The rubbishness of PSN - whose fault is it?

Shifty Geezer

Shifty Geezer

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A week ago me and two friends played Alienation with voice chat provided via PS4's Party feature and it was a blast. After a week business unable to play, we had some time last night to do the same. Only this time, my connection kept being lost, my party died, my friend couldn't connect and was advised to restart everything, then I couldn't join his party 'Possibly because of the wrong NAT type', and finally after playing 20 minutes in silence with lots of lag and delay, the game crashed out due to disconnect with server. All in all a waste of time.

The question is who's fault is this? Is it the ISPs? Do you have to have a dedicated gaming connection these days? Or Sony being crap with their network despite charging for it? Or weather patterns and sun-spots?
 
Shifty Geezer said:
The question is who's fault is this? Is it the ISPs? Do you have to have a dedicated gaming connection these days? Or Sony being crap with their network despite charging for it? Or weather patterns and sun-spots?
Click to expand...

Do you experience connectivity problems happen on other gaming platforms or is it just PSN?
 
I rarely encountered any similar issues if at all. But one of the most common I encounter is the fact that my PS4 sometimes doesnt load properly its PS+ list, messages or some information like people's profiles etc. But I suspect that might also be partly due to my HDD being almost full but I could be wrong
 
DSoup said:
Do you experience connectivity problems happen on other gaming platforms or is it just PSN?
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I don't have any other gaming platforms (other than Steam, but no games to test. I suppose I could spend time trying Awesomenauts out online). I had issues with PSN before and did a lot of router settings tweaks which seemed to help immensely with SWBattlefronts to the point I thought it was a fixed issue. And as I say, last time Alienation worked fine.

But with SWBF (before 'fix') and Magicka 2 and Alientation, I'll be online and connected and yet the games would keep complaining about dropping connection to the game servers.

edit: I could also try some freebie on Android or iOS I guess.
 
In modern networking there is a lot of things that can go wrong but which only reveal themselves under certain circumstances.

Your router could have a conflict with PS4 or PSN. NATs will necessitate running PS4 in a DMZ or specific ports being forwarded if UPnP isn't enabled - this is what is sounds most like. Is your router running the latest stable firmware? Your router could an issue with your ISP which is more likely if your router wasn't supplied by your ISP. I'd check both your router and ISP support forums to see if this is a known issue, there may be a solution.

Your ISP could generally have issues with PSN due to traffic shaping policies which may not be in operation at all times. How are you doing against your ISP's fair usage policies? They rarely tell you when they are throttling you and realtime traffic is the first to suffer.

Networking problems like this are difficult to diagnose unless you can insert something like Wireshark into the chain. If won't you tell you specifically what's wrong, but you will be able to see what isn't right like packets disappearing.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
I don't have any other gaming platforms (other than Steam, but no games to test. I suppose I could spend time trying Awesomenauts out online). I had issues with PSN before and did a lot of router settings tweaks which seemed to help immensely with SWBattlefronts to the point I thought it was a fixed issue. And as I say, last time Alienation worked fine.

But with SWBF (before 'fix') and Magicka 2 and Alientation, I'll be online and connected and yet the games would keep complaining about dropping connection to the game servers.

edit: I could also try some freebie on Android or iOS I guess.
Click to expand...
Some sites have a server monitor, like https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/, where it has indicators of the service, if you are unsure if your issue is local or not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone has a more detailed one, where it breaks down apps, login server, party, and whether you can play games. Long story short, I would probably check these to see if its on your end or if other players are experiencing the same issues as you.
 
What I don't understand with the router theory is why is it so inconsistent? Why can a router work sometimes and not others without changing anything? I've done all the port forwarding I could find. That seemed to fix the issue with SWBF so I thought that was a success.

As for fair use, apparently there are no restrictions - https://help2.talktalk.co.uk/broadband-traffic-management

To date I've mostly blamed my own connection, but where my friend was having connection issues too, that points to a wider problem. And yeah, debugging things like this isn't at all easy, but it's very frustrating. If few people are having issues, that points to more on my end than PSN at least.
 
iroboto said:
Some sites have a server monitor, like https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/, where it has indicators of the service, if you are unsure if your issue is local or not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone has a more detailed one, where it breaks down apps, login server, party, and whether you can play games. Long story short, I would probably check these to see if its on your end or if other players are experiencing the same issues as you.
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The official status last night was no problems. But if, for example, PSN servers are being overworked and can't cope, that wouldn't show as a service fault but would impact players.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
The official status last night was no problems. But if, for example, PSN servers are being overworked and can't cope, that wouldn't show as a service fault but would impact players.
Click to expand...
ugg, yea that's shoddy. Uhh, I guess you'll have to follow reddit and see if people start complaining then. Reddit is pretty quick with 'is it down?' threads.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
The official status last night was no problems. But if, for example, PSN servers are being overworked and can't cope, that wouldn't show as a service fault but would impact players.
Click to expand...
Was this related to your experience last night?
https://www.reddit.com/r/path%3D%252Fr%252FPS4%252Fcomments%252F6dtjmq%252F

And another:
https://www.reddit.com/r/path%3D%252Fr%252FPS4%252Fcomments%252F6du0yu%252F

And more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/path%3D%252Fr%252FPS4%252Fcomments%252F6do3x3%252F

And more:
https://www.reddit.com/r/path%3D%252Fr%252FPS4%252Fcomments%252F6drn61%252F
 
Not really. I've had no problem logging in to PSN. However, when connected I get games and Party reporting a loss of connecting. A friend send a message to our chat last night (hosted by me) but we never got it. Also had problems when friend hosted chat (couldn't join) and hosted game (connection lost after 20 minutes).

