Ping Assist problems

[Heroxoot]

I have an XR450 (basically an XR500 with slightly worse wifi?). When I set ping assist it does not seem to actually be checking the pings after a while. Sometimes rebooting the router fixes it for a short time. My assist is set to 45ms, strict enabled. I have tried with fast search on and off. To no avail, it lets people in with massive pings for some reason. Radius works fine as far as I can tell, but that does not stop some people with bad pings as I don't want to block out the entire US. But to get most of the USA into my radius I have to allow a lot of Canada and mexico. I can play with some people in cali and have a ping of 50-70 area and often this is fine for many games. I would be pretty surprised for someone to really tell me this person pinged under 45ms to start with and then rose to over 100ms. So either the filter does not work or there is something else I am not doing. I have downgraded my FW to initial release and back to the latest twice now with no avail.

General settings I have done in my XR450:

Prioritized all packets both UDP and TCP (individually not together) for my PC

Filter mode, strict mode, PC enabled in geofilter as a "console". Fast search off (tried on too)

QOS tested and optimized for low buffer bloat (DSL report's gives me an A rating) with max bandwidth allocation (100 distribution) to my PC, not sure if this has an affect on other devices.

I know some of the same admins on the netgear website also post here. I'm looking for others with similar issues, and it seems like this forum is a bit more active. I have attached a picture of my geofilter and autoping showing the issue I am having here. You can see his ping started around 60ms, which is well above 45 still, and thus the feature is bugged for sure.

[Heroxoot]

Just now it actually marked a bad connection properly with a triangle but still let it connect. I'm not quite sure what to make of that. It's a first that I have seen with a peer.

[Netduma Jack]

Hi, welcome to the forum! This doesn't seem like it should be happening at all. Could you let me know which firmware you're on, and whether you've ever had to update your router? We're going to investigate this and see if this is a known issue with the 450 or not.

Thank you for providing so much detail about the issue

[Heroxoot]

3 hours ago, Netduma Jack said:

Hi, welcome to the forum! This doesn't seem like it should be happening at all. Could you let me know which firmware you're on, and whether you've ever had to update your router? We're going to investigate this and see if this is a known issue with the 450 or not.

Thank you for providing so much detail about the issue

I'm not sure what you mean. It's not happening to me, or others? The XR450 only has one firmware with Ping Assist, 2.3.2.40. And I read it can be an issue installing the feature, so I downgraded to the original firmware and let it go back twice but that doesn't seem to help. But doesn't seem to be happening at all? I literally posted a picture of it happening!

[Heroxoot]

I'd like to mention the feature does work sometimes. Since I reformatted my router I lost some of the saved allowed discord servers I have. This morning I joined a discord channel on US Central, which has a ping of 60. Ping assist  blocked it perfectly fine, and once I allowed it all was good. It IS working sometimes. I just don't understand why it's having hardship with peers from Street Fighter V in particular.

[Netduma Jack]

2 hours ago, Heroxoot said:

I'd like to mention the feature does work sometimes. Since I reformatted my router I lost some of the saved allowed discord servers I have. This morning I joined a discord channel on US Central, which has a ping of 60. Ping assist  blocked it perfectly fine, and once I allowed it all was good. It IS working sometimes. I just don't understand why it's having hardship with peers from Street Fighter V in particular.

What I meant was this seems like a bug - it shouldn't be happening if your router is working correctly. I wasn't questioning whether it's happening xD sorry for the confusion.

I've seen this issue once before, and my colleague Joseph (who tested this issue in the past) believes that the issue was fixed in the latest firmware. I'm not sure which firmware is the latest on the 450, but definitely make sure you're on it.

Equally, as you say, this could be related to the game. Do you have any other games you can test this on? SFV is quite a weird game server-wise, so it could just be working incorrectly with that one game.

[Heroxoot]

2 hours ago, Netduma Jack said:

What I meant was this seems like a bug - it shouldn't be happening if your router is working correctly. I wasn't questioning whether it's happening xD sorry for the confusion.

I've seen this issue once before, and my colleague Joseph (who tested this issue in the past) believes that the issue was fixed in the latest firmware. I'm not sure which firmware is the latest on the 450, but definitely make sure you're on it.

Equally, as you say, this could be related to the game. Do you have any other games you can test this on? SFV is quite a weird game server-wise, so it could just be working incorrectly with that one game.

The XR450 is just the XR500 with a weaker 2.5ghz band. As such the hardware is otherwise identical from what I can find. They both are on 2.3.2.40 according to Netgear website. This is the only firmware available to the XR450 and 500 that have ping assist. The previous 2.3.2.32 firmware does not have ping assist. So whatever it was fixed on, probably the XR700, we do not have anything else with it yet. 

 

As for SFV, it detects the ping on the dedicated matchmaking server fine. it pings at 100+ and I have to allow it. Then peers who seem to be directly connected to me without it, are not detected well. Sometimes they will all show fine and have triangle on bad connections. Other times it will show people in South America as a dotted circle which should mean it's a low enough ping. I'll try Tekken with it later. It's a similar game that uses steam as the server instead. If that works fine then it might be an issue with Street fighter. Because discord is and steam shows and blocks accordingly so far. I have assumed till now the peers for SFV are just normal peers because it does block them sometimes when it should. It just is extremely inconsistent. Hopefully this all helps your team, because this is a highly popular game. 

