High Latency Spikes, evenings, US servers (California, Texas, Washington DC)

Hello!

First and foremost, I want to say that my husband and I are longtime fans of the game (started playing on December 25 2016).

Granted, we've taken every other league off, especially in the last few years due to our family expanding.

Now, our problem is this: why is it that California, Texas and Washington DC servers always have high latency and insane latency spikes (we're talking about 12k+) every evening, Central Standard Time?

It is NOT our ISP, as they have monitored our connection every single day for the past two weeks. They showed us the graphs. Nothing is wrong on our end. Granted, we don't play with a VPN, though we've considered getting one. But the fact it would only be for one game is what is holding us back from this.

During the mornings and afternoons, we have stable MS. Highest I see it is maybe 200, but it's steadily under 75. Starting 5-6 PM, however, our lowest is 250 MS and the graph shows ping ponging up and down like a polygraph test. It's ridiculous the lag we've experienced night after night to the point where we just log off, feeling it worthless to even try running maps when we end up dying to lag after skyrocketing for no reason (that is not to count when we crash-disconnect due to high latency). Weekends are usually the same thing, works fine mornings and afternoons MS wise, smooth as butter. Come evening...ooffff. Sunday was almost like that all afternoon and evening too. And we are not the only one who experience this. A lot of people in our guild also have reported this happening to them, as well as many people on reddit (and also on this forum as I can see). This has only started in the 2nd week of the league. 1st week was fine. We've never gotten to experience high latency that wasn't a problem from our end before, and we've played a lot of leagues, including Harvest, Harbinger and Blight...all of which had mechanics that can easily make our CPU lag.

Path of Exile is the only game where we experience this. We tried D2R, D3, Hearthstone, WoW Retail, Heroes of the Storm. NO lag at all. Latency is smooth.

Please, GGG. Listen to your players and do something about this. If a lot of people mention it, then this is an issue that is going on in a decent percent of your playerbase.

Did your ISP not do any work at all to actually troubleshoot?...

Tell your ISP to do trace routes.

They can do proper upstream pings and see where the issue is.


Get the instance IP of a few laggy instances, give them to your ISP. Ask them to troubleshoot.


Of course there's likely nothing wrong with your connection to your ISP, it's what happens after that.

Another ISP.

Yes, my ISP has been doing routing as well. And this one we switched to from a really bad one.

Literally, PoE is the only game where this happens. None of the others have that issue, and I'm talking about other ARPG, MMOs and what not.

Our ISP has been on top of things, applied all proper upgrades when needed.

Given the dozens if not close to hundred posts about this on this website and Reddit both, the problem cannot only be on the players and the ISPs, whether or not we use VPN. Something is wrong with the servers, and I wish GGG would address this, and not strictly place the blame on us when it's highly likely there could be improvements to be made on their end.

It makes no sense that MS is perfectly fine past 11 PM, throughout the night, morning and afternoon, but goes haywire in the evenings without fail.

And starting mid-week 2 of the league at that. Prior to that specific time, none of this was happening.