It's the timing that concerns me. If it was a router or setting issue, surely I couldn't connect in the first place? If I can connect but the connection is ropey and could be dropped after 20 minutes, to me, who's always seen networking as the blackest form of voodoo, that suggests a fault in the network itself.
 
Are you using WiFi?

I would try a wired connection first. If that doesn't help try setting up a static IP om your ps4 and forward the necessary ports (shouldn't really make a difference but still).

If you still got problems try a steam game or something else and see how that goes.

Similar problems? Maybe look into a different router.

No problems with steam? Might be something on Sony's side.

Your ISP is most likely to leave this kind of traffic alone as online gaming isn't really that bandwidth intensive.

As dsoup said troubleshooting problems like this is a pain, especially if it's happening at random.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
It's the timing that concerns me. If it was a router or setting issue, surely I couldn't connect in the first place? If I can connect but the connection is ropey and could be dropped after 20 minutes, to me, who's always seen networking as the blackest form of voodoo, that suggests a fault in the network itself.
Click to expand...

There's a hundred things that can fail in a routers TCP stack, particularly when you have many open concurrent connections open. Was anything else using the router. Doing background downloads or updates? Does your router offer realtime bandwidth/usage monitor? Most do these days so you can see exactly what devices (and even types of application), over which connection, is doing what.

What make/model is it?
 
Not saying its not a PSN issue, but routers are "fragile", especially the home kind. And memory leaks in software of the router can make it misbehave differently at different times. And different traffic patterns can trigger different problems/bugs and what not.

If you have some sort of QoS running on it, what are the rules for emptying different queues, some queues are getting starved others saturated.
What was the background traffic in your network and other traffic going through your router, how does that impact the TX/RX buffers and the QoS. Now multiply with the number of players you where. I assume that you where not playing splitscreen. Some of this info, even your router vendor probably will not be able to get, because they just bought the reference design from Broadcom (other chip vendor) which runs an ancient and super modified linux kernel.

If the game is P2P with no server, then add the complexity of that.

Do not use UPnP and port forwarding at the same time.

Yes, home networking is a mess, not so much that network by itself is voodoo, which it can be, but because most of the devices are not profitable. Its like games, you need a hit model to make decent money on a home router. :D

Oh yes, adding wifi to the mix and its a miracle anything works at all. Slap on more complexity on something already very complex, that really is not a good fit for each other. But with Wifi, you have radio issues like coverage, noise, interferences and what not to contend with also. Wireshark is your friend, but its just a tool that requires so much expert knowledge that it's mostly useless for the average person. Most likely the session traffic is encrypted, so Wireshark probably won't help that much anyway.
 
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If your router is fragile, you're running the wrong hardware and software. Look into running DD-WRT software on consumer routers.

I have never had router issues.
 
PSN mostly had issues last gen. I only own a PS4 since the very end of last year and didn't experience any kind of serious Issues and I don't have the best networking solution(WI-Fi only)
There was Lag in Battlefield 1 in some servers but there was a BF1 patch shortly after and didn't experience it anymore so it was probably a server thing not PSN.
that being said I didn't use my System much only occasionally Playing Single player, Downloading demos (which always worked) or testing online multplayer.

however I noticed something weird when I wanted to turn connection from OFF status to ON last weekend. It did not happen seamlessy at all.
I had to check the "turn internet connection on" Box >Restart the console>Still didn't load PSN/any browser site>restart a 2nd Time>wait a moment> loaded everything as usual.

My belief is that you have to let your system breathe a bit before opening anything Internet related on it. Had to do the same with PS3.
 
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PSN seems to be pretty fragile overall. FFXIV continues to experience problems with PSN from time to time. When this happens, PC users are unaffected.

For example. Problems with PSN which affected all PS4/PS3 users but affected no other users.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/325622-PSN-Technical-Difficulties-(May-23)
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/321749-PSN-Technical-Difficulties-(Mar.-31-Apr.-1)
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/318035-PSN-Technical-Difficulties-(Feb.-13-14)
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/317654-PSN-Technical-Difficulties-(Feb.-8)
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/317511-PSN-Technical-Difficulties-(Feb.-6-7)
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/317283-PSN-Technical-Difficulties-(Feb.-4)
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/317111-PSN-Technical-Difficulties-(Feb.-2)

It's particularly frustrating when your half of your raiding party consists of PS4 users and you can't raid because none of them can log in. Often when this happens they have problems with other PSN services.

But, note that internet problems in general can also interfere. For example, for FFXIV still.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/323859-Recovery-from-Network-Technical-Difficulties-(May-1)

That's where the ISP they use for hosting in Europe had problems that affected all European users of the game (only the EU data center was affected). This is pretty rare for them.

Also, if the game you are using is reliant on server side hosting, issues with data center hosting can affect server pods as well. For example,

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/324721-Recovery-from-All-Mana-Data-Center-Worlds-Technical-Difficulties-(May-14)

That's where technical difficulties were affecting the data pod hosting the worlds in the "Mana" server pool, but did not affect other data pods hosted at that location. On a pod by pod basis it's still more rare than PSN difficulties for users on any given pod but more frequent than the entire datacenter having issues.

As the internet is compartmentalized for the most part, the segment of PSN that FFXIV goes through may have been the only ones affected. Although with hosting in datacenters in Europe, NA, and Japan, it's strange that all of them were affected simultaneously.

If the game you were playing has a competent technical staff that documents issues like Square-Enix does for FFXIV, you could try checking their forums to see if they've been documenting problems affecting online users. If they report issues diligently to their users, you might be able to ferret out the root of the issues you had.

I really do have to commend Square-Enix for how compressive their reporting is for problems experienced by their users as it relates to their service.

It's too bad that FFXIV isn't on Xbox as well. It'd be interesting to see if the Xbox service can be as fragile.

Regards,
SB
 
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