Letter from the Producer LIVE Part X: Will the netcode issue be honestly addressed?

[Sunarie]

Yay! Lets create more threads! Its been working so far, right?

I think they know about it by now... just FYI.

There are still less threads about this than about adding features from FFXI, or how great FFXI was... and at least thread about this is at least slightly different. This one focuses on the Live Letter coming out, the other two focus on the problem itself (though the first was often mistaken for an endgame discussion/QQ, prompting my thread).

Honestly, the majority of people have been awesome about posting into relative threads as opposed to starting new ones... and we don't know they know it's an issue because they haven't said so. I would rather see threads about this (because it has been, and likely will be a game-breaker) than repeated threads complaining about tanks/explaining tanks, complaining about the community, boasting about FFXI, or adding fluff features.

[Mandze]

Please address this issue. I'm staring level 50 in the face and I'm not sure that I'll be able to continue playing, since being unable to dodge AoEs isn't going to fly in endgame. Turns out the game isn't much fun when you get hit by every attack even when you see yourself as outside the red zone well before it fades. It isn't okay. I feel like I can't run anything for fear of making other people wipe.

This sort of slow stuff on the server side was fine in FFXI because the general mechanic in FFXI was "get in a good spot and stay there so the bard can hit you with the dang songs, kthnx." You can't make a game that expects quick responses and dodging from players and then build extra lag into the system on top of the lag that is always going to be there in online play and expect the players to be okay with that.

[MageBlack]

There are still less threads about this than about adding features from FFXI, or how great FFXI was... and at least thread about this is at least slightly different. This one focuses on the Live Letter coming out, the other two focus on the problem itself (though the first was often mistaken for an endgame discussion/QQ, prompting my thread).

Honestly, the majority of people have been awesome about posting into relative threads as opposed to starting new ones... and we don't know they know it's an issue because they haven't said so. I would rather see threads about this (because it has been, and likely will be a game-breaker) than repeated threads complaining about tanks/explaining tanks, complaining about the community, boasting about FFXI, or adding fluff features.

Sorry, wasnt trying to dismiss the issue people are legitimately having. I respect that you would like a response but I see a LOT of assumptions and accusations being tossed around by all the people posting in these threads. Such as "They havent responded to our posts so they are ignoring/dont know/dont care the issue exists." "The issue is in 'X' thing"

In past experiences from this dev team over the last 2-3 years I have come to notice that they do not like to post unless they have some concrete information. They dont want to give half ass'ed responses that could be wrong. They want to give accurate assessments of the situations they are commenting on. I also know they do have people who read almost every post on the forums and report it to the appropriate teams.

Like you and others are so proud to point out, you have two well maintained threads (kudos) full of information and testimony and many, many responses and likes. I can guarantee you, they have seen it by now. I posted in one of these before that with as many different configurations of software and hardware out there for PC's as there are people playing the game, it can be a witch hunt trying to find out exactly what the problem is. I work in IT for a school district, while its a completely different ball game I have come to discover no issue is as simple as people might think it is. It could be something like an apostrophe in the wrong place in a single line of code, needle in a haystack much? Not to mention that the issue is not a universal one. Not everyone experiences the problem. If it was a global issue, it might be easier to determine.

Has a link to these threads been posted in any of the Questions for the Live Letter official posts? If so, please link cause I think that would be the best place for it and I will throw my like in the ring, as I have for the OP's of the other threads. Best of luck and I do hope the issue gets resolved, I appreciate the ones commenting about it with cool heads instead of heated accusations about how incompetent and stupid the devs are.

[Meklore]

The .3 server check thing needs to go away. If I want to move out of the red circle or w.e at the last second I should be able to. This is really frustrating...

It's not the red circle that determines if you get hit or not. It's the cast bar.
If you are in the red zone when the cast bar finishes you are going to get hit regardless of the time the red circle goes away and where you are when it does.

I looked at a few of the youtube videos and noticed that the characters were still in the red circle when the cast bar finished.
And in all fairness there were also videos showing lag causing damage after they were out of the red zone when cast bar finished.

