devast8tor

Comcast runs through the peering ISP mentioned above. They actually route through a different router for west coast servers on the same ISP and it doesn't seem to be having the same problems.

I'm on a Comcast business connection and am not having any other connectivity problems currently. There is a rumor that Comcast has recently started "traffic shaping" (read: randomly dropping packets) to throttle a new torrent app that is designed to use UDP connections instead of TCP. Since the CoX game server connections are primarily UDP (as are many other games), I can't help but wonder if there may be some correlation between the start of my lag (the first day of double-xp weekend) and the peering problems with the CoX upstream ISP. The fact that this problem does not occur vs. west coast servers seems to discount this possibility though. If traffic shaping were occurring, it would be global for both sets of servers.

I can understand the Technical Support reps feeling powerless to resolve the problem; they probably don’t have any direct influence with the ISP. However, the fact that the problem is occurring with a peering ISP means that Paragon/NCsoft has more influence as a hosted customer than we do. Hey Paragon, if you had me working for you I could have resolved this for you in a few days.

I would post the obligatory “FIX TEH SERVER OR TEH CANCELS!!”, but I cancelled my sub earlier this week. I mention this not as a threat, but patiently waiting for more than a month just isn’t acceptable to me in a pay-to-play environment. I’ve been with CoX since the original closed beta and am going to miss it – I was really having fun again with some new power combos, but I don’t have any desire to pay more money to transfer my Liberty investments over a problem I did not create and have no control over. If the problem gets fixed, I might just come back. Until then, I’ll just keep watching and waiting.