Effects of ping/latency on animation lock and ability to perform rotations normally.

The FFXIV subreddit r/ffxiv just posted their interview with Producer/Director Naoki Yoshida (Link), where they asked him this question:

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/r/ffxiv: Currently players with higher ping experience longer animation locks on their abilities, causing problems with double weaving or weaving in fast windows like Hypercharge. Are there any plans to reduce the influence ping has on the length of the animation lock?

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This was Yoshida's response

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Yoshida: I'm afraid there is not enough information in terms of how bad the latency is. So if possible could that person provide us with more information on the official forums like where they live, who their internet service provider is, what world they are connecting to, and any sort of ping information they can gather? Or else I'm afraid it is difficult to provide an accurate answer to that. Would you happen to have any information on-hand right now?

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r/ffxiv's followup:

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/r/ffxiv response: For example, I live in east coast Canada and if I’m playing Machinist and I use Hypercharge, and I try to weave an oGCD, it usually clips. It's about 120 ping.

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And Yoshida's reply:

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Yoshida: At 120ms it shouldn't be causing an issue so we suspect something like packet loss. And the developers do also simulate some of these environments by intentionally causing latency but they haven't really experienced anything at 120ms. We would love to get further information so we can analyze it better.

But I understand the frustration that you feel though like playing as a Black Mage and using a potion and then the animation lock comes in and it's like so irritating. It is a very tough element to address for sure; some people expect different things out of the franchise like skipping all the animations and that begs the question like what even is the point of animations?

But that being said with the battle system and any other older system that we have onboard I do believe that we should be improving on those that tend to become an issue. I do think there are possibilities moving forward and there are elements we need to look at and address as well.

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Yoshida's response seems to indicate that he doesn't really quite understand the issue on a crucial level, so I'm going to explain how animation lock works in Final Fantasy XIV and give Yoshida the information he requested.


In Final Fantasy XIV, when you press an instant-cast action, the game client (on your local hardware), applies 500 milliseconds (ms) i.e. half a second of animation lock to your character, which prevents you from using any other actions. The client also sends information to the game server, to let it know the client has used that action.

This information travels to the server, where the server processes it, and sends information back to the client to let it know things like the damage of the attack. This information from the server also contains animation lock data for the skill that was used. The game client takes the animation lock value given by the server and applies it AGAIN to your character, overwriting any time remaining on the initial 500ms. This new animation lock value is typically around 600ms, but some actions have more.

What does this mean for gameplay? Characters cannot use any actions until their current animation lock has expired. This has consequences on the act of "weaving" i.e. using off-global cooldown abilities during the wait time between GCD spins. If your character is still in animation lock when your GCD spin is ready, you cannot use your next GCD until the animation lock is over. This is called "clipping" your GCD, and it causes all sorts of problems regarding your character's DPS output and how their cooldowns align. Plus, it just feels bad.

So, how does latency come into it? Well, receiving information from the server is not instantaneous. It takes time for the information sent by the game client to reach the server, it takes time for the server to process that information, and it takes time for the server's reply to make its way back to your computer. This time is called latency, or ping. The further away you are from the servers, and the longer and more complicated the electrical "route" taken by those information packets, the more of a delay there is between you pressing a button in-game and then seeing the result.

So, when you press an action in game, you are automatically put into animation lock by the game itself. Then, you must wait for the server's response. The server's response contains additional animation lock data, which the game client then applies again, at the time of the game receiving that information. Any time you spent waiting for the server's response, is simply additional animation lock time.

Imagine a player who lives right next door to the servers. He has 1ms of latency. He uses an action, and the game locks him. The server responds in 1 millisecond, because it's right next door, and the game uses that server's response to apply the new animation lock data, which is 600ms. So 600ms of animation lock, plus the 1 millisecond he had to wait, means 601 milliseconds of animation lock. This player therefore ends animation lock after 601 milliseconds, and can use his next action at that point.

Now let's imagine a player who lives a few thousand miles away from the server. She has 160ms of latency. She uses the same action as the previous player, and the game animation locks her while awaiting the server's reply. It takes 160 milliseconds for her to receive a response from the server. The game then applies the animation lock data in the server's reply, which is 600ms. So this player spent 160ms in animation lock while waiting for the server to respond, and then an additional 600ms from the server's response. Total animation lock: 760ms. Her animation lock ends after 760ms, and she can use her next action at that point. 159 milliseconds later than the next-door player was able to use his.

Now let's see how this causes issues in gameplay.

The Machinist action Heat Blast has a fixed recast time of 1.5 seconds. During this time, it is highly recommended that Machinists use the off-global cooldown ability Gauss Round or Ricochet, as using Heat Blast will reduce the remaining cooldown of these actions. If you do not use Gause Round or Ricochet after Heat Blast, you might already have full charges of these skills, thereby wasting the cooldown reduction effect granted by Heat Blast, leading to a severe loss in damage dealt.

