Cloud Data Center Stress Test Feedback Thread (November 2023)

I know this is not part of the stress test except that I started from level 1 and I'm finding I'm going back and forth between full list and just one category. I'd like to pick say Hunting Logs and FATEs. Or other combinations. My main is max levels on all classes/jobs so I don't notice this limitation.

A bunch of us are trying to do DRS and upon duty commence we all got 90k'd out of the game. streaming it now twitch.tv/jaydeezus

On Couldtest02

I've gotten kicked with 90002 errors today. I haven't been kicked during the stress test until today and I've played extensively.

1st time was going into Leveling Roulette Duty Finder.
2nd-3rd time was going into a quest fighting instance for "Big Trouble in Little Ala Mhigo"

After the first kick to game menu, I was able to get into Halatali as a direct select.

I just want to add that I've also been experiencing 90k errors today and it occurs right as I accept the duty ready notification. Instead of being placed into the dungeon instance I'll be kicked from the game to the Start, Data Center, Movies and Titles select screen.

The first occurrence was about 40 minutes ago from this post and the second was about 5 mins ago. On both occurrences I was attempting Leveling Duty Roulette.

Edit: Just want to add I'm playing on Cloudtest01

Been playing fine all week, but apparently joining the kick-on-duty-start crowd. Two back to back attempts to start unsync'd solo Keeper of the Lake resulted in immediate kicks to title. I've done several other duties today without issue, most recently Qarn Hard unsync'd solo.

Testing here in Brazil in the Northeast area my ping normally on behemoth is 140 ms but in this server test the ping was 170~180 ms, so improve the route for people in the Northeast of Brazil

https://i.imgur.com/l8JIwIs.png thats my píng on the cloudtest server

https://i.imgur.com/koLaRgx.png and thats my ping on behemoth primal server

thats kinda bad bc my ping is worst on the cloudserver than in primal. get better!!

Can also confirm the 90002 disconnections on entering instances earlier at around 1:25PM est nov 25. Me and others in my FC had issues entering pyros, hydatos, BSF, DRN, E1N, and holminster.

Other than the 2002 errors in queue, this more than halved my ping which is amazing and feels way better to play on

I started experiencing noticeable latency after 9pm Pacific on Nov. 25th while I was assisting multiple groups with The Dark Inside and one group with Seat of Sacrifice. Some mechanics graphics were not displaying and party frames had a delay before damage taken by party members would be reflected in their health bars. I was not having the same issue when I ran The Dark Inside for my first time clear earlier in the evening.

Just logged in for the stress test that just happened, and noticed that Western Thanalan was congested when I tried to get in there. However when I was able to get there, there didn't seem to be any major crowds or anything out of the ordinary?! Maybe I was missing something, but I didn't even see a lot of people while flying around...however Ul'dah and Limsa and major cities were very visibly crowded and I had no issues getting there.

Playing from New Zealand, the couple of times I tried it I didn't notice the experience being any different than what I normally get on Crystal. Even during the login cap test they just had I was able to log in and play normally. At least normally by my standards - playing from the other side of the world means high ping to anywhere US based for obvious reasons, but as I said I get the same on the existing NA datacenters.

This server is the best server i've played on. Its smooth, easy and fast without getting any disconnects. Fates, quest, dungeons and Fall guys all ran without any input lag or lag at all. Even the ques weren't a problem, from a 1000+ to just 10+ just quick and easy and most importantly stable.

As an Aussie player who plays on Elemental i've had a very simlar experience on the NA Cloud Server as I have there, which is a good thing!

One piece of feedback is if there are to be more global cloud tests (or even the opening of global travel between regions), the auto-translation system will need a overhaul. So many lovely Japanese players came to play on the NA server and I only wish we could've communicated better~

Still so far so good, 3 days after. Still with a better ping and performance in Cloud test than my usual ones in NA server (playing from EU).

