Feedback: FIX YOUR NETCODE!

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Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

Furthermore, there's an even worse issue when considering the lag between your movement and the server recognizing it. You move a second before the server recognizes it. This means that, even if you dodge the "snapshot", you can still be caught in the snapshot, called "clipping". When mechanics are fast, like the new raids, this can happen a lot more often. It's usually found with high ping, but even Japanese players are having an issue with the new content because of faster and overlapping mechanics.

Any and all design issues with the new content can be fixed with better netcode. The challenge would be seen as fair (improvable with practice) rather than unfair (random and not responsive to skill) with zero change to the fight design itself. Otherwise, changes to design would have to be made to reduce the complexity of mechanics. As a certain other poster said, we have had easy content for "two expansions" (actually longer) because of this. For Dawntrail, the dev team decided to remove their old precautions. The above problems are a result.

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You're conflating two separate things. The perceived rise in difficulty isn't because the server's response time to player input is too high - FFXIV has always had this issue. Even a 0.5 second delay is not going to make a difference fundamentally - if you are late to respond to a mechanic, you're going to get hit by it. That's how they all work. The difference in the case of DT content is that enemies will telegraph their attacks in ways we aren't used to seeing. I'm not even sure what design issues you're talking about with the new content, outside of the usual FFXIV snapshotting.

I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I'm just unsure that anyone who is asking for this is in network engineering or does back-end of any kind because if they were, they'd know it's likely a monumental ask that would require rewriting most of the game. If it's at all possible, I would love to see the FFXIV experience improved by having less latency and more responsiveness. It's not a likely prospect though so it might be worth taking the time to understand how to make the most of server ticks and snapshotting. Pretend you're a Time Mage or something

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Originally Posted by Arohk

Don't stone me on the accuracy about this, but when you see orbs flying around it is something like this

https://i.imgur.com/V8R8ech.jpeg

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This is how it feels in Strayborough, yeah. Those goddamn poppets.

I play with 150-200 ms roughly from south america, so any improvement to the Netcode is a win

Untill the SA data center comes I will stick to using the network... of cousin Alex

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Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

As Yoshida put it: "Every time you take an action in the game, the game will communicate with the server, check for cheating and come back afterwards. This creates a delay that an offline game doesn't have, since there's no need to check on the Internet."

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Not gonna lie, I laughed out loud when I read that. Because guess what, all MMORPGs work the same way. And yes, obviously it creates a delay (which can lead to horrendous pings - WoW's WOTLK launch says hi).

But that doesn't change the fact that FFXIV's netcode is garbage. Because of it, we get snapshotting, animation locks, animation queues, slidecasts and other stuff that has absolutely no business being in a 2024 MMORPG (or any game for that matter). WoW's client did that way better 10 years prior to 2.0 release.
I don't know whether it was because the devs had little experience in designing that stuff, or whether because they used a commercial protocol that wasn't designed for gaming in mind, but they absolutely need to change that. Problem is, they can't.

Some people have NEVER played on ps3 and it shows. Please never complain unless you played this game on ps3 where you had to leave every aoe 3 seconds before to not be hit. Ever since nothing has been a problem.

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Originally Posted by TDawnstar

Not gonna lie, I laughed out loud when I read that. Because guess what, all MMORPGs work the same way.

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They don't, though. There are differences, for instance, between how BDO, Aion, B&S, Tera, and the like handled these verifications and the uptime costs, errors, or other artifacts that might come from it.

Having to verify the feasibility of an action that the client requests is pretty much universally important and therefore done, yes (though, even doing so did not prevent speed-hacking in parts of ARR and HW, where some BLM logs showed casts going off far faster than was possible with available Spell Speed and Wolf's Den and later The Feast would see the occasional player moving at 200+% speed). HOW they do so, though, and at what costs, is not. Just like various multiplayer shooter games have their different ways of handling such things, so do MMOs.

works on my machine

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Originally Posted by Mooserocka33

Some people have NEVER played on ps3 and it shows. Please never complain unless you played this game on ps3 where you had to leave every aoe 3 seconds before to not be hit. Ever since nothing has been a problem.

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Nah, I don't think someone needs to have experienced something worse to have a valid complaint.

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Originally Posted by Raraka

I play with 150-200 ms roughly from south america, so any improvement to the Netcode is a win

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Seconding that. While it is perfectly possible to complete every piece of content in the game, the netcode issues force you to adjust in ways that are less than intuitive.

Some examples:

Mechanics that require you to touch another player to pass a debuff, the popularly called "rots", require you to purposefully stay with the player for at least a whole GCD, to ensure that debuff has been passed. Examples of this are the Nisi passes in TEA, Hello World debuff passes in TOP, and rot passes in P4S.

Mechanics that require you to be in a specific position in relation to another player + be moving can fail simply because the difference between the position you see in your screen is completely different than what your server registers. Examples of this are the Limit Cut in TEA and Grand Octet in UCOB.

Mechanics that rely heavily on timing cues to register the position of an AoE also suffer from having a significant difference between what you see on your screen. For example, Thordan's Earthquakes in DSR.

All of these mechanics are perfectly doable. However, you have to consciously adapt to the server-client communication issues. In some cases, the solution is ignoring visual and sound cues and using your own GCDs to measure when you have to move, for example, which is somewhat less intuitive.

If you play PVP, these issues compound, since PVP is not as predictable as PVE encounters. I think anyone who played with long enough has been through a situation where you put your guard up, your ability is spent, but you get hit anyway because the server registered your adversary's input before yours.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

In typical XIV parlance, "clipping" refers to potential uptime (the amount of time for which you could be using an action, especially a spell or weaponskill) lost.

One of the most significant reasons for this is that whereas other games compensate your internal skill delays for whatever time is taken to verify server-side that your skill activation is legit, XIV does not. This means your roundtrip ping is added to the time after using a skill for which you cannot use another.

For GCDs, this is mitigated somewhat, but oGCDs are not. Therefore, a low-ping player can potentially triple-weave where a moderate-ping player cannot quite even double-weave without losing uptime.

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There is skill clipping and there is hitbox clipping. They both exist since all races have the same hitbox regardless of size. This is where my confusion over what you were saying because of the context of the rest of the post.
It is 100% impossible to get a triple weave with 0 clip without 3rd party tools. The only people who can triple weave without clipping are people using 3rd party tools. the reason is below.
Every Ogcd is given a minimum amount of time b4 the next one can be triggered essentially giving the netcode time to work and allowing players to plan what they are gunna do based on that information. it is part of the equation to try and create balance amongst dps output so that low ping players aren't putting out more damage, and high ping players aren't being banned from partyfinder.. If you have 0 ping(not feasibly possible), or similitude 0 ping through a 3rd party tool there is enough time to fit 3 in. This is because the intention is for double weaving so this extra time allows for above average ping players to still double weave. It requires a rather high amount of ping to not be able to double weave without clipping. this is made worse with bad ping that takes longer to register the entry late thus preventing your from getting a second weave. They recently changed the way the timer on pots, to allow for double weaving with pots, because previously they had wanted to restrict the pots to taking up a whole window. Something that would be in the way of doing a modern rotation on some jobs. This is not bad net code or unexpected. it is an intentional design to try and create a fair playing field between low and higher ping individuals. I used to play on country internet, and while my ping was awful I could still, just barely double weave without clipping 95% of the time. Dodging mechanics on the other hand was very challenging. This has no relationship to the snapshots of mechanics in the game and weave clipping, except that both them are effected by the players ping. Which exists in every mmo.

This is not to say there isn't an issue with snapshotting in this game, cause there is. it just has nothing to do with skill clipping.