. Depending on how consistently you are able to synch between those two targets can have a big impact--especially if something is interfering with your ability to receive the player UDP packets in a timely, orderly fashion (no error control on UDP transfers, so if they come in out of order, they can simply get dropped). Just a simple example, look at these statistics to two servers in Montreal, Canada from here in Florence, SC: Minimum = 58ms, Maximum = 147ms, Average = 81ms (184.107.107.176) Minimum = 38ms, Maximum = 46ms, Average = 41ms (199.91.189.74) Both those servers host content related to FFXIV. The iweb host that had the bad lag spikes is a webserver, while the more consistent one hosted by Ormuco is an actual lobby server in the subnet where the game actually runs. They are both physically in Montreal, basically across town from each other. They follow similar routes in some sections, but uniquely different routes through certain regions because we spent a lot of time working with my ISP's Tier3 support tracking down and addressing recurring points of congestion through specific corridors through our region. The Ormuco/EIDOS ASN for up there has been monitored extensively and the routing data for that specific ASN has been tweaked to maintain consistently low latency routes available for at least Atlanta, Raleigh, and Charlotte---our more common exchange points from here to get up there to that particular subnet. Before we started, we were frequently seeing numbers approaching and even exceeding 200ms. We brought it down in stages to the point where if it started breeching 120ms, the routing changed to another peering partner. They eventually got it tightened up even further to around a 100ms cut-off, and now it is fairly consistently under 80ms pretty much anytime I ping against it now. All of this was managed directly through my ISP--NOT Square Enix. It can and well may be something your ISP could investigate and help get addressed if it is in fact something bound to routing issues. But it won't necessarily happen if no one puts any effort into getting them involved. TWC didn't enter into a direct peering agreement with one of Blizzards ISP's in the Austin, TX area on a whim---it is because we put a lot of pressure on them and everyone was having horrible lag issues for months with Blizzard's IP's being hosted there. Overwatch was a big catalyst for beefing up peering agreements in several key Blizzard areas in fact. A similar thing happened with Twitch a few years back as well. Your ISP can do a LOT more than many realize...but you need to get in touch specifically with Tier3 support for it. The "help desk" levels you get saddled with on initial contact can't deal with this stuff. You need escalation to higher support. Some ISP's may refer to them as Engineering, but the normal term for this level is Tier3.
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Well thanks for that VERY thorough explanation of the traffic flow haha! I don't completely understand it but I get the enormous twisting journey the traffic takes. I'm in the UK so I'm pretty sure the distance isn't even half what you deal with over there. I don't know if it helps but my service is with British Telecom (one of if not THE biggest ISP here) 52mbps down, 9mbps up with 16ms ping. PlayStation gets nearly that same speed and Destiny is the only game that ever has problems. I'm always green bar but I often get stuck in a red bar infested match, especially if it's rift or when IB and Trials are on together. It isn't coincidence everyone I know who plays Destiny has the exact same problem.
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Edited by RAIST5150: 4/19/2017 12:51:48 AMBT, Orange (EE), O2 (Sky), and several others are no stranger to such issues either--especially when hitting purely NA based services. Forget if it was O2 or Orange that actually were a big catalyst to resolving a major problem at XIV's 2.0 launch. One of them captured an issue with packet headers and traffic shaping back then that led to a major fix for a lot of people, not just the UK players trying to hit the servers in Canada--it actually affected players here in the US as well. Downdetector also has a UK-centric site you can look at: http://downdetector.co.uk/companies Birmingham and London areas seem to be getting congested sort of across the board lately. Some monitors from deeper into the US to London are flirting with 280ms+ response times. Level3 is having issues in the south/central US region again (close to one of Bungie's two footprints). Northeast in the US frequently has congestion issues, which always presents a challenge for EU to the western half of the US in general. Have to keep in mind where Bungie is located: close to Seattle, Washington and Fayetteville, Arkansas. There isn't a Bungie footprint over there, so you can be at the mercy of a cloud service, and if that is floundering you may be struggling with synching all the way to central or western US locations. So it could even be more an AmazonWS or Microsoft/Azure related issue. There are a LOT of pieces to the puzzle for how this netcode is working in the background, especially for an extended P2P framework like you would be saddled with playing in the UK. 6v6 content can be highly dependent on over 2 dozen localized connections at once. And almost all of it is UDP protocol that has no error correction mechanism in place, so it is imperative that local network security and the routes in play are spot on. Here in the US, small hiccups in the P2P side that could normally easily recover with the persistent TCP/IP error correcting sessions directly to Bungie can throw things out of whack fast if packets aren't flowing smoothly back and forth between the UK and either the assigned Cloud service closer to you, or between them or you and Bungie here in the US. Simply put, you could be at a gross disadvantage because of the region you are in. Could simply be struggling with an extra 90ms+ backbone latency with the background synching to Bungie, be that either getting directly to Bungie or via a cloud service. If XBL/Azure or AmazonWS is having issues over there, it can have a profound impact just for you guys, while everyone on this side of the pond is getting along just fine. Has always been and will continue to be a challenge for a more global gaming experience. Without some form of fair regional locking/restricting mechanics in play, this kind of thing is going to routinely rear it's ugly head. Hopefully they will address this regional disparity somehow in D2. Hate to see a full on regional lockdown, as I too have friends across both oceans. But unless they manage to get more server support from Activision Blizzard's server networks, we may well be in the same boat again. Bungie itself simply doesn't have the resources to run a wide open global game---Activision Blizzard needs to provide them more resources like EA did for DICE (BF1) and Respawn (TF2). Until such time, we all can easily be at the mercy of a third-party ISP's transit. Something Bungie has absolutely no control over. Those arrangements are made and maintained through our ISP's, and you have to get escalated to Tier3 support in order to get anyone to look into that potential angle of things. The majority of people never make it past Tier2. Often have to jump through the hoops of getting a tech on site to evaluate cables and ends, possibly even getting to the point of a bucket truck coming out and looking at things on the street before you hear from Tier3. BUT... if you start off requesting Tier3 support to investigate potential routing issues with specific services, you usually fair a bit better getting through to them more directly. Sometimes an email contact gets you right through... not always, but sometimes. Twitter/FB has proven to get the ball moving a bit faster at times as well.
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Ok well thanks for the detail, I'm not going to be in this house for too much longer so when I've got settled in my next house (hopefully still on fibre!) I'll have a look into it further. Thanks a lot. Like I say I often get days of full green lobbies but then suddenly I can't get a lag free lobby even when my connections smooth and stable. Very frustrating, but hey like you say D2 will hopefully improve all this. And who knows maybe Bungie will finally open their wallet and get dedicated servers. Ha ha yeah right XD