The Elderscrolls Online (EU) utterly unplayable at times

[#1]

First thing I did, after the move to Frankfurt, when the issue appeared & the traffic is marked as game or gold.

[#2]

Here's a TBB BQM from yesterday for one of the gaming servers:

You can see where they have done the maintenance work at just before 3am. There appear to be no issues with latency/packet loss.
I would see how it plays today and if that maintenance made any difference.

[#3]

Guess Zenimax can affod to lose the custom of those that have issues:
Quote from their CS
"There's a few things here I think we need to clear up a bit at this point. Level 3 are a major carrier for everyone in fairness.

We have quite a few players using the game at any one time, the vast majority are experiencing no issues whatsoever. There is always going to be a handful of players with issues, and hopefully they'll be resolvable, whatever the issue may be. In the case of lag, there hasn't been any increase in lag reports, they have actually dropped dramatically since moving over, to the point where we have very little contact at all regarding it.

Your issue is pretty unique at the moment in all honesty, which is why I have been working through this with you and not just waiting for a fix to roll out, which would be a lot easier.  Have you tried a VPN at all? A VPN might bypass whatever could be causing the issue here and we could go from there.

Let me know if that makes any difference.

Kind regards,"
I think that can be paraphrased as:
pays us and you can fix the issue, we dont give a damn!

[#4]

That's not a particularly helpful response from them.
Looking at their forums, I've counted 30+ people still reporting issues in the last 48 hours post the update - so I think it's safe to say it's a widespread issue, affecting people from different countries (I looked at the English/French/German forums).
At the end of the day, I would imagine their European datacentre has not been scaled large enough to cope with the amount of traffic that it is receiving. They will buy X amount of bandwidth from Level3 and if that bandwidth is fully saturated, then they just need to buy more. They may also not have enough physical servers to cope with the number of users playing online.
I don't think it's a Level3 issue because some of the German users reporting lag, are routed via Zenimax's other carrier (Deutsche Telekom). They don't use the Level3 network.
You could easily dispute what they've written back to you here: there hasn't been any increase in lag reports, they have actually dropped dramatically since moving over, to the point where we have very little contact at all regarding it. If this was the case, why have they created stickies on every language support forum about performance issues on their European servers? And why are there dozens of users reporting lag?

[#5]

Interestingly, having pointed this out to them & that I did not feel that I wanted to continue to pay while this was going on, I suddenly got a "goodwill gesture" within minutes

[#6]

Well it's good you got a goodwill gesture, but it's frustrating how they wouldn't accept responsibility.
I take it you're still experiencing lag? I noticed there was more planned maintenance today and tomorrow.

[#7]

I think that they got the message, the last 3 days it's been what is expected with only 2 of the massive 'spikes' where nothing happens and almost no other noticeable events, & the route has been averaging 49ms instead of the 53+ that it was previously, not that that matters much, the game was more than playable when the server was in the US & averaging 180ms+
What is also interesting is that even more of Level3s routers are discarding all ICMP traffic - improving their bandwidth in London, maybe!

[#8]

Quote from: Gythral8PNC

What is also interesting is that even more of Level3s routers are discarding all ICMP traffic - improving their bandwidth in London, maybe!

This is normal though when their routers are busy - they prioritise other traffic. I can show you 500ms pings on a traceroute to bbc.co.uk from the Plusnet gateway I'm on (first external hop), but 3-4ms ping to the destination (bbc.co.uk).

[#9]

Yes, in this case I'm taking Level3s change of more routers as a good sign, not a bad one.