But I also want to say that it has been great to be surrounded by people from ALL OVER the world, including, at last, Japanese players. I wish we were not divided into 3 regions!

planning a stress test for 4am pacific wasn't quite a good move for the NA side of things. wouldn't be able to do a proper full world stress test. however, as its hard to coordinate its a whatever. buddy who lives in the country tried the cloud server. said he got better ping and stuff. Trust me thats an improvement for him. he gets bad lag due to his net.

I'm playing on a Server located in Frankfurt, Germany. On Shiva.
I have had no problems at all. Everything was fine. No lags at all. Even Teleportations between crowded places like Limsa and Mor Dhona were no problem.
The funny thing is. Later that Evening I logged in on Shiva and was lagging :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Glenfiddich

I'm playing on a Server located in Frankfurt, Germany. On Shiva.
I have had no problems at all. Everything was fine. No lags at all. Even Teleportations between crowded places like Limsa and Mor Dhona were no problem.
The funny thing is. Later that Evening I logged in on Shiva and was lagging :D

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Same lol
Even when costa del sol was filled, i could port to wineport and just fly over and it was decent. the 3723573547 gold mounts made my fps drop to 20-40ish fps but welp, thats expected.
Makes me really wonder how the same server based around here would feel...

Quest "He Who Waited Behind" the icon was missing from the NPC. I could see it on the map and found that it was level 36 and my job was only 35. After I leveled up I was able to see the icon on the NPC.

I had some lag when final boss in baelsar's wall did a move that flung a lot of fire onto the field but other than that nothing noticeable to me while playing on the cloud server

Problem: Hate speech, racism, and threats

The Service Desk function is unavailable on Cloudtest01.

How do we report someone for: using racial slurs, transgender slurs, telling groups of people to kill themselves, and is using a racial slur and a threat for their character name?

I know these characters will be deleted later today, but surely this level of TOS violation can and should be handled at the account level?

Perhaps this was noticed some time after I fell asleep, but the player was still in Shout chat doing it again some time later. The first timestamp I saw was 2:35 am EST.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NonBinaryNyan

Problem: Hate speech, racism, and threats

The Service Desk function is unavailable on Cloudtest01.

How do we report someone for: using racial slurs, transgender slurs, telling groups of people to kill themselves, and is using a racial slur and a threat for their character name?

I know these characters will be deleted later today, but surely this level of TOS violation can and should be handled at the account level?

Perhaps this was noticed some time after I fell asleep, but the player was still in Shout chat doing it again some time later. The first timestamp I saw was 2:35 am EST.

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really can't do anything. the reason these people even doing it is its a test period and the characters are deleted when its done. probably why support desk was disabled. however, doesn't mean they don't have people monitoring the chats. also lets be honest (and i mean brutally honest). The GM's barely do anything on the regular servers anyways when you report. Even with proof then really don't do anything.

Eureka is probably by favorite content in the game and I've cleared BA over 200 times. So naturally for the Cloud DC test, I spent the week doing Eureka from scratch. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had in this game. Between the difficulty of not having elemental gear, the comradery between the players in the zones, and the wholesome interactions with the global (mostly JP/OCE/EU) Eureka communities, I had a blast! We ended up beating Ozma and clearing BA on Friday, and there was much celebrating.

What stood out to me the most was how excited the JP players were to play content with us, and us with them! Lots of macros and auto-translate allowed us to communicate quite efficiently. Here on the final day, we are now trying to figure out how to play more content together.

Please SE, give us more opportunities to play content with the global community and not just with our local datacenters! Please allow us to visit our new friends with global DC traveling!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by voltnor

Eureka is probably by favorite content in the game and I've cleared BA over 200 times. So naturally for the Cloud DC test, I spent the week doing Eureka from scratch. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had in this game. Between the difficulty of not having elemental gear, the comradery between the players in the zones, and the wholesome interactions with the global (mostly JP/OCE/EU) Eureka communities, I had a blast! We ended up beating Ozma and clearing BA on Friday, and there was much celebrating.

What stood out to me the most was how excited the JP players were to play content with us, and us with them! Lots of macros and auto-translate allowed us to communicate quite efficiently. Here on the final day, we are now trying to figure out how to play more content together.