However, if you use Gauss Round or Ricochet too late, and this causes you to clip your next GCD, the added delay may cause the Hypercharge window (that allows you to use Heat Blast) to expire, meaning you are only able to use 4 Heat Blasts instead of the ideal 5.

Let's use the previous example players. Player A, with 1ms of latency, uses Heat Blast at time = 0. 601 milliseconds later, the animation lock for Heat Blast is expired, and he can use his next action: Gauss Round. After another 601 milliseconds, the animation lock for Gauss Round expires. 1202 milliseconds have passed since the player first used Heat Blast. Since Heat Blast's recast time is 1.5 seconds (1500 milliseconds), this player can comfortably use his next Heat Blast without any worry of clipping.

Player B, with 160ms of latency, also uses Heat Blast at time = 0. However, because of her latency, her animation lock doesn't expire until 760 milliseconds later. After 760 milliseconds have passed, the player is out of the animation lock for Heat Blast and is able to use her next action, Gauss Round. Using Gauss Round causes her to suffer another 760 milliseconds of animation lock. By the time this animation lock has expired, 1520 milliseconds have passed since the player first used Heat Blast. MORE than the 1500 millisecond recast time of Heat Blast, meaning the player has clipped Heat Blast by 20 milliseconds.

This might not seem like a big deal, but it quickly adds up, and there is also another factor to consider.

The server does not always send its reply immediately after receiving information from the client. Due to processing and network demands, there is a variable amount of additional random delay on every interaction between the client and server. This delay can be a low as 0ms, but typically averages around 40ms. This is an additional 40ms of delay, and therefore animation lock, added on to every action request you make to the server. Thus to reliably weave abilities without clipping, your latency must be low enough not only to compensate for the distance to the server, but also this random additional delay.

From this, we can see that Player B, with 160ms of latency, would actually average around a 200ms response time from the server, and therefore 800ms of animation lock on most actions. This would cause them to clip Heat Blast by 0.1 seconds any time they attempted to weave an ability during its recast time. If they did this 4 times in a row, their rotation would be delayed by 0.4 seconds, which is enough to completely prevent them from fitting a 5th Heat Blast in the Hypercharge buff window.

From this information, we can calculate approximate levels of ping needed to weave or double weave reliably on various jobs at various levels of GCD recast times. To weave one ability during actions with a 1.5 second recast time, such as Heat Blast, Ninjutsus, Enchanted Riposte/Zwerchau, and Technical/Standard Finish, one's ping would need to be at most 110ms. Ideally 100ms or less just to be on the safe side.

For jobs with fast GCD speeds such as Ninja and Samurai, being able to double-weave (two off-GCD actions in one GCD spin without clipping) on these jobs requires latency values as low as 50 or 60ms. Even less if you have lots of Skill Speed. For Monk, double weaving is essentially impossible unless your latency is in the single-digits.

As you can see, this makes playing several jobs the way they were intended to be played extremely difficult for players with higher latencies. There is almost no way they can adjust their playstyle to get the same damage output as someone who can weave reliably without worrying about latency causing them to clip. They're at a strong disadvantage, and frankly, it makes playing certain jobs very unenjoyable (Machinist, Ninja and Gunbreaker come to mind).


This concludes the explanation. My question to Yoshida is this: Why is it exactly that the game client must wait to receive animation lock data from the server? Why is the animation lock information for each action not simply programmed directly into the client? The client itself is what has to apply the server's value anyway, and this value can be tampered with by hackers, so it's not for the sake of anti-cheat.

Let's assume there is a good reason it works this way. Why can the game client not be programmed to subtract the server's response time from the animation lock value they receive from the server? This would give everyone the experience of playing jobs at 0ms ping regardless of where they live. If the answer is because this kind of system could be tampered with, that is already possible with the way the game currently works, as FFXIV has no anti-cheat functionality to determine if game data has been modified.

I do not understand why the game is set up this way to make it inherently less playable for users further from the servers. Naturally, there will always be some disadvantage caused by latency, such as not seeing boss AoE telegraphs until a bit later due to the latency delay time. However this system of animation lock has been intentionally programmed into the game in a way that makes it affected by latency, when it doesn't seem like there is any design reason for it.

This is not simply a matter of getting better internet or moving house or using a VPN. The game is DESIGNED this way, this is a function of the game's programming. Theoretically it should be possible to change the game itself to make this not an issue. So why don't they?

This is what the original question asked by r/ffxiv was getting at. I would one day really like to get an answer.

