I'll say it again, as it's been said countless times in the various lag threads on the board. The issue is white knights just like to ignore the real problem, and tell people to better internet or something.
The root issue is that FFXIV's network protocol, communication, and architecture does not compensate for anyone having network degradation. If you are able to maintain a 100% connection to their data center, with no packetloss, low jitter, and normal ping then you only need to deal with the 300ms movement update delay that is built into the game.
However, this is the internet, packet loss and jitter are very normal when routing. Spikes are going to happen, and there is nothing you can do about. This just compounds on top of the 300ms built in movement update.
VPN's like BattlePing fix the issue because of how VPNs setup a virtual tunnel between you and the VPN server, which is optimizing the network packet flow between those points. If you pick a VPN server close to their data center, you then only have a few hops of normal routing to deal with.
Most every other AAA online game (MMO, FPS, whatever real time game you pick) implements their network system to deal with the internet. SE's does a poor job of that with FFXIV.
Does that explain it yet?
