Cloud Data Center Stress Test Feedback Thread (November 2023)

One non-server related issue this test has revealed is that the dev team may have overlooked some older quest content bottlenecks when you have a lot of players present that should be remedied. For example, My Feisty Little Chocobo's quest objective of killing 3 Brood Ziz was a nightmare with lots of people camping the small area for the mobs, and their respawn rate was slower than that of other nearby mobs. Normally you don't have such a high concentration of players in older content like this, but when it becomes an issue it's frustrating.

I am located in the US Midwest and have a gigabit connection. I generally have a good experience playing the game, and only ever have mild problems with lag when the servers are very busy. The only potential source of issues is that I play behind very heavy NAT (to sum up what this means: I share an IPv4 address with a lot of people and IPv6 is not available through my ISP).

Unfortunately, I ran into some issues with the cloud test server. I tried to run a dungeon (Amaurot) as AST with Duty Support and consistently experienced an issue in which I could not cast spells on an enemy that was right next to me, with the message "Target out of range". While I would sometimes be able to cast, once the issue struck it would take quite a bit of moving around for me to be able to cast again. I tried going into the duty three different times and it happened every single time.

There weren't any other apparent signs of lag (for example, I wasn't taking damage from AOEs I had just left) outside of being unable to cast spells, but that could've just been good luck. (ETA: realized this might help narrow it down; Draw/Play were also working OK even while I was having this issue)

I don't notice a difference between doing things on the Cloud Data Center and doing it on normal servers.

That is a good thing. So good in fact, it makes you wonder why we haven't been using cloud servers. If all the worlds became cloud servers, it could allow SE to scale everything, such as housing, far easier.

I play from the East Coast US and latency has decreased very noticeably!

I was in the Golden Saucer playing Lord Verminion on Cloud2 when my game crashed and froze my Steam completely.

I solved the issue by force closing steam and restarting the game.

Not sure if it's a "just me" issue but I went ahead and took a screenshot of my error codes just in case. This hasn't ever happened on normal servers for me.

I am playing on Windows 11 Alienware R13, running steam, chrome, excel, and discord voice chat in the background.

https://file.notion.so/f/f/23ecb2fd-...-21+131209.png

Cheers! :cool:

I play from the US east coast and the ping feels so good (100ms -> 20-30ms). Everything is so responsive that it almost feels like a different game. I would love dedicated east coast servers in the future.

I understand that this stress test is to test out the cloud servers however the fact that you are already aware of the biggest issue makes me worry.

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A Word to Our Testers
While we encourage as many players as possible to participate in this stress test, please note that this may result in login queues on the applicable cloud servers. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding.

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The main issue this last expansion was the login queues, no matter what you do with cloud servers until this issue is better handled nothing will truly change.

While I appreciate having half the ping I usually have (Playing from the UK to Aether is usually about 140ms whereas this is 80ms.) the fact that the login queues are not being handled at all is a big worry heading towards Dawntrail.

Eu has surprisingly good routing to this, i went from ~45 i had on Light DC to ~135 and its very smooth playing. Did a few duties as well and all was good.

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Originally Posted by LionheartLRJ

I understand that this stress test is to test out the cloud servers however the fact that you are already aware of the biggest issue makes me worry.



The main issue this last expansion was the login queues, no matter what you do with cloud servers until this issue is better handled nothing will truly change.

While I appreciate having half the ping I usually have (Playing from the UK to Aether is usually about 140ms whereas this is 80ms.) the fact that the login queues are not being handled at all is a big worry heading towards Dawntrail.

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Seems like that should be a non-issue currently. There's literally only 2 Cloud Servers currently, and all players are funneled into these. Why wouldn't you expect a queue?

Once this technology is able to be deployed, they'll be able to add more instance and servers when necessary (i.e. expansion launch) to reduce queue times. 2 individual cloud servers on their own is not representative of what it'll ostensibly be when actually put into the real game environment.

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Originally Posted by Lydeck

Seems like that should be a non-issue currently. There's literally only 2 Cloud Servers currently, and all players are funneled into these. Why wouldn't you expect a queue?

Once this technology is able to be deployed, they'll be able to add more instance and servers when necessary (i.e. expansion launch) to reduce queue times. 2 individual cloud servers on their own is not representative of what it'll ostensibly be when actually put into the real game environment.

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To begin with, the queues are caused by the login server which is a different thing than the cloud DC. The test purpose is to test the server's expandability to adapt to big player numbers, not necessarily limit queue times atm.

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Originally Posted by HylianBebop

One non-server related issue this test has revealed is that the dev team may have overlooked some older quest content bottlenecks when you have a lot of players present that should be remedied. For example, My Feisty Little Chocobo's quest objective of killing 3 Brood Ziz was a nightmare with lots of people camping the small area for the mobs, and their respawn rate was slower than that of other nearby mobs. Normally you don't have such a high concentration of players in older content like this, but when it becomes an issue it's frustrating.