There's an additional random delay that can make animation locks even worse: moving. The server is unable to process the movement update packets at the same time with attacks and sometimes this results in an extra +50 ms spike on top of all the problems mentioned in the OP. I recently had a discussion with a third party plugin developer that told me about this. There have been rumors about this before in the MCH community but it has been very difficult to test properly.

There are at least two third party plugins that help mitigate ping issues but I'm afraid that posting information about them is likely against the forum guidelines and I'd like to keep my account intact. This highlights another problem with providing feedback about the issues: providing feedback without breaking the Terms of Service is extremely difficult because of the technical nature of the problem. This isn't a problem with locations and ISPs, this is a problem with game code.

It's extremely disheartening to hear that Yoshida feels that there is not enough information about these issues. Personally I've been talking about them for at least 3 years at this point. Here's a few threads and posts from my own history:


2021:
Problems in MCH design I hope are addressed for Endwalker

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

Ping dependency

It came to light that SE had been only testing jobs on their internal servers with 0ms latency and only realized the effects of ping once covid forced them to work remote. Stormblood MCH had really bad problems with this up to a point where we had 0.50s error of margin our main burst window. Shadowbringers improved this margin to about 1.25s on Hypercharge and 1.00s on Wildfire. Now that's an improvement for sure, but they also made the oGCD weaving problems much worse.

Hypercharge now requires mandatory oGCD weaving between 1.5s GCDs. That is a very, very tight margin of error for anyone playing overseas. Internally the game uses 0.60s regular animation lock timer to space out actions, that would leave 0.90s left for the oGCD animation before the next GCD. However, the game doesn't have a working ping correction system for oGCD weaving (apart from forbidden 3rd party programs), so the ping comes on top of the animation lock, screwing up players with slower connections. The limit of ping effects lies at 150ms, that makes the animation lock 0.75s long, which leaves 0 room for error between abilities during Hypercharge weaving. The effect of ping isn't quire linear either, from listening to people's troubles on the Balance MCH chatrooms, the problems usually start when people have ~100ms ping to the servers. MCH isn't the only one who suffers from tight oGCD weaving, although the effects on MCH are much more pronounced. The game desperately needs ping correction for oGCD weaving if it intends to keep its current design.

Other ways to solve the weaving and tight buff timer problem would be to use the Charge system we have for Gauss Round and Ricochet or a stacked buff system such as Bunshin on NIN that pre-determines the number of GCDs it lasts for. Alas, this was not addressed for the whole expansion even though the charge systems were introduced for all classes right at the beginning.

Another Wildfire related ping issue that emerged with Shadowbringers was animation length affecting GCD calculations. Wildfire only accepts GCDs into the buff potency after the GCD has fully carried out as opposed to how buffs and debuffs usually snapshot their effect before the animation even begins. I understand that this is to prevent ghosted or interrupted GCDs from counting in on the damage, but this has the unfortunate sideffect of making Drill and Anchor a very poor 6th GCD choice in Wildfire, because it makes the whole error margin over 0.30s tighter than any other GCD action, just because the animations are longer.

The devs really need to be more careful with how the networking issues affect overseas players and players in general who play with slightly worse connections than 0ms ping internal servers.

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2019:
Machinist latency issues need recognition akin to Ninja

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

I've been the main theorycrafter and mentor for the class on the Balance Discord for almost two years now, since early Stormblood. In my role, I answer a lot of questions and talk to a lot of people who have problems understanding the class, their rotation or general knowledge of the game.

During Stormblood, the most common topics regarding the difficulties with the class were:

"How much ping do I need to play this class?"
"My ping is too high, what can I do? Do I need to find another class?"
"Can you make a rotation for high ping people?"
"How much damage am I losing because of my latency?"

Endless questions of all variations about ping problems and they still get asked daily. The answer is often disappointing. The only solutions we have are using VPNs, accepting the sub-optimal performance or simply choosing another class to play.

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Ninja's mudra problems were finally acknowledged but I'd like to firmly emphasize, with kind words, that Ninja is not the only class suffering from latency problems. Please give some recognition for Machinist as well for the latency issues the class has been suffering from for two years. The technology for solutions obviously exists with the new gcd actions, dance steps, animation changes and the charge system. Please, just do something to make the Hypercharge, Heat Blast, Gauss Round and Ricochet interactions smoother!

Thank you for your time and many thanks to the developers for the efforts in providing an ever better player experience!

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MCH 5.05 adjustments are totally out of touch with the game

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

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And ping problems got no fixes. How long has it been since we've been complaining about those? Where are the fixes for those issues? How long are you going to ignore actual problems with the class?

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Problems that remain unfixed:
- Heat Blast 1.5s recast doesn't allow enough room for latency for reliable oGCD weaving with current animation locks.
- Recast reduction of Gauss Round and Ricochet causes overcapping issues if weaving is avoided in Hypercharge because of previous problem.

