PSA: The servers are fine, it is your ISP's routing that is not

I'm seeing these topics on reddit every day and sometimes here as well. If you have latency spikes, lag and packet loss, especially while playing on any of the EU servers lately, it indeed is not GGG's fault but your ISP's routing through highly congested / bad nodes. You can fix this easily by either contacting your ISP directly and hoping for them to comply (good luck) or use one of the various VPN services online that give you alternative routing for your traffic.

Not convinced? The next time you are having lag or latency spikes, and can absolutely rule out technical difficulties or limitations such as bad WiFi or otherwise, simply run a traceroute on a gateway of choice. (More about this: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/361292)

I guarantee you, at least within EU, 99% of the time you are bottlenecked by some shitty Telia or Twelve99 node. A VPN lets you bypass this and you will end up with a better connection to your desired gateway. There are some more nodes that are not preferable but these two providers are the worst and everyone can convince themselves by doing a minimal amount of googling. This isn't PoE specific and happens in a lot of games.

I've had to deal with this shit in other games as well (namely FFXIV and GW2) and fixed all of it by using a reputable, decent VPN. PoE included. Smooth and stable 4ms to Frankfurt for days. If I catch a bad route again I will simply connect to another nearby server within my VPN and it is back to perfection.

There is some more to it but without going too much into detail this isn't something GGG can easily fix. Or other games for that matter. To my knowledge only Riot Games managed to do so for their League of Legends by essentially building their very own infrastructure, an extremely expensive undertaking that otherwise probably only Microsoft could reasonably pull off. Not GGG though, credit where credit is due - they sometimes have issues, but most of the time it is not on them.

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PSA: The servers are fine,

Evidence suggests otherwise, see for example these:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3474199/page/4#p25223303
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3474199/page/4#p25223348
These are server side failures, not routing-with-player problems.

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Crimvaal wrote:

To my knowledge only Riot Games managed to do so for their League of Legends by essentially building their very own infrastructure, an extremely expensive undertaking

Can you quantify "extremely expensive"? Or give a source for it? Anyway if true it provides evidence that its fixable by GGG/Tencent.

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Crimvaal wrote:

that otherwise probably only Microsoft could reasonably pull off. Not GGG though,

You do realize that both 'Riot Games' and 'GGG' are owned by Tencent? Means the only thing necessary would be to cooperate and they could use the same "infrastructure" then.

If that would be true, then switching from London/Amsterdam to Milan wouldnt fix the problem. But it does.

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Zrevnur wrote:

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PSA: The servers are fine,

Evidence suggests otherwise, see for example these:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3474199/page/4#p25223303
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3474199/page/4#p25223348
These are server side failures, not routing-with-player problems.

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Crimvaal wrote:

To my knowledge only Riot Games managed to do so for their League of Legends by essentially building their very own infrastructure, an extremely expensive undertaking

Can you quantify "extremely expensive"? Or give a source for it? Anyway if true it provides evidence that its fixable by GGG/Tencent.

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Crimvaal wrote:

that otherwise probably only Microsoft could reasonably pull off. Not GGG though,

You do realize that both 'Riot Games' and 'GGG' are owned by Tencent? Means the only thing necessary would be to cooperate and they could use the same "infrastructure" then.

Instance crashes are indeed not routing issues which is why I specifically mentioned lag, high lantency and packet loss in the opening post. This is what people struggle the most with, especially during the evenings and prime times.

As for Riotgames, they have published a series of articles that describes the issues, what needed to be done and why existing services weren't up to task for such a sensitive and massive live service as theirs.

You can read up about it here: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-time-applications-part-i

Both companies being owned by Tencent doesn't mean GGG gets the benefit of using Riots infrastructure. Also with all respect, PoE is laughably small in comparison to League and I highly doubt it would be even worth considering sharing, let alone building similar, for GGG.

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Aynix wrote:

If that would be true, then switching from London/Amsterdam to Milan wouldnt fix the problem. But it does.