Please SE, give us more opportunities to play content with the global community and not just with our local datacenters! Please allow us to visit our new friends with global DC traveling!

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they really need the cloud servers and keep physical ones as backups. when i was doing content runs. ran into same darn fine people from all over.

Playing from the Canadian west coast. Been fishing most of the time so it's hard to spot major lag, but there was one incident where the game froze up a bit during an ocean voyage when a bunch of people got the achievement for the dolphins spawning.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by voltnor

Please SE, give us more opportunities to play content with the global community and not just with our local datacenters! Please allow us to visit our new friends with global DC traveling!

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Personally, what I'd like to see is a dedicated cloud DC where people can't create new characters, but where anyone from any DC globally can visit. This was the case in the original Guild Wars with International districts -- I couldn't visit the EU servers directly, but my EU friend and myself (NA) could both go to the International District to play together.

I think the nice thing about a setup like that, is that it would make it harder to do trolling and harassment on the main servers -- so if someone from JP truly is uncomfortable interacting with people who don't speak Japanese, they don't have to ever visit the International server. It would also help preserve individual DC economies (since, if everyone is a guest there, you can't use retainers, access the MB, make an FC, etc). Could also lock it to subscriber-only (no F2P accounts).

Either way though, I really do think this test was a wonderful example of how the global community can actually work together well!

I played a female Vierra on the test server.. Got a large house, formed an FC, got tons of content done that I don't normally run. The lag was non-existent.. Had a good connection the entire time, and nobody in my raids or dungeons lagged either.

We were able to clear all content without any real problems. 10/10 for experience on this beta test. Loved every minute guys! :cool::cool::cool:

Cloud server seems to work pretty well, and it was fun to play as an Elezen since I usually play a Lalafell. Definitely agree that the multinational nature of it is very cool! I like the idea LucidSeraph proposed for an international hub server; it'd be like visiting each other in a land of dreams! XD

I played on the cloud server in two different locations, (both on the West Coast of the US,) with two different internet connections. Both of them worked fine... mostly. I ran into an issue where FFXIV would occasionally freeze, sometimes the music stopped, sometimes the whole thing froze. It's happened thrice that I had the disconnection indicator by my name: once with the first internet connection in the Diadem when I tried to call a mount, open the map, and fly away from the starting point (the map didn't load, but the icons on it did, and the mount was invisible though I was flying with it). And twice with the other connection: once in Mor Dhona, when I was flying to hunt an A-rank monster with two other people, and once in Limsa Lominsa when I was walking towards the aetheryte plaza from the retainer vocate (there was a great crowd of people since Soken was there at the time!)

As a side note, I recently turned off DX11, since it was destroying my audio so badly that all I heard was static when fighting Tsukuyomi. Turning if off fixed the audio issue, but I don't know if that had any effect on anything else yet. I don't think it would have affected the cloud server in any way, but I don't know much about tech so maybe it does somehow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Don't want to leave anything out!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NonBinaryNyan

Problem: Hate speech, racism, and threats

The Service Desk function is unavailable on Cloudtest01.

How do we report someone for: using racial slurs, transgender slurs, telling groups of people to kill themselves, and is using a racial slur and a threat for their character name?

I know these characters will be deleted later today, but surely this level of TOS violation can and should be handled at the account level?

Perhaps this was noticed some time after I fell asleep, but the player was still in Shout chat doing it again some time later. The first timestamp I saw was 2:35 am EST.

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Note the relevant information (character name & world, time & date, what happened) then log onto one of your normal characters to report harassment.

I haven't had this issue before today. There was a noticeable delay before the MSQ icon showed on the mini map. The quest is "A Promising Prospect" in Aleport.

I played from the South Central US. While I personally didn't notice a large difference in latency between this and the live servers, I did have friends who had much better experiences on the cloud test. There were maybe a handful of instances where I thought to myself "I bet if I was back on Primal that would've hit me" after dodging something, but I didn't go too deep into testing.