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There was an easy solution to that but few were willing to use it.

Party up. I got there, saw all the players standing around and started randomly inviting them. Someone would hit the Ziz and everyone in the party got credit. A few got their third kill as I was continuing to invite so they dropped and I was able to add more. Within 5 minutes, 12-14 players passed through my party and got their credit off 5 tags instead of needing 36+ tags for them all to get the quest done individually.

I did the same thing when running into multiple players at the GC hunting log locations. Invite who I could see and those invited dropped when they got what they needed so I could invite more.

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Originally Posted by BeoCat

To begin with, the queues are caused by the login server which is a different thing than the cloud DC. The test purpose is to test the server's expandability to adapt to big player numbers, not necessarily limit queue times atm.

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SE has the log in service set to "batch" those logging in based on what they feel their current servers can handle. SE had temporarily increased the batch sizes at Endwalker launch to try to reduce the queue times.

If the cloud servers can handle higher loads than the current server hardware, then the log in servers can be set to create larger batches for the cloud servers. I think at least last night they had the batch size set low to be conservative. They may try increasing the size over the course of the week if they're satisfied with performance.

I play from central Europe and I noticed that I have much less latency compared to when I connect to Crystal, so interactions, skills and such are much smoother.

However, the game itself doesn't run as well as on any of the physical datacenters I've played. Every few seconds I get a very noticeable stutter, during which the game completely freezes for about half a second. Not only is it annoying to look at, during this time I also can't do anything and inputs during that time get dropped completely. I really hope this can be fixed in the future.

Echoing with the feedback from other Brazilian players

I'm from Chile, and I have played on all non-JP DCs (either for raiding, meeting with friends, or in the case of Materia, for fun), and I wanted to chime in with the feedback from other players, the game feels a lot more responsive and smooth as someone playing from South America

It feels very good even though my ping is basically the same from Central, clear responsiveness improvement, able to weave jumps with other jumps with ease, activation results are instant without random delays.
MTR even shows absolute zero packet loss, current NTT servers always show a perpetual single digit packet loss.
Yet another case in the eternal never ending list of East coast doing things better than than West coast.

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Originally Posted by ZiraZ

It feels very good even though my ping is basically the same from Central, clear responsiveness improvement, able to weave jumps with other jumps with ease, activation results are instant without random delays.
MTR even shows absolute zero packet loss, current NTT servers always show a perpetual single digit packet loss.
Yet another case in the eternal never ending list of East coast doing things better than than West coast.

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You probably weren't around the last time the servers were in Montreal. The level3 node that connected the US to Canada there crapped the bed frequently around 6pm. There were tons of posts and memes about it back then.



Hopefully that node is gone now, but it's only been a day.




I was only on for a minute when the book kicked me out, but a ping of 75 isn't terrible from the west coast. I'm usually around 25 to the normal DCs. I remember Florida to Montreal being around 75 too, when I lived there.

Im in Southern ,Ontario. Aside from the expected long que's once i am in its been so far flawless. Ping is about 34 - 50ms at most and butter smooth. Game is very responsive. Just another improvement on an already awesome game :)

I'm from Eastern Canada, I live close to Montreal. So far this has been a very smooth experience. I went ahead and did some Gold Saucer stuff just to get a feel of it. Blunderville feels that much better on the cloud Data Center, there's much less of that "Hey I was out of that!" thing going on there.

A point of comparison I have is when running Leap of Faith, whenever I'm collecting a statue on Crystal, I need to stand still on it for close to a full second for it to be collected. On the Cloud Data Center, I can just run through it and I'll get it. If I had to jump to get to it, most of the time I'd collect it before even touching the ground.

I just ran a couple of dungeons to test the waters, so far I can leave an AoE pretty much at the moment the cast bar finishes filling up and I'll get away with it almost everytime. Double weaving feels great and is much more consistent here than what I'm used to, pressing buttons has an instant reaction too.

I'll keep playing here all week and see if I can find anything that feels wrong specifically on the Cloud versus regular Data Centers, but I wanted to share how I felt after a couple of hours in. So far, it feels even better than when Aether was hosted in NA East, unless I'm remembering it wrong, it has been so long since they moved it.

East coast Primal player here. So far cloud 01 seemed buttery smooth, better than normal. A really crowded Limsa main square loaded almost instantly whereas on Primal it takes a few seconds. In the duty I did, ping seemed really nice, though I don't know of a way to measure it except feeling, and in that realm everything was really responsive. Overall I think I'd rate the experience as better than being on Primal. I'll need to work up the courage to do the Fall Guys event on that character to test it some more!

