EA Server Physical Location

After much digging and prodding I have finally located EA's servers.

It is located in Redwood City, CA.

Now, why is this important? Well, because now we can try to kill the lag monster, or sort of.

Here is a list of websites you can visit that will help you check and see if you are truly lagging or if it has to do with EA.

First off visit
http://www.speedtest.net/
A map of the US will appear, and on the left side of the map is California. Place your mouse over the stars in that state until you see San Francisco. Click on it and wait. Your computer will do a ping and speed test to that location.

My ping as of 10-13-2009 is 75ms

Now visit
http://www.pingtest.net/
and do the same thing.

My ping as of 10-13-2009 is 66ms

Now the toughy. If you are getting high pings like this you can download a trace program from EA to check where your connection is hanging up at.

First off you can use the windows trace program by clicking on Start-Run-cmd
Then in the DOS shell type in "tracert 159.153.266.105" Then press enter.

If that does not connect try the location just before it or "tracert 159.153.224.226"

The servers in Redwood should be "tracert 159.153.234.54"

Windows will show you all of the jumps you have to make to EA's servers.

As of 10-13-2009 I have 12 jumps to this location.

If you look at the tracert listing you can see what servers took the most milliseconds to ping through, and this might help you troubleshoot if it is something local or regional.

Last of all there is a program from EA called Ultima Online Trace Utility. You can download it from here (follow instructions listed here as well)

ftp://ftp.ea.com/pub/origin/patches/uo/uotrace.exe

Run UOTrace. (If a pop-up box appears telling you 'UO Server List not found,' click No.)
Click the Options menu at the top of the window and select Advanced.
In the rectangular window where the server is listed, type in easo.ea.com.
Click the Trace Route button, which is the fourth button from the left.
After the trace route has completed, click the Poll button, which is two buttons to the right of the Trace Route button.
Let it send around 100 or so packets then click Stop Poll.


Now you can view what is really going on between your home connection and the EA servers. I hope this helps a bit. You can also contact EA with this information to see if they can fix your connection.

Dewd!! This is cool stuff! How in the world do yo people know how to do this stuff? =S I followed all the steps and did the whole thing. Now I know what is going on every time I play. However I have no idea what to do with this info. How do I use this to make my connection faster?

well, this is what i have been digging through all day today gotta love being off work.

anyways, i am waiting for EA to get back to me about this information that I sent them from my tracert. Once that is done I may contact my local ISP and find out if there is anything they can do; ie. reroute the signal or something like that.

as soon as I find a viable way to use the information I'll post it. For now, I thought it would be nice for us to know just what was going on with our connections, and if the lag was something we could fix at home or would there be more involved.