Level3.net, a tier 1 provider used by many ISPs and online game services in the US, has been experiencing problems during prime time off and on for months now. Ping to PS2 servers jumps from <50-70ms at off-peak up to 350+ in the evenings. I've asked around enough by now to know I'm not the only one experiencing this, and traceroutes consistently show Level3.net as the problem. This is affecting all SOE services, not just PlanetSide 2, and I'm just about at the end of my rope. My ISP is giving me the runaround since it isn't a problem on their end, and near as I can tell there's no way to contact Level3.net unless they service you or you're a corporation affected by their service. I'm really hoping a company with SOE's clout can contact them and get them to actually look into this, because I'm starting to think they aren't ever going to fix it. Posting the relevant part of my trace route: Tracing route to lvspsn-liv-gw01.station.sony.com [64.37.174.140] over a maximum of 30 hops: 6 88 ms 89 ms 89 ms vlan51.ebr1.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.147.94] 7 89 ms 89 ms 94 ms ae-1-6.bar2.LasVegas1.Level3.net [4.69.148.1] 8 243 ms 243 ms 238 ms ae-0-11.bar1.LasVegas1.Level3.net [4.69.148.125] 9 57 ms 56 ms 56 ms SWITCH-COMM.bar1.LasVegas1.Level3.net [205.129.1 6.50] 10 171 ms 159 ms 164 ms vl3104.lvssw-2.sonyonline.net [64.37.168.26] 11 237 ms 236 ms 237 ms lvspsn-liv-gw01.station.sony.com [64.37.174.140] Trace complete. Bear in mind this is shortly after the primetime lagspikes begin to flare up. It will consistently get worse as the evening wears on.
You aren't the only one... There's at least 5-6 different people (me included) with threads about this in the past 4 days.
Yep getting constant large lag spikes every 10min or so, up until the last few days this hasn't been an issue for me.
The "backbone" of the internet is really only a handful of providers. It's not that L3 handles "many online game services"; it's that they handle "the internet"... as in, all of it, along with 8 other companies. The internet is a volatile place. http://www.internetpulse.net/ I'm not defending L3; however, if your game has been bad for more than just a few hours, then the problem is most likely not all L3, but a mixture of L3 and SOE. Looking at ping from a traceroute doesn't necessarily tell you why gameplay is bad. It only tells you where there are congested routers along the path. However, it's important to note that icmp traffic (ping) is the first thing to be deprioritized on a congested router. The traceroute does not tell you anything about upd (game) traffic. So it can be a bit misleading. A better tool is pingplotter or winmtr. What's important isn't so much what's happening along the path, although it can be, what matters is what's happening on the server. If spikes don't propagate along the route all the way to the server, then it's not very likely that it was the cause of your problem.
Tool leftover from supporting enterprise software: try using pingplotter. It's a free utility that shows you a graphical/visual version of traceroute. Once you get good with it, you can learn to identify single routers causing issues, it's IP address, location, etc. While you can't do much once you identify the issue, your ISP can contact Level 3 (if they are indeed the problem) with the information you provide.
Im from Polish ad i have that same problem. Im use tracert 69.174.194.166 and last line is Amsterdam1 level3.net and rest line is reguest timet out. It is level3.net problem Sory for my English
