Playing with Americans

There was this post on the lodestone last year
https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...a451d5a8daa66f

You can ping them, or trace to them I guess, to see latency and check the overall quality of the connection.

Their lag would solely depend on where they are in the United States. I’m in Wisconsin and according to my calculations there’s little to no difference on the amount of lag between the us servers or the eu servers. The last time I checked the European server location was somewhere in Germany, which made the physical distance half again as far. I had a character on louisoix during the endwalker crash at launch.

A gaming VPN service will give you the most optimal route and reduce some latency. America to UK has the highest density of underwater fiber optic cables than any other link.

You can thank the stock market for this one as traders want faster and faster links.

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Originally Posted by Casti_EL

There's a number of variables involved in this so can't guarantee either way what it'd be like for you/them (their connection to the DC, your connection to the DC, links between the two connections, how many players are on, time of day, etc).

I'm UK based and play on the Aether DC with a lot of American friends. Usually the lag is fine - yes, there is obviously some (typically I get a ping of around 110 - 160 ms during peak hours, lowest ever got was about 90-100ms with a dedicated VPN) but it's never really stopped me from playing/enjoying the game.

I'd say the main things affected are usually during battles - it's easy to get clipped thinking you were out of a mechanic hit-area when (due to lag) the game still has you registered within it - you soon learn how to slide-cast, move quickly, and it becomes less of an issue when you learn the fight mechanics well.

Easiest way - get them to create a toon on EU and you create one on US, spend a couple of hours playing each side and see which is better for you before properly starting out.

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to add to this as someone that played (only here cause Free Log In still has me active) from West Coast USA to the Chaos server, passing tethers can be a big pain