Unplayable Network Lag

Comcast is my ISP. Every single trace-route I've seen in this thread is from a Comcast customer. Until I see a player with another ISP with the same symptoms posted by the OP, I see no reason not to conclude that this is an issue specific to Comcast customers. It may be that Comcast is purely at fault, or it may be that Comcast has changed something on its network that interacts improperly with something on Cryptic's side.

At another poster's suggestion, I just used my mobile phone as an Internet hot-spot. The game runs nearly perfectly. Since Friday night (10:00 pm PDT), Neverwinter has been unplayable for me - even the simplest chores such as invocation or professions management took a full hour for a rotation of my nine alts. Using my mobile hot-spot, the game is instantly playable. I have swapped back and forth with consistent, replicable results.

I have ruled out Comcast DNS servers as the source. I configured my networking to use Google's public DNS servers as well as OpenDNS' servers. No change in symptoms.

In my experience with Comcast as a business networking provider, I have experienced a number of regional networking failures attributable to conflicting routing information as well as mysteriously resurrected obsolete routing information. While I find difficult to believe that this would be the cause of what looks to be a multi-regional problem, it would not surprise me. The result of such blunders is that two or more entries exist on Comcast's network for the same IP address. When the IP address is yours, this means that internet traffic cannot reliably make a round trip between your computer or router and the remote destination. While this sort of error won't noticeably interfere with streaming cat videos, it will hugely impact activities such as playing games. I don't claim that this is the nature of the problem with Neverwinter this weekend - but I do claim to have experienced these symptoms before with Comcast and can make a strong argument against blithely placing the blame at Cryptic's doorstep.

For what it's worth, for the last 30 or so minutes, Neverwinter and Gateway have been normal and stable over my Comcast connection (San Francisco Bay Area). Interestingly, my downstream bandwidth is now triple what it has always been, according to three different online speed testing utilities. I wonder if this entire mess has to do with Comcast speed upgrades? It would not be the first time Comcast has arrogantly rolled out networking changes without informing its customers (to be fair, I do not monitor my Comcast email account, so there may be some form of communication on the matter....but I doubt it).

zebular said:

Update, 2015-08-30:

Hey folks! I just got an update. It's not what we want to hear but at least it means they have found the issue! The connection issue has been pinpointed to being an issue on the Internet Service Provider that the Cryptic Servers connect to and through. Alas, this means the Tech Team and Developers cannot resolve the issue, so we are now waiting for our ISP to correct the issue. We do apologize it has taken so long to find the cause but at least now the wheels are in motion to get this resolved.

So Cogent...