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Author Topic: my last hope - help needed  (Read 31232 times)

dpd

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my last hope - help needed
« on: September 13, 2010, 08:56:31 PM »

hi and thankyou firstly for taking the time for reading this and also for any help you may or may not be able to offer.

i think im right in saying that these forums are not the ideal place to talk about online gaming but for me all the other options available to me have come up with nothing. i have tried calling and emailing xbox support, posting on the EA sports website forums, also i have had a small amount of dialogue with david rutter who is the online producer for EA sports' FIFA franchise. in the last 12 months or so i have now had 3 different isp's and the problem has persisted with them all. the first 2 were o2 and fast but in a final attempt to 'fix' the problem i crossed over to virgins cable services on there 10mb package but again the same problem exists. i live 100 yards away from virgin head office in pennywell, sunderland so popped in there to ask if they could offer any help but they have assured me that my line is sound which on the face of it, i think it looks very decent also.



i would like to give you the details of the problem im having. it started about 18 months ago when for some reason my enjoyable online experience of FIFA changed dramatically for the worse when my gaming became very sluggish. it sort of feels like lag in the sense that everything i command my controller to do, it takes maybe a half second to actually respond. however not lag as we know it as the game ran smooth as you would like but everything just took more time than it used to. i dont want to bore you non-gamers with the details but when playing FIFA my players:

1/ were slower than my opponents despite the attributes clearly showing they should be quicker.
2/ were very weak unable to withstand any pressure or slightest tackle.
3/ felt unresponsive and sluggish almost like they were running in knee deep mud.

but in general my game looked as if it was playing not in sync with my opponents game but ever so slightly behind so i was basically trying to respond to something that had already happened and i think thats why it feels like lag.
 

i have tried 3 different routers as i thought this could be the problem. i have tried a speedtouch 580 and the netgear dg834gt neither of which showed any change. i am now currently using a dlink which was supplied by virgin and generally have had no issues with the connection i have had since day 1.  im no whizz but far from it and the extent of my knowledge is that i know how to use the various speedtesters out there and also how to do ping tests and traceroutes (although i dont know what the results mean) but do these show all the nessacery details which are important to a good connection. i suppose i just want to gain advice from someone to make sure my line is as good as it should be, and if possible any advice on what the problem could be. i mentioned earlier about the various options i had taken to try and resolve this issue but everyone keeps telling me its contention, or traffic shaping, or latency etc. i have this problem 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. even during peak hours my stats look the same and basically stay the same no matter what time it is day or night. i have no computers running at the same time and i have tried connecting my xbox staright to the modem. i have tried ressetting my router/modem and my xbox. i also tried putting my xbox in the dmz in case it was a port issue but no change was apparent. here is the very latest tests ive done just now








having spoke to probably hundreds of other gamers on the EA forums, there are lots more suffering the same problem as me but also i have to say that are are just as many who do not. when i spoke to david rutter (online producer) i learned that this game is actually peer to peer and not run on servers but only at the end of every game our consoles send the results to a stat server. with this in mind it got me thinking if its peer to peer then it has to be a problem somewhere in my connection. but all the tests i carry out dont highlight any problems.

strangley this problem only affects FIFA and i play many other games. i dont know whether this is possibily a clue to the problem but i did play another EA sports title called battlefield bad company 2 but i had the exact same problem on that so i sold it and bought call of duty MW2 instead. again it just felt slow and unresponsive and the same sort of strange lag.

so this really is my last port of call and my final hope ( so no pressure guys ) and just whenever i have tried to get help here in the past you guyshave always been brilliant and tried to help so i thought i would give it a shot. can anyone assist me in trying to get to the bottom of this and trace exactly what the fault is and where it is? im at the stage now where i will try anything.

again, thanks for any help anyone can offer.
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roseway

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2010, 10:43:42 PM »