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- Drill and Air Anchor have increased delay in damage application which makes them hard to use in Wildfire.

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To make MCH more ping friendly wouldn't it be easier to...

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

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Originally Posted by Mistyregions

Just cap how many times you can max WF and just increase the length by 3 seconds? Keep everything the same, then people can weave 2x in between heat blast and not have to worry about anything? The damage would be the same, they would just be able to get in 1 more attack thus solving the whole problem.

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Capping Wildfire with stacks and giving Heat Blast 5 charges would be the best change. Changing Wildfire alone won't fix the issue because the issues is with clipping during Hypercharge. Clipping is a dps loss regardless if you manage to hit your 5 Heat Blasts and 6 gcd Wildfires and it adds up as you have to repeat it often. The core issue is the 1.5s gcd and animation locks. It has to be possible to avoid weaving completely during gcds that fast if we want to fix the problem, so either the gcd needs to be longer or there needs to be another work around for avoiding the weaving. Giving Heat Blast charges would mean that you can do a couple, then do other gcds while weaving and spend more Heat Blast charges without weaving. More about the topic here.

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Media Tour MCH issues: MCH is now 4 times more punishing

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

Here's a compilation of all the possible fixes that we've come up with:
- Make Heat Blast available outside of Hypercharge at lower potency and without cooldown reduction effect.
- Reduce the effect of cooldown reduction to 10s or less (down from 15s).
- Increase the maximum charges of Gauss Round and Ricochet to 4 (up from 3).
- Increase the recast time of Gauss Round and Ricochet to 40s (up from 30s).
- Increase Heat Blast gcd to 2.0s or to an even slower speed (up from 1.5s).
- Increase Hypercharge duration to 9 seconds (up from 8s).
- Lower the animation locks on Heat Blast, Gauss Round and Ricochet to well below standard levels.

Lost potency should obviously be made up somewhere else. I would recommend adding it to Gauss Round and Ricochet.

Edit 3:
This post was written pre-release and some things changed for launch. We didn't get 6 Heat Blast Hypercharges, but pretty much everything else in the post remains relevant: 1.5s gcd and ogcd weaving is a problem. All the fix suggestions are still relevant and even more could be added if we wanted to do some changes to the core mechanics of the job. Hoping for improvements with the release of Savage, but very discouraged to be ignored once gain even with the amount of support these issues have got from the player base.

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The above post had over 100+ likes on the OP and the Reddit thread over 700 upvotes. These issues are wide spread.


5.0 Machinist Launch Feedback

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

We avoided the worst ping nightmare when we couldn't fit 6 Heat Blasts into Hypercharge, but the job is still about as ping dependent as in Stormblood. The issue can somewhat be alleviated by spending all charges before entering Hypercharge, but that's not possible in all scenarios. It just feels bad to play when you keep clipping with Heat Blast and weaving oGCDs.

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2018:
Usability evaluation of Machinist

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

The main culprit behind latency problems is Rapid Fire in combination with ogcd weaving. Rapid Fire lowers gcd to the floor value of 1.5s similar to RDMs' melee combo. This is fine on its own, but it becomes problematic when ogcd weaving is required during it. With animation locks being roughly 0.70-0.75s in practical gameplay with good latency that leaves almost zero room for lag. Double weaving ogcds during slow gcd is already too much for many players but this is far worse. Since this is a compound problem with the combination of Rapid Fire, Overheat and Wildfire, any of the following solutions would help alleviate the issues.

1. Reduce the required ogcd weaving during Rapid Fire
This would require combining abilities, such as reloads, direct damage abilities or wildfire+overheat, into a single ability or changing them to have longer lasting effects so that they can be applied outside of burst, like Hypercharge. Alternatively, a SMN-like approach could be used, locking some of the abilities during Overheat so that they can't be used. The downside is that the rotation might become more bland or feel boring with less abilities used.

2. Significantly reduce animation locks
I feel that this would be insufficient for most players, but it would retain the current structure and feeling the gameplay has. This would help alleviate issues with ability weaving but only if it was possible to implement fluidity similar to NIN mudras.

3. Change how Rapid Fire works
If Rapid Fire gave a damage boost through other means besides reducing gcd timer, it would allow for double weaving ogcds more easily. This would no doubt have a big impact on gamefeel, and the excitement of a fast burst rotation might be lessened.

4. Make Wildfire and Overheat longer so that ogcds are not required during Rapid Fire
This would give more ogcd space between gcds simply by extending the buff period. This would introduce an old problem with Wildfire, the difficulty of delivering the payload damage before phase changes or interruptions. It would require a mechanic similar to Deathflare or Eartly Star to explode the collected damage before the Wildfire timer is up naturally, a manual detonator.

