One of the cooler benefits of my new job is that not only does our office sit on one of the fastest internet nodes on the west coast, my funky new laptop comes with a selection of 5 VPN access points – 3 in the US, 1 in Seoul Korea, and the last one in France. And it’s ok to use these for ‘recreational use’ within reason.
Travel is part of the job, hence the varied access.
So for fun, I decided to try STO from the office fiber connection, a VPN from Boston and Los Angeles, from France and just out of curiosity – from Seoul South Korea.
Office connection tested out at 100MB down (topped out), with an upload speed of 36.4MB. Pretty much a commercial connection. The game stuttered, rubberbanded and lagged just like at home.
So I VPN’d to our Boston hub. While not as bad at home, the lag made playing the STF’s near impossible. Tried LA next. Same lagging and rubber banding.
Could not establish a stable VPN connection in Seoul, but oddly enough from France I got in 2 STF’s with minor lagging. After disconnecting 3x, I gave up and decided to play from home.
It’s Thursday night and everyone is complaining about the lag in 10K DPS. I’m just wondering what city I have to move to get a good connection to Star Trek Online.
Conversations with the Lootcritter 
Aren’t their servers on the east coast somewhere? But yes, even the folk I know who use VPNs are seeing the same thing: the PvE queues – especially ISx queues – are a flaming mess. Supposedly, Cryptic thinks it might be a DDoS; https://twitter.com/trekonlinegame/status/591366588982398976 (A DDoS against STO? Pull the other one. A DDoS against Neverwinter on XBOne, as someone on reddit mentioned? Possible. A DDoS against someone else on Cryptic’s stellar ISP? That, I’d buy.)
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Why a basic DOS attack is possible, it’s also easy to contend with when it’s this small. If the attack worked, we’d be unable to login, let alone play. But given their hesitence to admit anythings wrong with their ISP, Cryptic blames everything BUT the actual problem.
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Assuming they never moved (and I want to say in her posts trendy confirmed that the datacenter is still where it was) the game ‘lives’ in Boston. I thing is, the source of the latency is still a big problem. It could be the gateway into the datacenter, which then means whatever fight you have to have to fix that, be it pay more money to get more bandwidth or ride the provider like a mule in order to get them to fix their stuff. The problem could also easily be network inside the datacenter. THis then gets harder to peg down if its intermittent. The thing with that is that if I am following things, when they are complaining about latency, its in very specific things, like ISA (and maybe ISN) and several other places, and not a general lag. That leads us to possibility 3, routing to those particular instance providers or the instances themselves. And if thats the case, that moves things possibly into the software side of things, though you have to determine what exactly would cause issues in one scenario vs another. See also, frustrating as hell.
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