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Originally Posted by Raraka

Echoing with the feedback from other Brazilian players

I'm from Chile, and I have played on all non-JP DCs (either for raiding, meeting with friends, or in the case of Materia, for fun), and I wanted to chime in with the feedback from other players, the game feels a lot more responsive and smooth as someone playing from South America

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I play from Brazil and was looking for this kind of feedback! That's good to hear. Maybe I'll join in future tests to see with my own eyes.

Hey fellow WoLs!

As the title implies, i'm currently living in Florida AND i play on PS5. i never had noticeable ping issues when i originally started playing FF14 on PS4 while living in San Diego while connected to the Primal DC back in 2018. shortly after moving to FLorida and getting into raiding i moved my main character to Aether DC.

The announcement that the Cloud DC servers were going to be located on the East Coast is very exciting news to me but unfortunately upon creating a test character on Cloud Test 02 server and reading the books for GNB, MCH, and MNK (all my favorite high APM jobs) and testing their kits on striking dummies, i genuinely don't feel any difference in terms of latency and i'm still hard clipping on double weaves between GCDs.

I sent a few shout chats in Limsa Lominsa and people from Canada and EU claimed they have noticeably better latency/ping and i just can't seem to relate. For context, i live in an area where the only ISPs are AT&T and Comcast and they have literally zero fiber internet infrastructure here.

Does anyone know how i would go about testing my latency/ping to Cloud DC on PS5? Any reasonable advice that doesn't require me investing in a PC setup? or am i just doomed to play low APM jobs that dont have alot of oGCDs to avoid clipping?

It feels so much more responsive than the normal NA DCs! Quite literally night and day. I'm not super tech savvy, but I hope they get rolled out soon, whether it be as a DC, or simply used in the current DCs.

Server: Cloudtest01.
Time: 7:58 PM Central Time.
Location: Copied Factory, first boss.
Issue: A red sphere created during the first boss fight remained on the floor for a considerably extended period of time, until a player intentionally ran into the sphere to remove it from the arena. Confirmed via /alliance chat that all other players could see the red sphere.

Playing on the Cloud DC feels so much smoother than the west coast DCs that it feels bad going back to my main.

DC used to play: Behemoth
Country: Brazil
Playing on the Cloud DC feels so much smoother. Tryed to play in crowds places. Even tryed the event fall guys and was super okay! It works fine.

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Originally Posted by catboykit

I am located in the US Midwest and have a gigabit connection. I generally have a good experience playing the game, and only ever have mild problems with lag when the servers are very busy. The only potential source of issues is that I play behind very heavy NAT (to sum up what this means: I share an IPv4 address with a lot of people and IPv6 is not available through my ISP).

Unfortunately, I ran into some issues with the cloud test server. I tried to run a dungeon (Amaurot) as AST with Duty Support and consistently experienced an issue in which I could not cast spells on an enemy that was right next to me, with the message "Target out of range". While I would sometimes be able to cast, once the issue struck it would take quite a bit of moving around for me to be able to cast again. I tried going into the duty three different times and it happened every single time.

There weren't any other apparent signs of lag (for example, I wasn't taking damage from AOEs I had just left) outside of being unable to cast spells, but that could've just been good luck. (ETA: realized this might help narrow it down; Draw/Play were also working OK even while I was having this issue)

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I went ahead and got a clip on Discord of what is happening; hopefully it is helpful.

Playing on the Cloud Center is an amazing video game gameplay experience, I can see all the degenerates messages in Limsa shout chat at least 30% faster, I feel like I can see even more people than usual standing around doing nothing, and the queue timers are working great letting me know it'll be longer than 30 minutes for anyone who wants to actually play the game to log on so that I know to log out and go play other games. Popping the free story and level skips and seeing 50 mil gold on a fresh character was fun enough at least.

I'm noticing that I can't seem to click the quest dialog and have it move to the next block of dialog in the same timeframe that I see in Exodus Primal. The delay isn't long but it's still noticeable. I do read all the dialog before trying to move on so I'm not skipping any of it.

I tried to search to see if this was reported but the search took me out of this thread. I just want to make sure it's reported.

When I leave the city or change to gathering class the Sneak command is not automatically triggering. I have to start it.

Home DC: Aether - Faerie
Playing on: CloudTest01

I have only done really basic things such as going through the main city states, but this feels SO much smoother! I was really doubting I would have a good connection as I am a West Coast player but I am having zero issues with lag.

Home: Light - Lich
Playing on: CloudTest01

Despite increased network latency introduced by being farther away (Cloud for me is 100+ms compared to ~40ms on light), when I ran a dungeon it felt more responsive to play in cloud DC than in EU - Light. Which basically means the current production DCs like Light have another layer of latency introduced by their network and/or servers.