5. Make Overheat and/or Wildfire work based on gcd count instead of timer
As suggested in the OP, this would alleviate issues with the tight timers and large damage loss due to latency, although the problems with ogcd weaving would remain.

6. Make Overheat timer not tick down before Flamethrower is interrupted.
This would get rid of the human error with the timing and actually make the Overheat window comparable to other buff windows. It would also allow Flamethrower to actually be used for AoE damage instead of a simple heat tool.

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Moderate Latency (150~) + Impacts of Double Weaving

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Originally Posted by SleepyNeko

After looking around the forums for DPS that is good with a high latency, these are the common responses:

SAM/BLM - Least affected
MNK - Moderately affected
RDM/DRG - Abit more moderately affected
NIN/BRD - Don't even try.
SMN/MCH - Didn't see any responses so no idea.

I'm getting into the DPS role and have raided with BRD/NIN/MNK/SAM. With 150 ping I cannot fit 2 ogcds most of the time without clipping into the next gcd.

So my questions are:
How much damage am I losing if I don't strictly follow the optimal openers and just try to spread everything out evenly (single weave everything), over the entire fight.

Second, are dragoons really that dependent on double weaving? I've looked at the CPM for DRG and it is fairly low for most fights.

Should I just play whatever class I want and single weave everything or change to a slower class like DRG/BLM? (All my friends are playing SAM already).

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MCH biggest issue?

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

Another personal gripe I have is forced ogcd weaving during Rapid Fire which is caused by the tight OH/WF window, it's cancer especially for high latency people. Ogcd weaves during Rapid Fire have zero room for latency (gcd anim lock + ogcd anim lock = 0,75s + 0,75s = 1,5s = gcd during RF) which is even tighter than double weaves during normal gcds (0,75s + 0,75s x 2 = 2,25s < 2,5s base gcd) and even those can be a pain for people with high ping.

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Been gone a bit: is MCH still crippled by latency?

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Originally Posted by RichardButte

I observed back when playing XIV some months ago that MCH was literally crippled by latency because it meant you couldn't get the maximum number of attacks off during an overheat if you simply lived too far away from the servers. Others confirmed this as well.

Is this still the case or have they actually fixed that?

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NoClippy has this comment in the code:
https://github.com/UnknownX7/NoClipp...ompensation.cs

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        // ALL INFO BELOW IS BASED ON MY FINDINGS AND I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE MISINTERPRETED SOMETHING, THANKS
        // The typical time range that passes for the client is never equal to ping, it always seems to be at least ping + server delay
        // The server delay is usually around 40-60 ms in the overworld, but falls to 30-40 ms inside of instances
        // Additionally, your FPS will add more time because one frame MUST pass for you to receive the new animation lock
        // Therefore, most players will never receive a response within 40 ms at any ping
        // Another interesting fact is that the delay from the server will spike if you send multiple packets at the same time
        // This seems to imply that the server will not process more than one packet from you per tick
        // You can see this if you sheathe your weapon before using an ability, you will notice delays that are around 50 ms higher than usual
        // This explains the phenomenon where moving seems to make it harder to weave

        // For these reasons, I do not believe it is possible to triple weave on any ping without clipping even the slightest amount as that would require 25 ms response times for a 2.5 GCD triple

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XivAlex has this bit in read more:
https://github.com/Soreepeong/XivAle...ncy-mitigation

And this is a twitter thread about the animation lock subject:
https://twitter.com/perchbird_/statu...780186120?s=20

It's already a known issue, with different approaches from the community to try and minimize the problem, and it's been known for a while. Even the problem solving part is mostly done, but the players have to resort to 3rd party tools that are pretty invasive (they need to attach to the game process) and are just asking for an official response to the issue.

Many players don't want to depend on ToS breaking tools just to have a proper experience, but there's no official answer to it yet, and apparently not even acknowledgement.

This issue is super close to my heart as an Indian resident playing on Omega-Chaos EU, the data center with the "least" ping of the bunch (150-160ms). I was super excited for Machinist... but ugh, Heat Blast + Gauss weaving is horrible. I just stand in place and button mash, feeling like I don't even want to count how much I cram in because it'll dishearten me. I play it least and can't feel like budging it past 50, even. I get this with Scholar as well - not sure if it's server side, but there's such a big delay between me getting into combat and the game registering me as being in combat so that I can use Aetherflow. Single weaving as a whole feels bad, never mind double.

I get it. I'm South Asian, probably super low in priority. I also should probably either "not bother" weaving because it's "only needed for high tier" or some such, or stop playing entirely if the combat style isn't something I can cope with. I get the issue will forever be "looked into" and at some point it becomes inevitable. I get all these things, and it's been the only thing so far that has really upset me. I truly do want to play, but perhaps I should bow out after all.

