Hello, I play Lord of the Rings Online and usually have no problems but on occasion the character animations become choppy or rather they look like they are walking on ice and usually a short while after that my character gets stuck. My character "rubber-bands" back into place over and over but every other aspect of the game runs fine. In the game there is a small icon to monitor network connection and I sometimes see a 01.% - 0.2% packet loss. Usually this does not effect me but sometimes the above problems will occur even with out the packet loss appearing. I have run ping plotter for gls.lotro.com and I never see any indication of packet loss on the final hop, but plenty of packet loss on previous hops. The same sort of packet loss appears when I run ping plotter to any address but as I understand it, it does not matter unless the final is getting packet loss. So this has me very confused.
I have a Linksys Wireless-G router with current firmware and configured for port forwarding as instructed by portforward.com for the game as well as unblocking the proper ports for the game. This was all recommended in the common technical issues thread on the LotRO forum and I have posted my problem there but have gotten no helpful answer. So I am looking for help elsewhere and hoping to have a more trained eye to look at my ping plotter data to perhaps give more insight into the source of my problem and perhaps determine if it is some network problem on my end or my ISP. I will be glad to make a better data sample if this is inadequate:

Actually, the final destination is the most important hop - and yours looks very good (at least during the time period in question). We cover that in this knowledge base article here:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/24

Of course, this is pretty frustrating to you - it *looks* like you've found a problem, but you've really not. It looks like something early in your route (it's hard to say for sure if it's hop 1, 2 3, or something else close to there) is dropping ICMP TTL expired packets (which is used to get data back on all intermediate hops), and showing packet loss for that type that's not "real". Remember that all data has to go through intermediate hops before reaching the final destination, so if you're not seeing packet loss at the final destination, then echo reply packets.

You might be able to improve your statistics a bit by only having a single outstanding packet - some routers have a propensity to drop multiple outstanding replies. We cover that here:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/22

You might also try, just for fun (although this has only *occasionally* made an impact in this) switching your packet type to UDP and/or TCP packets instead of ICMP. For TCP, try using port 80. Depending on the problem, different packet types might behave differently and give you different results.

Even if your intermediate hops are showing packet loss (that isn't real), you can still use PingPlotter to troubleshoot the problem - you just need to find a period where you're having problems in-game and then look at the final destination to see if you're seeing packet loss or latency problems there. We cover this topic here:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/47

When you see packet loss or latency at the final destination, then look for that same pattern at earlier hops. You'll need to look *through* the packet loss noise that you normally get at these hops, though, and identify just the packet loss that shows up at only the final destination - this can sometimes be difficult to do on hops with really high packet loss all the time, but usually there is a pattern that helps you identify an earlier hop as the culprit.

If you don't see any problems at the final destination *ever*, then it's probably not a network problem - it's something else (server problem, something with your computer, etc).

Let us know how this goes.

- Pete

Thank you for the quick and very informative reply. I had a feeling that I may not have been catching the times when packet loss reaches my final destination and it seems I was right. Just a little while after I had posted my original message I caught a small bit of packet loss reaching my final destination. It is not large but when it happens in the game it is very debilitating to not only to play the game properly but more often ruin the immersion by every model running choppy(while low frames per second are not responsible). It is such a subtle amount that it allows every bit of information back and forth except when there is that small spike it seems to be affecting the data of character positions. Perhaps making my character out of synchronization with the game server. As I was saying before there is a latency and packet loss meter inside the game and it sometimes shows a 0.1% loss , sometimes 0.2% but I have never been able to catch it on ping plotter maybe because for last night I had the interval at the default 15 seconds and now have it at 1 second intervals. Here is the picture of it:

I realize how much I have failed to use this wonderful tool known as PingPotter. Reading the pages you provided links to helped a lot and it seems that something I did has taken away all of that "fake" packet loss. I still see some packet loss at 4, 14 and 15 so I have graphs running for all of them to see if the packet loss is slipping through. I don't mean to say that I know for sure what I am doing but I think that is the way to go about things. So I will continue to collect a larger sample of data and make a note on when my problem happens in the game.