Thanks for all those details. I'll keep an eye out for other reports of this.
Community ManagerI definitely get that it's not always on the customer's side. We're constantly monitoring for issues. When the majority of the playerbase has a good connection, that makes it very difficult to troubleshoot. But, just like assuming we're responsible for bad connections, are we also the reason for good connections? Personally, upgrading my equipment made a huge difference in my own connection, but I see the occasional report where even with a router and modem designed for gaming, they still feel lag. However, these are rare as most people are using equipment provided by their ISP that really isn't designed with gaming in mind. Especially not a game like NHL that requires little to no input lag to be successful at.
Bad connections are probably the hardest issue for us to troubleshoot. There are a ton of different pieces to that puzzle and our servers are only one part of them. A myriad of things can go wrong between the data sent from your console to its final destination with our servers. 2 people in the same region, connected to the same server could have wildly different connections. There is only so much we can do to try to make everyone play with a low ping and little to no packet loss. We don't have any control over the concurrent traffic on your network, what TV/monitor you're using, what modem/router you have, if it's updated with the current firmware, if it has features specific to gaming available, your HDMI cable, the routing of your ISP and any issues that might be happening in the regions your data is being sent through.
We want you all to be able to play without issue and do all we can to make that happen. Thankfully, most are playing just fine, but when we don't have any current issues with our servers, there's only so much troubleshooting we can do.
Community ManagerYou can probably look up any competitive, online game and see people complaining about connections. It's one of the biggest issues with games today if not the biggest. Connections can vary wildly. In my home, there are very often 2 people playing a game online along with 2 devices streaming media at the same time as well as having a dozen devices connected to our network. Yet, my connection is fantastic and I'm often playing on northern servers. close. Also, every game is different. For example, shooters have a very different mechanic than a hockey game that has 12 players with a single object constantly in motion. If there was a huge issue on our end with connections, we'd get a far higher number of reports than we do. That will happen when we have an outage. Our forums and support are flooded with contacts about it.
I'm not going to say we're perfect. I'm sure somewhere there could be improvements made on our end, but that also goes for everyone. I have looked at thousands of connection tests over the years from people that say their internet is perfect. A very large amount of them come back saying otherwise. We can't survive without having dependable connections and do all we can to make that happen.