Hello,

I'm pretty sure I'm the one that asked Yoship those questions, or at least very similar ones since I also live on the east coast of Canada. While 120 ping is 'playable' the job feels very unresponsive and can sometimes cause clipping issues during weaving. In the worst case scenarios this can lead to missing an entire heatblast. I have since started using a VPN at the start of SHB since I've been raiding mostly, if not exclusively on MCH for my static. While this alleviates the issue, I'm forced to also pay a subscription to said VPN (Exitlag). Whilst there is cheaper options, none of them worked for me. More popular and cheaper options such as Mudfish barely had any routes available for where I live (Montréal) and/or would just keep DC'ing me. My issue is pale in comparison to people playing MCH overseas or even in south America (200+ ping). I don't think a VPN should be needed to play a job.

As it was mentioned in a above post, this issue has been talked about multiple times on these forums. In the early days of Shadowbringer this was probably the biggest subject of conversation around machinist and multiple ways of fixing this was proposed. Even from a job design point there are ways to fix this. Reaper for instance plays very similarly to MCH. Their shroud form is basically a version of hypercharge, except it is not as limited by time like the latter (30 sec vs 8 sec). The reaper chooses to end this window with it's finisher move. Something similar could have been added to MCH as well. Another options would be stacks similar to the new Inner release or perfect balance, though it would not fix the weaving issues per say.

Machinist's playstyle feels complete to a certain degree but changes to part of its core design such as heat would make it 'feel' better to a lot of players and even allow some unfortunate ones to be able to play it even at higher ping. I get that it is late into ShB and EW is about to release so I doubt anything will change in the short term, but please consider one of the many options your community is providing.

PS: As asked in the QnA, my internet provider is Videotron, connecting to Aether.

I hope you can fix your issue!

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Yoshida: I'm afraid there is not enough information in terms of how bad the latency is. So if possible could that person provide us with more information on the official forums like where they live, who their internet service provider is, what world they are connecting to, and any sort of ping information they can gather? Or else I'm afraid it is difficult to provide an accurate answer to that. Would you happen to have any information on-hand right now?

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I have intermittent issues. On most days I can play Machinist and weave a skill between every Heat Blast with no issues, but on some days, I will play exactly the same way but the 5th Heat Blast in Hypercharge will get halfway through its animation before canceling itself.

I live in the US midwest. My ISP is Spectrum and I am connecting to Faerie. My ping to Aether datacenter (using the address listed on https://arrstatus.com/) is currently about 70 ms. The next time I have issues with latency, I will be sure to record my ping and a video of the issue and report it here.

I've seen the original post on Reddit and decided to come forward and let them know more about our ping issues when I saw this post! Just to add some more feedback, I'm a Brazilian player with an average of 190 ping. I rely too much on VPN to stabilize my packet route, otherwise, I'm unable to double weave anything. Even then, I can't safely double weave on some jobs like WAR and GNB at the risk of breaking an unfinished combo/losing a 5th Fell Cleave inside Inner Release windows. I had to switch from GNB to WAR during UCoB prog because of the amount of double weaves I had to go through because of the heavy defensive cooldowns usage + GNB's oGCD-heavy rotation. I'm a Paladin main and I know my limitations - I cannot play at 2.41 GCD or I risk losing a Confiteor usage under pots, for example. If I am to talk about other jobs like NIN and MCH, there's just no way of playing them comfortably. Lots of clipping and missing buff windows.
This being said, I'm pretty sure lots of South Americans play this game and have the same issue as I do. I'm sure there are not many ways to reduce ping, since it's a physical barrier (distance), but we've already seen third-party programs doing things that can mitigate that problem without giving anyone "advantages". Adjusting animation locks would, in my opinion, just put us all on even ground.

I expanded my earlier post for easier reading of the main points in the feedback. The threads contain comments from other people as well but many people I've talked don't post on the official forums at all. Ever since Stormblood I started being more active in the theorycrafting community and got to talk to a great many people suffering with ping problems almost daily. I've been trying to be a spokes person for them and put a lot of time in my feedback so I hope that the developers would take notice of it eventually. Many players will simply give up on the classes that require good ping and never play them, they might even quit the game because they can't play it properly and you never hear about them so the problems stay buried.

If anyone has been following the Media Tour information, even Mrhappy1227 commented on the weird lack of changes to help with the ping issues in his MCH video on the changes. Some other classes did get changes towards "stressful" abilities, but it seemed to be based on very arbitrary feedback since it didn't extend to all of the tight windows or abilities. The video can be found here: FFXIV Endwalker - COMPLETE MACHINIST Changes & New Skills Overview. By the way, initial theorycrafting seems to suggest that MCH weaving will become even more stressful in Endwalker. Please look forward to that.