There was one instance on Saturday where it seemed like the server had no picked up that I had used Triplecast, and I seemed to be hard casting Fire IV despite using the buff prior.

In general, I did enjoy getting to play with people from regions outside of the US on the cloud test server. Everyone was really nice, either through autotranslate or basic English chat, and it was an experience I haven't really had since I stopped playing FFXI. I doubt it's in consideration by the dev team, but it'd be nice if there was a sort of cross-regional server, maybe using a permanent Cloud DC, that encouraged people from around the world to play together.

Tested mainly 6.0 MSQ progression, including solo duties, and running all party duties except for The Dead Ends with other players while playing Black Mage. Ran The Dead Ends with a Duty Support group. Also ran a few Leveling and Trials roulette queues on Black Mage and Sage.

I played there all week.

• Fought and killed lots of S ranks between ARR and Shadowbringers.
• Formed a very large cross-region Cross-World Linkshell for hunts.
• Did Endwalker MSQ just beyond Vanaspati.
• Ranked up my grand company and unlocked a lot of things.
• Fought FATE bosses such as Formidable with large turnouts.
• Cleared the Ivalice raids with 24 people and farmed the Bozjan Southern Front which was busy.

It was all very smooth, all week long. I spent my time there as I would on my normal character.

There were some RP communities there often gathering in large crowds in one place, as well as people there to clear ultimates, people to clear DRS, a lot of people doing MSQ, people there to try out glamours or jobs they normally can't because they would have to level up and some hunters.

The most interesting parts of the experience were communicating with people from other languages, learning to use auto-translate effectively and fighting old hunts and them being tough like they used to be because of small turnouts or lower level gear. It was fun.

Everyone had a goal they set for themselves to do before it went down, but many came to participate in content and behave as they would normally with no incentive to do so, such as joining a party for hunts and FATEs even though the benefit to their rewards is fleeting, offering to pay for items and services even though it's irrelevant because we'll lose said payment, clearing ultimates or DRS even though the achievement and rewards won't exist for long.

I wish I'd been able to play for more than today!

Belatedly realized I forgot to unlock and try Rival Wings on it. *headdesk*

Crowded areas seemed *less* stuttery than usual, which was surprising. \o/

I played on and off all week from the West Coast of the US. My latency was noticeably worse than normal. Most of the time it was only a little worse but there were a few times that the game became so stuttery it was almost unplayable. However, I can't say for sure whether it was due to the cloud server because my connection seemed worse on my main character on Aether as well.

I participated in the Delubrum Reginae (Savage) community effort and cleared three times. On the technical side, this was mostly smooth (lack of actions/items/Zadnor buffs notwithstanding!), except for the very beginning of the second run, where all 31 players in our alliance got 90k'd when we tried to instance in. We also had an issue where when our alliance leader put us in the DRS queue, the "commence" window was visible for less than a second before we were all withdrawn. This issue persisted until we disbanded the alliance and reformed.

On the social side, it was very fun to see the NA, EU, and JP communities interact! We all got to use autotranslate much more than we are used to in the NA community. I thought that using autotranslate to coordinate Lost Actions and strats would be very difficult and clunky, but for the more casual parts of Bozja, it wasn't too bad. For the DRS runs, we had a handful of folks who knew enough English and Japanese to get across the more complex ideas. It helped that almost everyone knew the raid well; I imagine that attempting fresh/blind prog in a multilingual environment like the cloud server would have been a lot harder. It was also very enjoyable to see Bozja in a state of high population with lots of characters of different Resistance ranks doing lots of different things (fragment/cluster farming, story progression, relic grinding, mettle/level grinding, etc.) I did not get to do Bozja back when it was new, but I was around for both the original heyday of Zadnor and the resurgence right after the release of 6.0, and this felt like that in a good way.

I did not bother to try and get to max level on my test server character because I was interested in doing adventuring foray content and there is not a lvl 90 foray.

