Hello, I’m playing from California on EU servers. I’m usually used to around 150ms which isn’t great but is tolerable.
Almost every night this week (around 9am server time) I’ve experienced 500ms (world) for hours.
I’m with Spectrum ISP, ethernet connection and no issues with any other internet service (or other games).
This issue has been ongoing for a while, with some weeks being more frequent spikes than others.
Howdy from across the pond, Grimold!
Increased latency around specific times is almost always related to high load on the network nodes you’re passing through on your way to the server. In a sense this is much akin to how there are times of the day when roads tend to clog up with more cars and traffic jams occur, e.g. typically in the morning and evening when people drive to/from work. 9 AM in Europe would not usually fall under this in terms of network usage (it’d very much fit for road conditions…), but if that happens to be late evening/night in California you’d be pretty much hitting “prime time” for internet usage of that region.
In other words: the regional networks which you pass through on the way towards european game realms could be fairly congested, and that’d definitely cause delays especially in the current situation where gaming-related data traffic is already being throttled/delayed by most network companies even at the best of times.
For some ISPs especially in the US there are also somewhat notable differences between “peak” and “off-peak” routing when it comes to international data traffic (“peak” here referring to times with lots of regional users online). You may want to run a WinMTR test during a time you have regular latency, and another when it spikes upwards - comparing the results would allow to see if there are differences (which would indicate the ISP indeed changes routing based on respective time of day).
Have you considered playing on US servers, where your latency won’t be affected by the trans-atlantic jump?
Thanks Veadsarias! I’ll give the WinMTR test a go.
I appreciate the response, cheers!
@Trovlak, that’s not possible unfortunately.
I’ve played with the same group of folks for 16 years and have a bunch of server first achievements I couldn’t bear to give up. I’d probably just stop playing altogether if the latency issue became too bad.
Playing on EU servers has been totally fine for me for years up till around 6 months ago.
Thanks for chiming in though.
im also from the US and just about 6 months like you said my latency went through the roof out of nowhere. for years i had around 80 latency and ever since then im lucky to see below 120
Hi, me again! (Server transfer and name change!)
If anyone was interested and is having the same issue, I installed a VPN and it fixed my problem. I have no idea what this means for my ISP or network issues, but it works and I can get playable MS again during the problem hours.