Geo Filter without effect?

[Metroman]

I got the R2 (latest firmware) to improve my latency and reduce bufferbloat for Call of Duty (currently MW2) but no luck yet and even after reading the docs and watching a fair amount of videos I can't see any effect.

I have cable internet (250 MBit down, 25 MBit up). The R2 is directly LAN connected to the modem and to a TP-Link TL-PA8030P V3.0 Powerline adapter, whose counterpart is directly LAN connected to my gaming PC with Windows 10. Ookla Speedtest shows me about 23 Mbps down and 2,5 Mbps up for my gaming PC. I am located in northern Germany. I am not using any extra firewall or anti virus soft- or hardware besides those integrated in Windows 10. The facts and issues:

1.) The Ping Heatmap function seems to work fine (see screenshot), though I don't understand why this function is not integrated in the Geo Filter tab, since it's basically for the same purpose. I also don't see where to see or edit the custom lists for server grouping.

2.) The Geo Filter map shows no servers, except one "Ping Assist Server" in western Germany (see screenshot). I set "Ping Assist" to 25ms but when starting MW2, I am getting the same 35-40ms range as with my old router. I also set my location to the US east coast and set Ping Assist to 200ms for testing, which resulted in MW2 not finding any servers for me at all -- though the Heatmap shows me some servers around 130ms ping at the east coast.

3.) I started the Bufferbloat test at https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat and it gave me a D rating which is the same as with my former router.

To make this work, I resetted the R2 and my PC, restarted MW2 and did "Resync Cloud" many times (saw that in another thread here) without success. I also tried finding servers for different games like FiFA and Fortnight but Geo Filter does not find any at all.

Okay, how do we proceed from here? So far, I don't see the slightest difference to my former router and any Geo Filtering settings do not seem to have any effect on MW2 (except not finding any servers in the US when setting US as home location). Maybe I am missing something or the issue is somewhere else in my hardware or Windows settings?

 

 

[Netduma Fraser]

To answer your questions:

1. Ping Heatmap was added after the Geo-Filter, however we are planning on merging them in future. You click the dropdown list then you can ping your list or edit it by clicking the pencil icon next to it.
2. Try this:

   Quit the application/game/client completely

   Remove device from the Geo-Filter

   Give PC PlayStation Device Type in the Device Manager (if on PC)

   Resync from the Geo-Filter Map menu

   Re-add the device to the Geo-Filter with the manual option

   Set up the Geo-Filter how you like

   Wait 2 minutes

   Boot up application/game/client

   Then see if it works better. I would also say don't expect Ping Assist to be a hard limit - it is an assist not a limit so you can get servers with slightly higher ping sometimes. Better to use heatmap, locate the low ping servers then force them with your radius.

3. You have Connection Benchmark on the router which will be a better test of bufferbloat as it runs on the router level, what result do you get for Ping Under Load?

 

[Metroman]

Okay, that brought some improvement: I did three 6v6 matches and most of the time latency was 30ms or better. I used the polygon mode to select the 4 best servers with ping below 30ms.

Benchmark was also better now but I am not sure if it's meaningful, because my PC is not directly connected to the R2 but by the Powerline extenders.

1.) Still, there are no servers shown in the Geo Filter tab, aren't there supposed to be servers on the map like in the Heatmap?

2.) Am I supposed to switch filtered mode on?

3.) And what can I do to improve my ping even further? Do you think replacing the powerline for a WLAN range extender would bring some improvement?

 

[Netduma Fraser]

You won't see servers like Ping Heatmap, you'll see the server you're playing on and maybe some servers being blocked when searching. Yes filtering mode needs to be enabled otherwise it's not restricting the search according to your settings. Your base ping is quite jittery/spiky so it's not the best start, there is nothing we can do about that specifically, however your Ping Under Load can be improved to better match the Ping Test results. It's best to start with a high value for Congestion Control, say 95% then do a test, decrease by 10%, test, decrease by 10% etc, until you get to a value that is pretty good and then try 5% either side of that value to see if it can be improved. It's important to note that Download & Upload on Congestion Control don't have to be the same value and that you may have a better experience with differing values. The idea is to get the Ping Under Load graph to look as much like the Ping Test graph as possible.