I really hope SE can start looking into the animation lock systems and do something about weaving. If the problems can be greatly alleviated by 3rd party plugins, surely the developers can do something about it as well.

I have a huge amount of issues with this, especially on console since I have no reliable access to VPNs. I would like to see this addressed and I think it's extremely important they fix it.

It's a problem that is told for years first with rapidfire then wildfire and I know lot of people got disheartened when they saw they made rapidfire the core gameplay of the class while it was the thing people wanted fixed. Same with Bloodweapon, people complained more about bloodweapon than delirium and only the later got fixed, it's very sad to see that our feedback is rarely listened to :/

I am from Brazil and play as MCH.

Without a paid VPN, my ping goes around 160~ and I cannot do 6 gcds and weave under WildFire. Paying I am able to, however, I shouldn't have to pay to do a simple job's mechanic. Yes I am in South America, but the bunshin treatment would fix the problem and make the job very playable by SA. Even though a SA server would be amazing for raiding.

That is also a problem for, like, Dragoon that have animations lock. Without VPN you can see how much it drifts. So a change on to how the animations lock and client/server interacts is good, either for people neaby, and for non-NA/EU/JP/OC people too.

I think the biggest issue(s) with this ping problem is that it has both been around for years with plenty of people asking/questioning/suggesting for it to be fixed, and it also has had third party tools fix the issue for SE. Meanwhile the feedback we receive is "not enough information" despite many threads going into details that they worry will have them banned for ToS violation. We also have people take the time to repeatedly explain how the system works in detail and point out the exact problems while providing various solutions for SE. There are also directly mentioned freely accessible and some source code even accessible programs that do fix the problem. Yet SE has seemingly taken no action to fix the issue, if they even acknowledge it at all. This isn't meant to be an attack AD against SE, but a request for help and direct action to be taken. There are already easy access to cheats that would do anything the current method is supposedly preventing, so why is it not just part of the client side to always have the amount of animation lock SE desires so that ping(distance) does not affect the issue? The issue is not packet loss, its the current method used by the system to determine an inconsistent animation lock between actions and players. As seen in this thread the clipping and inability to play classes normally is not even a "high end top tier game-play strategy" issue, it makes the game feel bad, clunky, and not enjoyable.

The only thing I can guess is that the EN forum staff only pass along threads that get a thousand replies or something. So I guess we just keep endlessly bumping this? Don't worry if you have nothing of value to add, just bump and maybe eventually someone will notice.

As a NIN player ping issues really really hurt. So i am throwing in my support, please SQEX have a look and fix this.

Please do something SE >.<

Doubt they will fix it, SEA server is going to be their solution. You can also try the current Japan datacenter where all the oceanic cool kids already play.
Before I went over there I couldn't even dodge stuff like Titan's bombs and half the orange aoe's in this game, let alone use 2 moves off gcd.

Also agreeing with this post. I live in a fairly rural area and I am stuck having to use a VPN (ExitLag). Without it, I'm sitting around 100 ping but can spike as high as 150. ExitLag helps stabilize my connection to keep my ping from bouncing all over the damn place. Without ExitLag, can't hit a 5 GCD Blood Weapon, can't hit a 5 GCD Hypercharge. With ExitLag, I can do both, but I shouldn't be shelling out $8.55CAD a month just play the game without getting screwed by the effects of ping on animation lock.

What I really want is for them to get rid of the 90002s due to heavy packet loss and implement error correction/catchup instead like XI had. And while they're at it, get rid of the auto-fail while solo on d/c during Deep Dungeons. :P

I just remembered that even with a good connection that now allows me to put 5 GCD under hypercharge/do blood weapon/delirium/inner release, I still can't have a drill/Air anchor to finish my Wildfire consistently. The damage being applied -later- than for normal heated shot, I can't imagine the ping needed to be able to do it 100% of the time, so yeah, please look into this, square :/.

And I lived in Belgium/france/Finland, so not even that far from the eu servers.

I'm in Europe and play on Crystal since most of my friends are there; I average 150-160ms latency. I can hit all 5 hypercharge if I'm careful, but I don't think I've ever in my life hit 6 GCDs in wildfire, trying all sorts of skill orders. I was sure that they'd change heat blast to a stack system in EW after seeing other jobs get that treatment, and I'm deeply disappointed that they didn't. Same goes for blood weapon, why on earth is delirium now so lenient but that wasn't touched?

I find it especially frustrating with machinist, because as much as I enjoy the job I feel that I've hit a wall in improving. If changing to stacks doesn't work, I think even increasing the duration of each skill by one second (11s for wildfire and 9s for heat blast) would make it doable for me, without affecting the total possible skills used I believe.

