Constant Networking spikes seemingly causing lots of stuttering during gameplay

Hi guys, first real forum post I've ever needed to make, but I am at my wits end with how to deal with this issue.

Back during PoE2 .2 patch I was playing for a solid month with no issues, until one day I logged in and the game was essentially unplayable with the network sitting at a constant 20-30 MS (DC servers) jumping up to 500+ MS that would freeze my entire game. I scoured forum posts looking for some sort of answer and was never able to find one, so I decided id just be done with the league and come back when a new patch dropped.

Come 3.26 and however long into the league it ahs been, essentially the same events happened but in PoE 1. I have been playing since league start with no issues, both my Reap Miner and Smite trickster haven't even been pushing my PC as hard pretty much staying above the 144 FPS cap that I had set. I even played some this morning with no issue. Come home from grocery shopping and the game is a mess, I cant even walk around my hideout without the network freaking out and locking up my game.

I again started going through forum posts and trying basically every solution I could find, with the only one working being setting my Multithreading setting to singlethreading, dropping my FPS down to sub 50 FPS, but the Networking is sitting at a constant 30ms now. I used WinMTR to have these numbers https://pastebin.com/HBrbRT75, I don't really know what I am looking at when looking at this, so if anyone has any ideas that would be greatly appreciated. I'm really hoping that this is on GGG's end as nothing has changed on my end and all of a sudden the game I was having so much fun playing is at the point where I cant go 20 seconds without massive stuttering making the game really hard to play.

My specs are:
13700k
4080 Super
32GB ram
Games on an SSD

Hey, I can't offer a solution myself, but did you check your Ping with F1 ?

For me the game is literally unplayable around 19:00-21:00 cuz my Ping spikes to 5-7k....no joke

Doing a Speedtest at the same time shows a Ping around 12-17.

So i guess it's the server acting up ?

Ping sits at around 30-40 for the DC server and 40-50 on the Texas server, both are the two best servers for me since I'm in the Midwest. I don't have GB Internet, but I have zero issue in other games when I am playing those and up until yesterday I had been playing PoE perfectly fine. I'm going to be logging in after work today and see if things are fairing any better and will update the post again if things have changed.

"

Hawkfr0st#1255 wrote:

https://pastebin.com/HBrbRT75

Thank you for taking the time to run the WinMTR test!

The issue appears to be right at the beginning of the log;

| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 192.168.0.1 - 0 | 2149 | 2149 | 0 | 12 | 1514 | 0 |
| 10.61.159.130 - 3 | 1998 | 1958 | 8 | 23 | 1528 | 9 |
|po-322-321-rur201.wchicago.il.chicago.comcast.net - 2 | 2011 | 1975 | 6 | 25 | 1529 | 10 |
|po-2-rur202.wchicago.il.chicago.comcast.net - 2 | 2020 | 1986 | 8 | 24 | 1374 | 9 |

Here we can see that there was a ping of 1,514 ms (!) to the router in your own home, and that every subsequent hop reports packet loss. Essentially, packet loss is a percentage of your internet traffic that gets lost along the way and never makes it to its destination - this will be what causes the spikes you observe, as your game client has to wait for an acknowledgement, recognise there isn't one coming, and then try re-sending the data to GGG's server a second time.

The first thing I would recommend trying, if you haven't already, is what is known as a "power cycle." GGG doesn't offer help pages (or any other form of Technical Support), but Blizzard has step-by-step instructions which you can find here. Let me know if you've any questions.

As an aside, how is your computer connected to your router? An Ethernet cable? WiFi? A powerline adapter kit? I'm just wondering what "normal" would look like for your connection.

"

Hawkfr0st#1255 wrote:

I don't have GB Internet

FWIW, please never pay extra for better download speeds for gaming.

Games care about ping. You can think of faster download speeds as a larger delivery truck that can fit more inside at one time, and a better ping as a truck which drives faster on the road.

When you're playing an online game, your client and the server are constantly sending each other data - but it's absolutely tiny amounts of data (even over the course of an hour). But if you have a bad ping to the server - either naturally, or through packet loss artificially causing one - then the client will have to keep stalling while it waits for that data to arrive.

Typically an ISP won't attempt to lock better pings behind upgrade packages, so the only advantage of paying more for a """faster""" connection would be that installing the game & downloading any updates for the game will take less time. There's often diminishing returns there, too - as the faster your download speed gets, the more likely you'll run into a bottleneck elsewhere; e.g. having the fastest connection in the world won't help if a game's update server is struggling.

