Latency issues and a possible fix?

FF latency is pretty bad when you play at 200ms+, but it doesn't feel this way with World of Warcraft, which is pretty responsive at even 400ms.

The solution the WoW team found back then was Spell Queues, when a GCD or a cast is about to finish, you have the last 400ms of that cast or GCD to press another button and queue it to cast next, this way, the moment the SERVER register that the GCD is over, the next spell is already running.

Right now, I need to wait for the cast or global cooldown to finish, my bar to be available to use, and then press a button which is yet to be registered by the server, in other words, lots of avoidable "waiting".

Was this ever discussed before? Is there a reason why this is not a thing in FF?

The major reason is twofold. Routing and the game's built-in animation lock.
In NA the major issue to the handover to NTT's San Jose node, which SE "can't" do anything about. The other they will likely never change. VPNs solve the 2nd issue only.

I mean you could just install plugins like alexander or noclippy and make your game function as it should.... oh wait thats illegal for some reason mb.

The issue is in another bug report thread that has been brought up repeatedly and gets told things like "packet loss", "on your end", etc. The actual issue is in how the game applies the animation lock after using an ability. There is a base 500 ms wait, but abilities have unique animation locks (most being about 600ms) that it needs to get from the server. So you push a button, it goes ok, gonna tell the server you did that and how long before you do something else. Then it goes there, gets the time you need to wait, it comes back to your client and applies that lock. But it doesn't account for how long it took you to get that number. So it resets it and makes you wait the full length even if you already waited.

The fix would be to either remove the server being involved and do it client side. Issues are people hacking it out entirely but you can already make your GCD like 1.5 with something as simple as cheat engine so I dont have any stock in this being a valid excuse.
Or to have the server/client account for time already waited.

Instead of starting at 500 ms, counting down, receiving the packet, restart counting at 600 ms. It shouldn't reset the count but just adjust it to the correct value.

This is hacked up a little bit to try to make it easier to digest.



If you're in square enix or live in an area this isn't an issue, try to play on a different data center. You will instantly be able to tell the issue.