I did not get to attend the Costa del Sol event but I was present in several heavily-populated server areas in the last few hours of the servers being available (Amaurot and Central Thanalan). I did not notice any performance hiccups aside from the normal stuff: players not loading in until I was right next to them due to how many people were present, being unable to teleport into busy areas due to congestion, etc.

I wish this was a yearly event! I'm sure there are many technical and practical reasons why it's not a common occurrence, but the social experience was completely unlike anything else I've done in FFXIV before. It would be fun if there was a temporary server like this for the Rising every now and then.

My initial feedback with location and ping details

Well, after a week of daily playing, I have met only one issue.

On Cloudtest01, the game stuck at the opening cutscene in Ul'dah. After the initial cutscene of our job vision, the transitional black screen stayed for a few minutes before progressing. The sound of the moving carriage was playing, but the cutscene did not start, and the game did not react to button pressing. No connection issues were shown in the Resource Monitor.

On Cloudtest02, the cutscene played as usual.

I mostly did story content, so I visited different parts of the world and witnessed different player activities. It was charming to see! I regret that my schedule didn't allow me to do Bozja, and I'm glad to know that people enjoyed it.

And the farewell made me cry. Thanks for the company, Cloudtest02 folks, see ya.

https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/acc...605e4176fb.png
Large image

Following up from my initial feedback:

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Since then I've played substantially with EU and JP players, especially in hunts, PVP, and a few in DRS, and had great experiences all around. Now that the servers are down I really miss it. There were isolated trolls, but all that showed is that humans on the other side of the planet aren't that different.

I almost never used the autotranslate system before this so I'm not the most familiar with using it quickly, but it worked well when I had the time to go through the options and slowly pick out phrases. I do wish it was easier to use, with support for multi word or partial queries- anything that started with "The", e.g. "The Tower at Paradigm's Breach" was annoying to get to. If market board search is anything to go off of, as an implementation note, it might be worth precomputing results for 3-7ish characters and storing the results in a hash or trie. Ultimately I dedicated an entire hotbar to autotranslate macros for the most common things.

I also wish it were easier to convey complex topics, such as "please use a sac strat on the stack markers because we don't have enough people"- the best I could do was "(spread out) + (raise)". For DRS we had translators handling the heavy work and it went well. I've seen some people comment on how being familiar with the raid helped, and it did, but there were also a few people new to the raid, and others like me who got hard carried once back in Asphodelos.

The fact that LS/CWLS have such little space makes ingame coordination difficult, whereas external tools like discord lack autotranslate and cannot be quickly macroed to or viewed ingame without a second monitor/computer.

From what I hear Materia has issues with queues and side content that are similar to Dynamis, except Dynamis still has the option to call for reinforcements on things like S rank hunts. I don't play on JP or AUS, but please consider linking those two- I think this cloud test proves that there are less cultural barriers than one might otherwise expect.

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During the latest frontlines pvp sync, the servers appeared to have issues keeping up relative to the first one. At times I'd be bouncing around in a stunlock at the rate of the server ticks, and I'd go back to dying in the middle of dragoon LB after losing the LB charge. The netcode is still a bit of a flaming trash heap, but it was interesting to see this isolated from the effects of my own latency, which is a lot higher on the main NA servers. I do want to say in no uncertain terms that this was still substantially better, and I would PVP more with cloud latency.

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[character limit, 1/2]

[2/2]



It would be nice to have a way to view how many people are DF queuing for a duty, so we could see what we should queue for. I get that there might be concerns about being a self fulfilling prophecy, but at lower populations people get split between DF and PF.

It would also be nice to be able to merge alliance PFs- this was an issue for Nier since most bunker or tower groups would only fill when another group freshly cleared the previous raid.

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For future tests, I'm not sure if having 1 or 2 worlds is better- 2 helps for hunts and day 0 logins, but I also found that 01 became the main social hub while StQ activity was strongest on 02 because the main StQ FC was established there. Also made me wish that CWLS could be larger, to act as a substitute for multiple FCs- there were plenty of cool ones.