I'm not a games player, so I don't have any specific knowledge to bring to the problem, but the thing which raises rather loud bells in my mind is that FIFA uses P2P. A lot of ISPs will throttle P2P traffic in various ways, and the big ones (like Virgin) tend to make most use of this type of traffic management. I suspect that your best option would be to move to an ISP which doesn't use any form of traffic management, such as Zen. But this is something of a guess on my part, and maybe others will have better ideas.
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  Eric

dpd

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #2 on: September 13, 2010, 11:42:43 PM »

hi and thanks for your response. im also aware of a traffic management policy on virgins behalf but this kind of throttling, for want of a better word, am i right in saying it would be reflected in my connection stats either via bandwidth or ping/latency?

i used to be with fast broadband and have to say they were top notch with no traffic shaping at all and these problems persisted with them also, despite having good connection. mind i have to say the connection i had with fast broadband wasnt as good as im getting now. the ping times were roughly twice as high as i get now and i could only get around 6mb download.
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roseway

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #3 on: September 14, 2010, 07:15:45 AM »

If it's P2P traffic management, then it won't affect your connection stats, normal download speeds or (probably) latency. You could check it out by downloading something which uses Bittorrent, and see if the speeds are capped. You would need to choose a popular torrent for this check, so there are plenty of peers available.
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  Eric

geep

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #4 on: September 14, 2010, 06:59:55 PM »

Hi,
There's a tester from the Max Planck Institute in Germany which claims to tell if your P2P is being throttled.
Maybe it's worth a try - http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php
It takes several minutes to run. I just tried it and got the report that I expected saying my connection is not throttled.
Cheers,
Peter
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roseway

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #5 on: September 14, 2010, 07:14:06 PM »

That's a nice find Peter - thanks.
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  Eric

dpd

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #6 on: September 14, 2010, 07:36:09 PM »

hi and thankyou for the replies.

i have just downloaded a music album which was 50mb or so in size. it downloaded in around 1m 40 secs and the download speed was 600kb - 800kb. i took a screenie aswell  here >>>

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dpd

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #7 on: September 14, 2010, 08:16:15 PM »

sorry about previous post. must have pressed post instead of preview, sorry.

anyway here is that screenie >>>



and also ive just seen the other post to test if im being 'throttled'  so i took a screenie of that aswell>>>




something i find starnge is that i only have problems playing EA titles and also my friend who is also in sunderland, he is also on virgin broadband on the same 10mb package and when we play eachother the connection is terrible. you would think we were on the other side of the world. do you guys think that if i performed a traceroute to his ip it may show up anything which may cause lag/latency?
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geep

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #8 on: September 14, 2010, 09:29:00 PM »

Hmm.
Glasnost seems to show no rate limiting. Hope the report about "data is too noisy" isn't relevant to the problem!
This tool might show something useful:http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/
I'm no expert on interpreting traceroute results. Did you try it? Maybe somebody else can interpret any results you get.
Cheers,
Peter



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dpd

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #9 on: September 14, 2010, 09:55:10 PM »

hi again. i ran that test and i have the results but dont know how to post them here for you to see  ???


hope that works.........

also i will do a traceroute when my friend gets home. that may be tonight but if not i will do it tomorrow as i have no work  ;D think my friend is out drinking beer with women somewhere !!!
« Last Edit: September 14, 2010, 11:30:35 PM by dpd »
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geep

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #10 on: September 14, 2010, 10:18:41 PM »

Hi,
I took the liberty of putting your results here: http://pgg999.co.uk/dpd/ after I removed your IP address
from the top of the results. (Will delete the data sometime in the future). Suggest you now remove your link to n3.netalyzr.icsi.berkely.edu

The test results suggest a problem with network buffering - see the section "Network Buffer Measurements".
Click on the ? for futher details @ http://n3.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/info_buffer.html & http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18953-understanding-your-netalyzr-results.html?full=true#bufferl

I don't know what to suggest, however. Maybe others can suggest some parameters in PC or router
to change which could improve things.