Home : Primal - Famfrit
Playing On - Cloudtest02

Plaued late last night and so far there's trouble in joining party finders and I keep getting "Failed to join party "

So far, the only thing I experienced was a brief lag spike while attacking enemies. It only happened once out of the entirety of the last day and a half and could have been my own connection. It's been really smooth so far, both in duties and in the open world.

I was fine last night but my ping shot up over 100k in the instance server when I queued into Pagl'than earlier this morning. Need to fix that, it's unplayable with that kind of ping.

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Originally Posted by HotaFox

i play from Brazil on the Primal behemot server with about 220ms, on this cloud NA east I can play with 140ms, this for me is wonderful, it's less than I used to play on wow

I've never seen this game so fluid, it feels like another game for me. The simple fact of talking to an NPC and being instant the answer, I only have 300hrs of gameplay so I still need to understand a lot how it works, but it seems really very very good to me right now

Edit: I live in the south of Brazil, that's why the ping is so high, people who play in the north have 140 by default in primal. Brazil is very big haha

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same for me!

In future tests, just for the beta, some type of tool could be added to see the ping internally in the game (as this facilitates feedback).
Regarding ping, mine dropped from around 300 ms to 160 ms. If there is a server transfer when it launches, I would definitely change.

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Originally Posted by Zarakki

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same for me!

In future tests, just for the beta, some type of tool could be added to see the ping internally in the game (as this facilitates feedback).
Regarding ping, mine dropped from around 300 ms to 160 ms. If there is a server transfer when it launches, I would definitely change.

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They should also let the beta testers keep the characters they rolled with the bonuses. If they are going to use us as guinea pigs we should get something for that lol.

I pre-ordered Endwalker, and almost all previous releases.
On Early Access to Endwalker... I couldn't access the game at all.
Waiting for hours for the queue of 6K+ to let me in.
I get it and it's time to go to bed to go to work to pay the sub. !*irl stuff*!

Cloud servers With a queue of 3K+, 30 minutes later we are logged into the game.
FANTASTIC!!!! ;)

I have to say the graphical updates are amazing! I live in midwest USA and have had no latency problems at all. It was kind of a pain at first getting the books done but after that it was amazing!!

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Originally Posted by Ezlin

Server: Cloudtest01.
Time: 7:58 PM Central Time.
Location: Copied Factory, first boss.
Issue: A red sphere created during the first boss fight remained on the floor for a considerably extended period of time, until a player intentionally ran into the sphere to remove it from the arena. Confirmed via /alliance chat that all other players could see the red sphere.

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This occurs on Primal or Aether as well, not a cloud issue

My experience with the cloud servers has been absolutely fantastic, I live in the UK and I get a connection of 85ms to the NA Cloud server vs the 150ms I have to the crystal data centre!

This made the game so much more playable for myself, everything has felt so smooth, I've tested all kinds of content from dungeons to raids.

Fall guys functioned amazingly also, when I was hit by something, it was genuinely my fault vs how I usually feel on crystal where its a dice roll depending on where the server thinks I am.

PVP was also very smooth on my end. GCDs and the shield ability worked immediately for me, whereas on crystal I have to use the shield a lot sooner for it to take effect.

I cannot wait for the day these are rolled out as this has been the best experience I've had with ffxiv in a long time.

Before people say "Why don't you just play on the EU data-centres?"
My answer is that I have way too many friends on NA that I want to keep playing the game with. This has been the closest experience I've ever had to being able to play ffxiv with them without feeling like I'm a huge compromise.

On crystal we literally had an issue where me and another player were far enough away from each other(P10S) (I was in the middle of the arena and they were near the bottom right of the arena) and we "overlapped" even when footage clearly showed we weren't near each other.

It's hard to test to see if this issue will replicate on the cloud servers as we're unable to test level 90 content right now(I don't fancy wasting half the playtest speed-running EW when I'm too busy being amazed at how much this breathes new life into old content for me). However from what I have tested it's felt so much better and I haven't had any awfully cursed moments that would cause me to raise an eyebrow.

Home: Aether: Cactuar
Cloud: 01

My experience on the cloud DC has been pretty good. Latency is better than average in general. Blunderville obstacles effects still hits me before the visual, but at least the object is visually moving before the impacts; unlike my normal experience of being hit before the animation starts.

A strange thing is occurring now, which may not be related. After playing on the cloud DC I returned to my home world, without fully restarting the client, and I've been getting disconnected ever 20-30 minutes. No warning either. Normally you can tell a DC is coming because NPCs stop moving and won't interact when you click on them. That isn't happening today. I kill an enemy, mount up, disconnect. As fast as you read that. Could be completely unrelated.