On future tests it'd also be nice to start at 2nd Lieutenant, just to get access to housing and hunts- it's trivial if you know to go through the extreme primal quests and then it's just some hunt logs stuff but its otherwise annoying.

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Overall this test was lots of fun, in ways that I couldn't replicate on my main character. Besides improvements to latency, I was able to NG+ STQ, play with players from around the world, and experiment with interior design in a large house. I was able to design high level glams on a character with a different race- being a roe player on main a lot of things changed and I couldn't just recycle outfits verbatim. Massive shoutout to all the event organizers, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun without you guys.

I'm aware that being an ephemeral, potentially one time event contributed to all the activity we saw, but it was fun and I'd be down to do it again.


Edit:


-forgot to mention that it was nice being in a world where gil meant little- people were giving umbrellas out for free and effectively using MB to share things. Shoutout to that guy making glasses for everyone.


-I dislike Blunderville, but tested it anyway since nothing makes lag more noticable, except pvp against a good enemy team. I only got solo games, but the snapshots actually felt fair for once and I might have liked it more if it was always this way.

I just want to add on a data point for the devs to consider here in favor of region travel for the wider game. Short an implementation of region travel similar to DC travel and world travel, I think some form of a visitable Global DC would also work, like the Guild Wars International District idea suggested a few thread posts ago. Something to allow people from different geographical regions to play the game together should they choose to do so. My biggest takeaway from this cloud DC test was how fun the cultural exchange aspect of this test had been, and the kind of memories it created. Perhaps it might be due to the novelty of the experience, but I think a lot of strong and favorable memories can be made if the devs looked into somehow delivering this kind of experience to the wider subscription base, and it's these kinds of memorable events that tie people to a community.

Also consider drawing inspiration from Everquest progression servers and World of Warcraft Seasons concepts with regards to revisiting/remixing old content--I think this could be a means to experiment with the game in a way that would not make sense in a mainline game patch or expansion, something like a wider implementation of Save the Queen/Eureka with lost actions allowing for player experimentation and actual "character builds". If long term support for such things is a concern then I would say--having experienced the 1-week time limit of the cloud DC test and the explicit understanding of the fate of the characters at the end of the test--any "progression server" style of service could be time-limited in nature. The time limited-ness and ephemeral quality of the cloud DC test really forced players to focus on experiencing the part of the game they enjoy, and seeing how far they could get in the limited amount of time they had. In my case, I set a goal of how many DRS/GD零式 runs I could host to clear (ended up being 5). I saw other players push the DoL/DoH game and try to get max level gatherers/crafters and a few gatherer/crafter relics. Some people focused on clearing Ultimates, others focused on hosting parties. There's a lot of little nuggets here in the player experience of the cloud DC test that the devs and SQEX can look at for potential avenues to expand the service of FFXIV in addition to the straight line that is mainline content development via expansions and patches.

Hope this helps. I saw a lot of people already saying lag and network response was good, so I figured mentioning some qualitative stuff here would help in a different manner. Thanks again for holding the cloud DC test, and I hope you guys got whatever information you needed from the week it was up. As a player who generates content by hosting DRS raids on NA as the main way I enjoy this game, participating in the cloud DC test was a real treat even more than I initially expected.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeej

My biggest takeaway from this cloud DC test was how fun the cultural exchange aspect of this test had been, and the kind of memories it created.

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This for sure. I learned to interact with a lot of JP players and was able to invite and talk with them in CWLS as well.

Cloudtest 02 - ran on Mac M1/M2 Sonoma (desktop and laptop) and PS5, Hard-wired and WiFi, in the U.K and Ireland, I had less latency, interaction to quests was quicker - although I didn't find time to do a dungeon (sorry). it also didn't interfere with my other Apps running in the background. Also loading to one area to another is pretty smooth! ALSO even with a lot of players in Limsa Lominsa, it didn't caused any stutter or animation delays and etc.

There is only one thing that happened after every logout; Almost every time as I re-login again to play on my normal character and datacenter, My hardware went into a Kernel panic; I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it; But I thought I'll let you know.