[Netduma Fraser]

Do you have see a host with a white solid circle around it when you're searching for a game and does it appear that you can't get a game until that host appears?

[Heroxoot]

On 8/13/2019 at 3:40 PM, Netduma Fraser said:

Do you have see a host with a white solid circle around it when you're searching for a game and does it appear that you can't get a game until that host appears?

The host always appears first in SFV. But the connections are still Peer to peer. They show a symbol before a match starts to confirm p2p or a connection through the server. Generally the host appears for a minute and then peers show on the map. As soon as the game says "time for battle" and the notification pops up to join the match, it goes away. It seemingly only makes players visible to each other. Once two people connect it's gone. 

Top is server run and bottom is p2p. P2p is what 99% of matches are for me personally.

Also I tried Tekken 7 instead and it's working kind of. There are a lot of triangles on my geofilter now, all with pings above my assist. It's working fine but none of them ever go away lmao. They stick constantly. In fact it looks as tho all these peers continue to be active until I close the game. But otherwise has functioned as I expected. So SFV seems to be an issue for the geofilter. Very odd to me.

[Netduma Fraser]

Could you show the Geo-Filter map along side these pictures so we have a better idea of what is going on please? 

[Heroxoot]

16 minutes ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Could you show the Geo-Filter map along side these pictures so we have a better idea of what is going on please? 

I got the picture off Google. I never get the non p2p symbol. But perhaps tonight I can. Currently working.

[Netduma Fraser]

Okay let us know please, would be best with Geo-Filter screenshots anyway so we can understand what is happening.

[Heroxoot]

 

So this is with my ping set to 45 in geofilter. Oddly tonight the filter is working better but still not 100% correctly. Fast search is still off. As you can see by the ping chart he started around 85-90ms. On the other hand, this is what Tekken looks like. Tekken uses steam server for matchmaking.

 

Tekken works better. Some high pings still come in but most are blocked.

[Netduma Alex]

In the original post you said that in order to add most of america you need to add canada as well... Is this because of the circular shape of the radius or because you haven't moved the radius further south?

Anyway it looks like there might be an incompatibility with Street Fighter V here. Something about its matchmaking is confusing Ping Assist. I imagine it's to do with the initial reported ping being unreliable.

[Heroxoot]

1 hour ago, Netduma Alex said:

In the original post you said that in order to add most of america you need to add canada as well... Is this because of the circular shape of the radius or because you haven't moved the radius further south?

Anyway it looks like there might be an incompatibility with Street Fighter V here. Something about its matchmaking is confusing Ping Assist. I imagine it's to do with the initial reported ping being unreliable.

I don't want Mexico in my radius either. It be better if geofilter had an option for country instead of a big ol circle honestly. I wanted to use it more as a region filter when I bought the router. 

But yea, weird how sfv confused the ping assist. Sfv server shouldn't be any different than any other game server, or even steam. Perhaps the cross play is the difference here.

 

[Heroxoot]

I have a new one now. Now it's letting in people it marked as bad with a triangle.

 

I accepted the match to take this picture but it had me play this guy with assuming a Dominican republic nation flag.

[Netduma Admin]

So it's possible that because you cannot connect to the player (thanks to the Geo-Filter), the game is instead routing you through that server on the West Coast.

Try disabling Strict Mode in the Geo-Filter Map options. Does that change things? This will block dedicated servers, so will prevent this from happening. BUT it may affect your ability to matchmake, so experiment with it disabled but be prepared to revert back.

[Heroxoot]

16 hours ago, Netduma Admin said:

So it's possible that because you cannot connect to the player (thanks to the Geo-Filter), the game is instead routing you through that server on the West Coast.

Try disabling Strict Mode in the Geo-Filter Map options. Does that change things? This will block dedicated servers, so will prevent this from happening. BUT it may affect your ability to matchmake, so experiment with it disabled but be prepared to revert back.

This is not the case still. The game shows a peer to peer connection. Server is not involved. It COULD be possible however that it gets confused because the peer initially connects to me as told by the server to and the server is allowed. However this makes no sense to me because Tekken 7 uses steam as it's server just as SFV uses it's own, and I have that allowed. Yet it blocks every bad peer.

Capcom blows my mind sometimes. Their stuff is broken and transcends their own programming.

[Netduma Fraser]

Every game implements their matchmaking in a different way so it depends on how they want to run it. I've asked the team to see if they can test this and see the same.

[Heroxoot]

19 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Every game implements their matchmaking in a different way so it depends on how they want to run it. I've asked the team to see if they can test this and see the same.

Nice. I'd like to mention thus far all games using steam have no issues for me. I was playing Monster Hunter World and had to switch to spectator because it was blocking people in the lobby I was in. That game of course does not matter for pings as much, but it was functional as expected.