Surprise surprise, you connecting to another server means your traffic gets routed differently and there is a chance you're not getting one of the aforementioned Telia or Twelve99.net nodes. If that works for you then great, for others however it does not because routing is different from ISP to ISP and from person to person. Which is why two players from the same city can be in the same map, one lagging and the other being completely fine.

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Crimvaal wrote:

Instance crashes are indeed not routing issues which is why I specifically mentioned lag, high lantency and packet loss in the opening post. This is what people struggle the most with, especially during the evenings and prime times.

I quoted your title. And the part I quoted is just wrong. Which I provided evidence for. Maybe fix your thread title, as you yourself actually know apparently, the servers are not fine.

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Crimvaal wrote:

As for Riotgames, they have published a series of articles that describes the issues, what needed to be done and why existing services weren't up to task for such a sensitive and massive live service as theirs.

You can read up about it here: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-time-applications-part-i

Ok, thanks for link.

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Crimvaal wrote:

Both companies being owned by Tencent doesn't mean GGG gets the benefit of using Riots infrastructure.

Of course it doesnt automatically get any benefits of that. Somebody somewhere would have to decide/act to make that happen.

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Crimvaal wrote:

Also with all respect, PoE is laughably small in comparison to League and I highly doubt it would be even worth considering sharing, let alone building similar, for GGG.

Building similar not. If VPNs work then they wouldnt need to do that anyway, VPNs typically dont have their own (sub-)internet either.
About the sharing: Tencent owns a lot of other companies. Not just GGG. From my limited POV it would potentially make sense to use this system so that other parts of Tencent would also benefit. So whether GGG is "laughably small" (we would need financial numbers to properly quantify this) or not is too limited a POV onto this. For a better POV you would have to look at all other current and expected future Tencent owned companies.

One of the biggest frustrations to arise from these rampant EU issues is the loss of portals/zones. It happening all the time, more than it ever has before.

Can you explain why--after being in a map for two, three, four minutes--a DC would lead to all remaining map portals disappearing? Isn't that a server-side thing?

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WaywornExile wrote:

One of the biggest frustrations to arise from these rampant EU issues is the loss of portals/zones. It happening all the time, more than it ever has before.

Can you explain why--after being in a map for two, three, four minutes--a DC would lead to all remaining map portals disappearing? Isn't that a server-side thing?

That's not related to connectivity, it's a bug. Map crashes for some server-side reason. Can be a capacity issue (if it happens only in EU) or something totally random, like untested mechanics or combinations of mods on some mob.

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Crimvaal wrote:

I'm seeing these topics on reddit every day and sometimes here as well. If you have latency spikes, lag and packet loss, especially while playing on any of the EU servers lately, it indeed is not GGG's fault but your ISP's routing through highly congested / bad nodes.

Whether it is a problem with the routing can be easily checked with a program like
PingPlotter. (there are probably other programs like it, that others can recommend as well. You can use such a program to see the packet losses and latencies of nodes along the way.

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Crimvaal wrote:

or use one of the various VPN services online that give you alternative routing for your traffic.

I personally would not recommend using a VPN to play as not only does it add latency but:

Most VPN services give you a shared external IP, meaning everyone else who uses that VPN will have the same IP address as you. If they do something dodgy online, such as breaking rules of the game then your account may also be flagged as it has the same IP address from what GGG/any external service can see.

If you do decide to use a VPN to play this game or for anything else, please make sure that your VPN gives you an individual IP address so that you aren't sharing with others as they may not be as respectful as you are and you do not want to pay the consequences for their mistakes.

It's a very strange situtation indeed but since the last two weeks i had to choose Moscow Russia servers instead any other EU servers (im from Hungary) because any Eu servers had 200+ ms but Moscow server had 30-60ms.

This week i changed my ISP from Digi to Telekom and since then my EU servers ping went back to even lower 19-30ms. Nothing else changed on my network but the ISP.