Hi,
I would like to ask QA and Battle Content teams what kind of Ping (network latency) as well as hardware specifications they use when developing and testing battle content for us play with?
I was talking to my JP friend about battle strategies for Kurma (a Delve NM, the highest end game content we have at the moment) and he said one notable thing: Kurma is easy, just stun Tortoise Song. Thing is, you can stun Tortoise Song if your Ping is around ≤100ms (typical for Japanese player), but for me as EU player, typical Ping to SEs FFXI server is ~280ms. And from talking to people in game as well as reading forum posts, I'm not the only one. Yesterday I was in a Delve NM run with a friend, both of us on SCH/BLM, both EU players. It was the first time my friend was stunner inside Delve and was VERY frustrated. The lag inside is immense, even if you disable all graphical effects. It is very easy for a JP person to say to Stun all of Tojil's attacks and win, but the rest of us have a diametrically different gaming experience.
I'm sure SE has those statistics available, so I would like to know, what is average Ping for your NA, EU and JP customer, and what ping you simulate when testing your battle content? It is very important when going for, for example, Delve megaboss.
Also, do you test your battle content on PS2 (anyone remember Kalasutrax?), XBOX (anyone remember Besieged?) or PC? What kind of PC specs you use? What graphical settings?
If things continue like this (need super low latency or miss stuns = fail), we will end up with a situation of Ifrit Extreme from FFXIV. I'm sure producer Matsui would be aware of what I mean.