I tried a power cycle as one of my first tests yesterday, no help when I tried it. My router/modem sits right next to my PC connected to an Ethernet cable (3Ft) then the line in is right next to that with another 3ft cable. Have not missed the days of being on WiFi and trying to game.

What is confusing me is why would it be perfectly fine one session, then less than 2 hours later the issue appears, let alone it being essentially the same issue I had back during .2 patch for poe2? My router is fairly old, got it roughly 7 years ago but it's a Netgear c7000, which I have found reliable in the time that I have used it.

After I got tired of troubleshooting yesterday I had logged on to CS2 and played a few matches with no issues at all which is also making me suspect it would be an issue with PoE specifically, but I have no real way to prove that, especially if what the readout is saying that the issue is happening before it even makes it to my router. I will be leaving work in an hour ish and the plan is to get home and try things out again, and per your reading I'm going to make sure everything is seated correctly with my PC and router to be 100% certain nothing is acting funky there. Who knows when I was looking yesterday maybe I missed something obvious, either way think you for reading that log for me that at least point me in a direction!

"

Hawkfr0st#1255 wrote:

After I got tired of troubleshooting yesterday I had logged on to CS2 and played a few matches with no issues at all which is also making me suspect it would be an issue with PoE specifically, but I have no real way to prove that, especially if what the readout is saying that the issue is happening before it even makes it to my router.

Path of Exile and Path of Exile II both - for better or worse - use GGG's proprietary game engine. I don't believe their networking stack is identical, but the two will definitely be similar.

The only specific takeaway from the WinMTR log (and WinMTR is an industry staple, FWIW) is that there is an issue causing latency spikes which resides at your computer, at your router, or between the two. The log is incapable of specifying further than this.

GGG's in-house solutions do okay in terms of performance - certainly, better than I think a casual browsing of the games' forum would lead you to believe - but they're never quite been... graceful. An example of this is that there are dedicated programs specifically designed to stress test thermal solutions (e.g. case; CPU cooler) and verify that overclocks are stable. The Paths of Exile are not designed with this goal in mind, but in my experience... are rather useful in that capacity.

What I'm getting at is, if one did have an issue with their network connection, GGG's games would be the first to fall over. While there's nothing (that I'm aware of) in their code which would artificially cause latency delays or packet loss - the instant an external factor introduces one or both of these, GGG's games quickly go to hell in a hand basket. One quick example of is that the games tend to wait quite a while for an acknowledgement before timing out & resending the data; and this, really, only serves to make any such latency spike or packet loss all the more noticeable.

Path of Exiles I & II use TCP. WinMTR, which GGG has had no hand in the development of, uses by default ICMP. If multiple developers' programs are presenting symptoms of a troubled connection across multiple protocols, we do have to consider the common denominator.

Are there any furry family members who could have stepped on the Ethernet cable, just enough to make it slightly loose at one end? You could always try unplugging it at both ends and then subsequently re-inserting it at both just to test for this.

Unfortunately, that we're seeing latency spikes in responses from the router, and we're seeing packet loss immediately on the other side of the router... it is rather conspicuously in the nexus of seemingly multiple different problems. I really had been hoping a power cycle would have helped.

The Nighthawk C700 is end-of-life; if it's an ISP-provided device, you could always nudge them about a potential replacement. Best case scenario, that resoles the problem. Worst case scenario... well, you should at least get a more modern WiFi solution which might be nice.

If you're planning on troubleshooting when you get home from work (I'll prob be asleep by then, soz), I'd be interested in attempting to rule out issues with the Ethernet cable & the ports on either end its connected to. If either your desktop happens to support WiFi - some motherboards do - or if you'd have another device e.g. a laptop you could run a WinMTR / MTR test on, being able to compare the results to that of the Ethernet-reliant test could be informative. While WinMTR is Windows-specific software (hence the name), the underlying MTR software is not - this page might help.

Well anti-climatic, everything seems to be working fine as of this moment. Ran some maps and did an elderslayer invite, nothing crazy to speak of. If the issue comes back I'll try and update with what may have changed to cause the quality to degrade again, but here's hoping everything will be fine! Thank you Sarno for the insight into what may be wrong, even though I'm not sure what in particular helped the situation. May end up looking into getting a new router if mine is at its EoL but I'll have to shop around and see what is out there, its obviously been a while since I looked for one haha.

Heyo,

Sounds like a good problem to have! :)

Can I just ask whether that one you have now was provided by your ISP? YMMV, but the ISP I have here in Ireland specifically forbids the use of third-party modems - they permit theirs being put into Bridge Mode and a third-party router being put in place, but that's it.

Nope, in the states at least where I live and my ISP doesn't require you to have their Modem, they do provide one if you want one but I prefer to have my own.