JIO22 - thanks for the captures, that's exactly what I needed and helped to confirm what we're thinking is the problem.
We've got our PS3 sorted and we've done some more testing here and think we've spotted something.
What we've noticed is that that when the game starts it does some initial ping tests against EA's ping sites. The captures we've seen shows that it does those against several ping sites, some of which aren't in Europe. When it matches you against a random player it uses the results from that ping test to match you against someone with similar latency. Our theory is that when it matches you to a player it uses the wrong site, it doesn't use a UK site it uses one outside of Europe. Therefore it matches you to someone whose ping to the US or Hong Kong is similar to your ping to the US or Hong Kong. That means rather than playing against someone in the UK or France you end up playing against people all over Europe. Our testing shows we end up matching against all over Eastern Europe and even Saudi Arabia but only once against a UK player and occasionally someone in Spain or Germany. Because of this we we think we were seeing lag in the game. The only time we played against a UK player the latency was really poor.
What we've done is block the PS3 from communicating with all the ping sites except the UK one. In testing we were playing against mainly UK and French players and one from Austria. In all the games we played we saw no lag and where we could ping the opponent it was steady and stable (and usually less than 60ms).
We're going to go back to EA and see what they say but it would be very helpful if anyone playing the game could do the same as us and see if it makes any difference.
If you have a Technicolor router you can block the ping sites by doing the following:
Make sure the PS3 is switched off.
Telnet to the router and then copy and paste or enter the following commands:
:expr add name fifa13block type ip addr 159.153.174.133
:expr add name fifa13block type ip addr 159.153.105.104
:expr add name fifa13block type ip addr 159.153.202.54
:expr add name fifa13block type ip addr 109.200.214.104
:expr add name fifa13block type ip addr 189.1.174.126
:firewall rule add chain forward_custom dstip fifa13block action drop
This will take effect immediately. If you reboot the router then the commands will be lost but let's just see if it makes any difference first.
Switch the PS3 on and play the game and see if it helps any. Like I say, for us, apart from one game we played against UK and French players which is something we hadn't done before and it did seem to make a big difference, but over to you guys to see if it helps.
Dave Tomlinson
Enterprise Architect - Network & OSS
Plusnet Technology