If you wait until the last second to get out of the red you are going to get hit.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

Has a link to these threads been posted in any of the Questions for the Live Letter official posts? If so, please link cause I think that would be the best place for it and I will throw my like in the ring, as I have for the OP's of the other threads.

I think it's a good idea.

I have skimmed through the Thread: "Ask Questions for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part X! (General Questions)" and found 8 posts asking specifically about the responsiveness/netcode/delay/AoE dodging issue. Unsurprisingly, the earlier ones gathered more "Likes" than the later ones.

I will add links to these questions in the OP of this thread. Here they are, for reference:

➜ Post #40 (41 Likes at the time of this writing)

Are you planning to do anything to address the incredible unresponsiveness & discrepancies between what players see on their screens and what actually happens that plagues the entire game? Why is this the only MMO on the market where spells can complete casting while you're on auto-run, and where you can be out of the red zone for an AOE for almost an entire second and still get hit?

➜ Post #57 (31 Likes)

Currently, many players are getting hit bye AOE effects when they have moved out of the red zone before the spell finishes casting. Are there any plans to address this, or is it a game design choice?

➜ Post #42 (23 Likes)

With PvP and new raid content coming in 2.1, one major concern with the game currently is the client-server responsiveness regarding player positioning. It is extremely difficult at times to avoid ground based boss abilities without the use of third party programs to change the routing process to the game servers or using applications to read in game log events and provide sound effects to help players react faster.

How do you plan to approach this problem?

➜ Post #246 (20 Likes)

There have been a lot of posts in the general forums recently regarding issues with the netcode.

Players have found that combat could use some tweaking in the following areas:

Dodging AoE: http://youtu.be/hg33BjzwLWw

Unresponsiveness in the activating ability system: http://youtu.be/ripyJWGWNIo?t=11s


Many of the encounters in FFXIV require fast reaction times or a lot of prediction on the players part to succeed.
Do you have any plans to either:
1. Review the current battle system to allow players to feel more in control of their actions?
2. Review the current battle system so that players won't require such fast reaction time or constant prediction to succeed?

➜ Post #89 (13 Likes)

Are there any plans to address the horrendous positioning check delay that causes no end of players no end of frustration, particularly in a game that primarily focuses on avoiding AoE ground effects?

5 MMOs with endgame experience and I've never seen one this bad (SWTOR came close but they fixed it quickly).

➜ Post #124 (9 Likes)

i keep seeing this issue being dodged but is anything being done about the net code? people are still getting hit by things they shouldn't just like in closed beta

➜ Post #319 (7 Likes)

Is there any plan, acknowledgement, theory crafting... anything at all being done to address in game latency? I believe most players would like WYSWYG (What you see is what you get.) gameplay, and FFXIV ARR is too far off the mark.

➜ Post #186 (4 Likes)

Why do I still have times when the game becomes unresponsive and lags? I play on an NA server and live on the east coast.

I think it's not my place to say which of those should be preferred, however there's a common theme which can be synthesised in the following points:

• There seems to be a delay between what players see on their screens and what's really happening (being confirmed) server-side: WYSI NOT WYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get).
• Players sometimes get hit by AoE's whereas they see themselves out the red area before the enemy's cast completes.
• There is a general unresponsiveness in the game (delay in display, delay in taking players' inputs into account) for a number of elements, including but not limited to: position change, performing an action, cast interrupting, UI confirmation of player input. Regardless of whether the observed subject is a PC (Playing Character, human) or NPC (Non-Playing Character).

I would encourage the authors of all these questions to link to some of the most-liked ones in their post, so as to show this is the same issue being questioned, albeit with a different wording. That would probably help unify our concern, to make sure SE sees them as a whole.

For your convenience, here's a copy/paste material referencing the 5 most-liked questions.
(simply hit "reply with quote" under my post, copy the following, cancel, then paste it in your post)

※ This question is in relation to Post #40, Post #57, Post #42, Post #246, Post #89. ※

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

Also, please let me know if there are mistakes (spelling, grammar, style…) in my OP, guys.

English is not my first language (I just happen to love it).
Any criticism/lesson will humbly be taken into account.