Added - for info - ICSI Netalyzr gives my Network buffer measurements as Uplink 720 ms, yours is 740 ms.

Cheers,
Peter
« Last Edit: September 14, 2010, 10:48:16 PM by geep »
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dpd

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #11 on: September 15, 2010, 12:45:09 AM »

just like to thankyou for the help and advice ive recieved so far, i really appreciate it.

i tried to perform a traceroute to another friend of mine who is with AOL and lives 2 miles from me in sunderland (he also has the problem. we all think its because we live in the north east ha ha). anyway it wouldnt let me, i thought it may be as he isnt pingable and he didnt want to change his router settings as he has even less knowlege than myself. so i tried doing it using a free program called ping plotter which actually worked and here is what it came back with:

Target Name: host-xx-xx-xxx-xx.as43234.net
         IP: 92.11.182.30
  Date/Time: 15/09/2010 00:30:13

 1   34 ms    8 ms    6 ms  [10.157.212.1]
 2   33 ms    7 ms   17 ms  midd-cam-1a-v123.network.virginmedia.net [213.106.238.117]
 3   13 ms    7 ms   10 ms  midd-core-1a-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [195.182.176.97]
 4    8 ms    8 ms   20 ms  leed-bb-1a-as7-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.75.45]
 5   23 ms   13 ms   30 ms  nrth-bb-1b-as2-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.185.101]
 6   15 ms   13 ms   17 ms  tele-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.184.2]
 7   13 ms   42 ms   24 ms  host-78-144-3-65.as13285.net [78.144.3.65]
 8   17 ms   15 ms   23 ms  host-78-144-0-173.as13285.net [78.144.0.173]
 9   25 ms   25 ms   28 ms  xe-10-0-0-bragg001.loh.as43234.net [78.144.2.128]
10   16 ms   17 ms   17 ms  [92.31.252.37]
11   *       *       *       [-]

the last hop said destination unreachable. the 3 columns are 3 different traces. it basically keeps doing it every 10 seconds or so and allows you to chart all the times to see if there is a problem with a particular hop. unfortunately i wouldnt know a problem in it if it slapped me across the face.

i must also say i found your last post very interesting and it actually sounded very much like the problem i encounter, espacially when it mentioned that the activity would feel slow when being asked to perform it. anyway im off to bed now but again thanks for the time you have spent on this.

regards dpd
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BritBrat

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #12 on: September 15, 2010, 08:20:36 AM »

My first thought was the same as Roseway but I am no gamer either.

Do you have access to a 3G dongle and do a test using that then you may be able to rule out computer and software.

Virgin Media Traffic management policy

Traffic Management Trial
We are currently undertaking Traffic Management trials in the following areas. To find out more about changes to the policy where you live, click on one of the areas below:

Live in these areas?
•Preston
•Acton
•Aldershot
•Wigan
•Blackpool

Quote
i live 100 yards away from virgin head office in pennywell, sunderland

Sunderland is not on the list.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2010, 08:30:30 AM by BritBrat »
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BritBrat

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #13 on: September 15, 2010, 08:37:59 AM »

Could it be your firewall causing the lag?

Try dissabling it for 30 mins and play a game.

Is this what you get:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=098g_3j7pSo

SOURCE
Looks like you have already read that post dpd782004.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2010, 08:54:25 AM by BritBrat »
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dpd

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Re: my last hope - help needed
« Reply #14 on: September 15, 2010, 10:13:44 AM »

hi. yes i also posted on that forum. as you can see there are lots of people with this issue and are basically at a dead end with no real help from anyone. funny thing is when i have phoned EA support they told me to try resetting my xbox and router.  :wall: that vid on you tube is not quite what i get. mine is just always lag in the commands i ask for, but the game itself runs smooth.

i dont think its the firewall as i have tried playing games whilst in dmz  and also tried plugging xbox straight into modem but no change.
 
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