Latency Issue on Fortnite

[#1]

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@Eatpower wrote:

The trace route address (which I used) is: qosping-aws-eu-west-3.ol.epicgames.com

Are you able to use the Fortnight server at  qosping-aws-eu-west-2.ol.epicgames.com  ?

as "eu-west-3" appears to be in Paris,  whereas  "eu-west-2"  seems to be in London

[#2]

No, you can only choose EU and that's it. Americans, Canadians and Mexican users seem to be the only user who get that luxury of choosing between NA -W or NA -E

I did another trace route on my MacBook Air via terminal and enclosed an image. 

[#3]

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@Eatpower wrote:

Is that a Static IP?

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As Plusnet static IPs always appear to be located in England, but sometimes Plusnet dynamic IPs report as being elsewhere on some geo-location services,  I'm wondering where Epic "think" you are connecting from (assuming they try and connect you to a server nearest to where they think you are physically located).

If you go to  https://www.whatismyip.com/   does that show your location as somewhere in England (but not necessarily anywhere close to where you actually are)

[#4]

Just another thought,  do you have access to a VPN ?

If so does that give you a different result as that would very likely be sending traffic by a different route, and prove/disprove Epic's statement about the ISP sending traffic via particular "exchange points"

[#5]

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@Eatpower wrote:

Here is a sample what Epic says about my ISP being responsible. “ Well, this is almost always due to an issue with your internet service provider's way they are routing to our Fortnite servers. Internet service providers use things called internet exchange points to efficiently carry data from your computer to any destination.”

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Perhaps you could ask Epic to explain why it is that when you connect from the UK to their "Europe" server pool, that THEY are directing your traffic to their Amazon servers in Paris (eu-west-3) instead of London (eu-west-2) or Ireland (eu-west-1) if that's closer to you ?

Epic server in Ireland -

$ mtr -w -c 10 -r qosping-aws-eu-west-1.ol.epicgames.com

HOST: My-Desktop-PC                                       Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- My-Router                                          0.0%   100    0.2   0.2   0.1   0.2   0.0
  2.|-- ec2-52-48-115-87.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com   0.0%    10    6.6   5.9   5.7   6.6   0.3

Epic server in London -

$ mtr -w -c 10 -r qosping-aws-eu-west-2.ol.epicgames.com

HOST: My-Desktop-PC                                       Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- My-Router                                          0.0%   100    0.2   0.2   0.1   0.2   0.0
  2.|-- ec2-35-176-71-245.eu-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com  0.0%    10    6.0   5.9   5.7   6.1   0.1

Epic server in Paris -

$ mtr -w -c 10 -r qosping-aws-eu-west-3.ol.epicgames.com

HOST: My-Desktop-PC                                       Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- My-Router                                          0.0%   100    0.2   0.2   0.1   0.2   0.0
  2.|-- ec2-52-47-107-154.eu-west-3.compute.amazonaws.com  0.0%    10    5.8   6.5   5.8   8.5   1.0

Getting the Amazon aws server locations from this -  AWS service endpoints 

[#6]

Epic are extremely pompous.

Because this company makes billions hand over fist, and believe nothing on their side is ever wrong or broken. But I’ll definitely ask them what you suggested, just don’t want to get anyones hopes up and think Epic will help resolve this problem.

[#7]

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@Eatpower wrote:

... this company ... ... believe nothing on their side is ever wrong or broken

Well they couldn't claim to be "EPIC" if they thought they weren't perfect ?

[#8]

Haha, that is very true. Unfortunately, they’ve relegated some of their responsibilities of problems with their games to Reddit users. I made a post asking why can I not join a local server and this was the response from one user.

“If they’re using aws, then probably yes, and aws is probably responsible for any routing”

[#9]

If AWS are doing the routing, then they will most likely simply connect you to the least loaded server in a given region no matter what the distance, or allocate users to different servers on a round-robin distribution within a given geographic pool,  neither scenario taking into account optimum minimum latency for the user - which is required for gaming.

You can see something like that is going on when you do repeated traceroutes to "qosping-aws-eu-west-3.ol.epicgames.com",

because the resulting IP address of the Amazon AWS server that replies, changes frequently within the same Epic eu-west-3 server address pool.

What it needs is Epic to recognise that you are in the UK and route you to the "eu-west-2" London or "eu-west-1" Ireland pools, and then let the corresponding AWS traffic load balancer select a server from those pools for you.

[#10]

The same user decided to reply and add further information. They said they are connected via the same traceroute path as I am and are not experiencing any packet loss. 

[#11]

@Eatpower I think this thread should be in the gaming forum. it is of no interest to anyone who cannot be bothered with Computer games.

[#12]

It’s a network issue none the less.

Had you read through this you would know the developer of the game has made it abundantly clear this issue cannot be resolved at their end. A Plusnet employee went through this thread this afternoon, and he didn’t mind me posting here.

I can only advise you to continue to ignore this post if it antagonizes you in anyway, shape or form.

[#13]

I will do exactly as you suggest. tl:dr

[#14]

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@Eatpower wrote:

... the only time this happens is when the game gets a new season and tons of people bog down their servers but as the weeks go by, things go back to normal.

Given that neither Plusnet, Epic, or Amazon, are likely to provide a solution, and that it appears that your home broadband connection looks OK, and that at least the trace to BT in London seems fine. I'm clutching at straws as to what else you can try.

1)   If you understand that ping response times from almost any server usually has the lowest priority compared to the actual traffic the machine is supposed to be serving,  and I believe that some games have automatic anti-lag built in - so a consistent high latency connection can be mitigated,   I'm wondering whether it is worth doing the counter-intuitive thing, of deliberately connecting to each of the other far away regions to see whether they are actually playable (as opposed to taking any notice of the ping values which might not reflect real world performance ?

2)  If you have access to a VPN with the capability of making you appear to be located in a different (probably European) country,  it would be interesting to see whether sending your gaming traffic via a different path across the internet makes any difference ?

3)  I would have suggested trying to connect to Epic using IPv6,  but I can't get their servers to reply from my IPv6 requests.  I often find that forcing my home network traffic to use IPv6 uses less network hops, has less 'buffering', and generally behaves better than Plusnet's IPV4 routes.  But if Epic don't support IPv6 then it's not any use to you.

Good luck !