Signed up for the forums just to say this, since they apparently need more feedback!

Love seeing you sign up, and it would super help if more people registered and voiced their experience and feelings on the matter

Signed up to +1 this. Having read the code linked earlier when I became aware of it months ago, this seems to be a clear design oversight and is very easily resolved without any meaningful negative impact to the game. In fact, it will allow a more flexible design space, as abilities like Hypercharge will not disqualify (or strongly discourage) players in certain regions from using certain jobs in higher end content. It opens up a wider range of options for players all over the world.

As an example, imagine if such a design was in a FPS. In CounterStrike or COD, every time you shot a bullet and the server ACKed, you would have to wait before firing the next one based on your ping.

A player on a low ping could fire more bullets per second than on a high ping! Yet anyone who has played a FPS online will say this is not how it works. It would be unfair. It would be unfun. With some effort, a good player can overcome some disadvantages. But it's night and day once you get to experience both.

That's how FFXIV handles inputs today.

Agree with everyone here and hope we can get more better connection in the future.

As an Australian player with ~140ms ping who saw Yoshida's interview and was surprised by how this issue and playing at higher ping (his words suggested they didnt even consider 120 much?) seemed to be something not on their radar. A lot of people have explained the issue better then me so I'm just here for support.

+1
The ping issue is very much real. With ~180ms I feel like most of the time it is not possible to perform the MCH rotation as it seems to be intended by the dev team. And there is a lot of minor issues in the rotations for other jobs as well. Maybe those are not as intended, but still it feels bad to not be able to do those just due to how the animation lock works.

+1.

This is an issue that ought to be focused on, especially since there are already third party solutions that could be adopted to first party.

I’ve been curious about something and this topic made me wonder if it’s related to it, or whether it is something different. I’ve noticed with swiftcast raising in raids that sometimes the raise doesn’t land despite the swiftcast being used up by it. I was a bit unsure about what had happened the first few times but when my partner didn’t ‘accept’ my raise it confirmed my suspicion it just doesn’t always actually land. Since then I make sure to leave a second between swiftcast and raise and that seems to prevent it from happening. Weaving a regen in between dps sometimes yields the same result (as in no regen despite having cast it) but that’s obviously less problematic. It only seems to affect gcd abilities, I never run into this issue with ogcd ones.

+2 shameless bump

Without VPN, I can't double weave without clipping.

+1 for this. Playing with well over 150 ping, mch is my main and its disheartening. Please, SE, give some careful attention to this issue; as people took the time to explain here, it can be improved and everyone would be a lot happier!

Bumping this back to the front. Animation lock and ping are issues on both DRK and GNB, jobs that mandate double weaving for optimal performance.

Please support this thread, very rarely do we have a post this well written, and objectively useful to all players, whether they realize the implications or not. If the developers only look at likes for topics that deserve translation, this has precedence over every other thread that gets thrown around on these forums. Spread the word, make an account, keep this alive, if only for the information it provides to others.

+3 shameless bump

Bump because YoshiP should take the time to read what's being written here.

Shall bump too! Latency has become such of the issue that there is one entire thread in the technical support area about random disconnections making play impossible.

Everyone on this end could not play Mech or Ninja until we installed a vpn. With the vpn lag bunnies are now thing of zee past. In fact there is not one single multiplayer game out there where ping does not effect performance in some way. It is.. well umm, simple physics?

I hope they can do something about it, playing mch with 160ms+ is miserable.

Have support, thread. *bump!*

Made an account for this, I heavily agree.
Learning that double weaving was the standard was so disheartening as it was impossible to do with 200+ ping as a DRK.

Learning that the dev team didn't test with anything but 0 ping until COVID made me almost fall out of my chair. I worked QA at a small time language learning website and even we knew to test with all kinds of connection qualities. I really hope they decide to finally take a look at this. Even with my 85ms ping maining BLM weird things happen sometimes; for example, on some days I'll use Ley Lines, my character will do her animation and the ley lines will start to appear on the floor, and then the ley lines are gone and the cooldown hasn't been triggered. It's an instant cast skill, so it's not like it can be interrupted. I can only assume my using a GCD overwrote the fact that I had used Ley Lines during the global cooldown, which is incredibly strange behavior! And don't even get me started on the delay on using items.

It's not physically possible for an MMO to have every person on Earth achieve a low latency connection since they're inherently centralized. For that reason it's critical the game in all aspects is tested at all times with non-ideal conditions. A simple change: do all development testing from JP to the NA DC.

There's no good technical justification for the behavior the client takes for GCD locking. Players should not have an explicitly granted advantage based on where they live. That alone is justification enough to change this behavior.