Strange/inefficient tracer route = bad latency

[lllNuggetslll]

So, I'm currently residing in Korea, and when I play BF3, it's usually on Asian servers. For the past year, I've enjoyed servers that offer latencies that averaged around 50ms. Lately, I've been getting kicked from these same servers for having too high a ping, it would fluctuate from 90 - 1000+! I've reset my router and modem and dinked around with software to no avail. I also loaded Diablo 3 and played a bit on the US servers, where I got an average latency of 188ms. Not bad for overseas, huh? http://www.pingtest.net/result/82805075.png [pingtest.net] What in the world is going on with BF3?

That led me to investigate my internet connection. I waited to check this last because Korean internet is pretty much creme de le creme when it comes to quality and speed. I have a 100mbps connection with 5mbps uploading speeds, more than enough for a broadband hog like BF3. http://www.speedtest.net/result/2783268669.png [speedtest.net]

I did some online tests, first at speedtest.net where I pinged a Japanese server from Korea, because Japan has most the servers and is right next door. Here are my results:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2783123379.png [speedtest.net]

It's lower, but I believe it's still more than enough according to past gaming experiences.

I went ahead and did a tracer route test of one of my favorite Japanese servers using http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ [yougetsignal.com]

They give you a nice visual display of the path your packets take to get to that server. This is where things got interesting.

First, I did a trace straight from my IP to the server:

http://imgur.com/0AHxiPp [imgur.com]

So, it starts in Korea, jumps to the US, to CHINA, and THEN to Japan! What in the world!? A stunning 20k miles @ 29hops! The distance between Seoul and Japan is about 700mi to give you guys a reference. I tried on another home laptop, with the same results.

I played around with it a bit more, this time behind a proxy, and this is what I got :

http://imgur.com/0VJIfeV [imgur.com]

This time it starts in the US (I think that's where the proxy server is located) and it ends up traveling to Spain, back to the US, China, and then Japan. That's a distance of almost 15kmi @ 23hops.

I did a third trace, a host trace where the website started the trace from their own servers.

http://imgur.com/XDY8Q1y [imgur.com]

Still not the most efficient path, but notably faster and shorter than the first 2 tests. 9k miles @ 13 hops, and the fastest in 2 seconds.

The obvious questions should be, why is BF3 taking such long routes? Or is it BF3's fault at all? Does anyone else seem to exhibit the same problems?

I have no idea what to do or where to go from here.

[Carbonic]

Yeah that does seem silly. It is however hard to know if it's your ISP, the Korean Internet Exchange point or EA's ISP.

I would tackle this in 2 ways.

1. Contact you ISP and give them the information you have provided here and ask about the weird routing and try to get them to diagnose it. They have tools you and me simply don't.
2. Contact EA. The advisor you get first probably won't know anything about how to solve routing issues, so you should probably get them to forward you to a specialist. This might be an USA based telephone number so you will have to use a free "computer app to us phone" solution. You contact EA by going to https://help.ea.com/contact-us
   You will have to write some keywords about your problem, then fill out product, category and platform, press "Find Solutions" and then "I Still Need Help". Then your contact options will appear. If live chat/phone does not appear, it might be closed in your area at the moment and you might consider changing it to: "United States" or something else in the language selector in the bottom for a better result.

Hope that helped

Please accept solutions if they are correct and press the XP button if somebody helped you. This way you help others in the same situation.

Cheers
-Carbonic