[DaiLyght]

someone get jp ppl to complain so that se notices since they only thing we are good for is our monthly fee

[Soukyuu]

It's not the red circle that determines if you get hit or not. It's the cast bar.
If you are in the red zone when the cast bar finishes you are going to get hit regardless of the time the red circle goes away and where you are when it does.

For me, the red circle disappears when cast bar reaches 80-90%. If I go by the cast bar, I will get hit. So I don't agree. And even your last statement supports mine:

If you wait until the last second to get out of the red you are going to get hit.

If it was going by the cast bar, then I'd have another 0.5s time to get out of AoE. But it's the circle.

And the fact is that the circle might appear delayed if your have low fps (<30) doesn't help the problem. Because the server doesn't care, lol

In principal they can, to some degree, through BGP tables.

I don't think mine will care to be honest, even if it's a major provider. If SE contacted them, then it's another thing completely. But will they? I don't know. The German board has a thread collecting all the info, so maybe something is going to be done behind the scenes, but I'm not holding my breath until I see it posted somewhere officially.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

The problem is, if you want a working vpn, you need to pay extra for those tunnelling services. Sure they do improve (I tried difference is less then 30ms, I live in Singapore) your connection, but you need to pay another fee on top of your sub.

Indeed, and actually it doesn't always help.

I play from Europe. I do have a decent ping to SE's Canadian datacenter (all my checks were between 129 and 135ms) and my tracert doesn't show anything unusual (the biggest hop is about 50ms when the packets go through the Atlantic via Cogent cables, packet loss is under 1%).
[for reference: ping 199.91.189.47 ; tracert 199.91.189.47]

But I have issues with dodging AoE's (getting hit when I see myself out of the red well before it disappears and the enemy's cast completes, with a margin of about half a second or even more), as well as enemy's casts not interrupting unless my Shield Bash hits before ~80% of the enemy's castbar (it is so frustrating when you see your character finishing the animation, hitting that mob confirmed by the sound effect but still, the cast bar keeps running to the end and eventually completes…). Therefore I tried using VPN's, as people around me told me it helped them clear Titan HM and Coil turns. Many ISP's in Europe are known to be throttling at peak hours, which mine does not as far as I know (these people's ISP do, though), and anyway throttling is supposed to reduce bandwidth, not increasing latency in theory, but still… there were rumours of ISP's messing with P2P protocols, and this game relying on such protocols so… I wanted to give it a try.

• I tried vpn4gamers first, which is a free VPN. It resulted in a slight increase (!) of my ping at ~139ms; but I thought the tunnelling could maybe still help reducing the packet loss (I haven't been able to identify a problem on this specific matter with my regular ISP routing but then again, I'm not checking all the time).
  To no avail, I haven't seen any improvement. So I thanked this VPN provider for their service and tried another one.
• I then went with the well-known Battleping, purchased 1 month. Direct tunnelling to an East Coast (NY I suppose) server @115ms to 122ms (again, ping to SE's datacenter wasn't better than bare routing with my ISP).
  Again, no perceptible change in-game, I would still get randomly hit by AoE's when out of the red before the castbar completion.

So, in my case, I think my ISP is quite fine, since no VPN could improve anything. Might I add that I've never experienced such issues in any other online game I've played during the last decade, including some whose servers were based in NA or even Asia (my worst experiences were in Aion Korean beta, and Star Trek Online release servers, but never did it felt as game-breaking as it does here, even though these games include twitch PvP situations). Also, I played some of these games (WoW, TOR…) on the same computer I'm using now, with the same modem/router; and the rest were on worse (older) hardware I've since discarded.

The only logical conclusion is that if I'm having issues only in ARR and in no other games, and regardless of my routing, including some dedicated VPN, then the problem must lie on SE's part —be it their netcode, or their datacenter, or both. Scientifically, playing ARR is the only variable in all these tests and past experiences that yields such a subpar result in terms of responsiveness.

[DooDooBrown]

Mayhaps the N.America servers are substandard quality and JP servers are better and the JP players have no such issues to complain about..