Final Fantasy 14 and lag in Australia

[ShizumiNeko]

Hello,

I have some questions about lag and that with in Final Fantasy 14 I'm playing the game from Perth with in West Australia and when ever I've played FFXIV I've always had lag in the game like when the boss or add haves a AOE move the you need to move out of the way and 9 out of 10 times even if I move far away from the AOE I will still get hit by it.

I'm running on Ethernet with a speed around 111.03 mbps on a NETGEAR modem is this fast enough to not get lag in the game? I was also wondering would it be better to also get a steaming/gaming router as well to get better and smother internet? (The one I was looking into was the Netgear Nighthawk router and was wondering if this was any good?)

I'm on the Behemoth (NA sever) would I be better off moving to a JP sever since it's closer to AUS, or would it not make much different with lag and such?

Are there any AUS player here that moved to a JP sever and seen a drop in there ping?

Are there anything I could do to improve my connection with the game? and also is WTFast any good people says it improve the connection with the game and drops down your ping quite low?

Is there anything eles I should know or you could suggest? Thank you for your time and reading my post. I hope you all have a great day.

[Scholar-]

Also in Australia. Playing on tonberry was previously on a NA server and had the same issues.

Your options are:

- transfer to Tonberry / other JP server
- use a VPN like wtfast or battleping

And yes wtfast is quite decent and you will notice a massive improvement.

Also worth noting is tonberry has an extremely large Australian / English speaking community. Id say at least 75 percent of the server is English speaking except obviously duty Finder sharing a jp data centre. Good luck

[ShizumiNeko]

I found a video that shows away to give you an idea on how much ping you get compared to each data center @ https://youtu.be/QQyjn44ZThQ

Witch tells you by typing in ether ping 184.107.107.176 or ping 202.67.53.202 in Command Prompt and I got 318 for NA and 184 for JP do you know if these numbers are good?

[Scholar-]

I found a video that shows away to give you an idea on how much ping you get compared to each data center @ https://youtu.be/QQyjn44ZThQ

Witch tells you by typing in ether ping 184.107.107.176 or ping 202.67.53.202 in Command Prompt and I got 318 for NA and 184 for JP do you know if these numbers are good?

Neither number is good really, but the lower the better. With 184ms you will notice a massive improvement over 318.

[ShizumiNeko]

Neither number is good really, but the lower the better. With 184ms you will notice a massive improvement over 318.

Do you know what your ms with out a VPN is? (just to compare with another AUS player)

[ShizumiNeko]

Neither number is good really, but the lower the better. With 184ms you will notice a massive improvement over 318.

Also on your sever do you still get the problem when a AOE happens and if you move you still get hit or does this not happen on that sever?

[Raist]

Those aren't addresses used for the game...Canadian servers start with 199, Japan 124. If you want to test to the actual network segments used by the game, either lookup the address your client uses when in game, or use the lobby server addresses: neolobby01.ffxiv.com through neolobby06.ffxiv.com. Odd numbers are Japan, even are Canada.

The issue is indeed your latency and not your bandwidth. A 100Mbit plan is technically not your speed--that is more your allowed throughput, or bandwidth. The electrons run the same speed over the wire/fiber optic cables regardless of your plan. Your bandwidth plan determines how many electrons are bundled together in one transmit cycle, and the duration/number of cycles per second to get you to that cap of 100Mbit/s (typically it goes in anywhere up to about a 5-38Mbit bursted cycles). This game actually only requires about a DSL-lite level of bandwidth to run normally (just over 64Kbit/sec of actual data is sent/received per second during most game play). The added bandwidth really only comes into play in isolated moments like zone loads, updates, and maybe hunts (all that extra character data--depends on your clipping settings).

The game is programmed to function on roughly a 300ms boundary. If your latency and/or your packet loss/retransmit frequency is too high, it can cause things to get out of synch. Symptoms can range from a rhythmic stutter (sort of a skipped heart beat sort of thing), to skipping (tele-walk like we used to see in XI), to out right pausing and fast-forward rubber-banding caused by the delay and sudden catchup of the data stream. If things get too far out of hand, the session can timeout completely and you get dropped from the server.

It is a tricky situation for the Oceana region unfortunately...as you guys are dependent on a limited set of undersea lines to get either to the US or Japan. And it is further compounded by the language barriers... Japan is likely a better candidate in terms of latency, but then you may have issues integrating into their community. Until the higher tier ISP's (level3, Telstra, etc.) that manage the undersea lines and the exchanges along the West Coast of the US that you guys are forced to use can manage to reduce congestion and improve latency, your only viable choice to improve stability might be a premium VPN service, which can get pricey for some of them.

Buyer beware though---some VPN's are very overpriced. Research your options...some computer/gaming magazine sites have comparisons up at their websites, or you should be able to find a list via Google. Test them out thoroughly under their free trial agreements to find the one that best suits your needs---you may find that some provide enough usage for you to actually stay within their free trial agreements (some cap at a set data usage level per month, or so many hours a day/week/month). For example, my Tunnel Bear account gives me 500MB a month free--if you promote them on social media you can get an extra GB added--was more than enough to use for isolated instances and troubleshooting and such during Beta4/early launch of ARR. Keep in mind that some VPN's don't always select the best tunnel for you, so you may need to manually choose where you connect to. I found that sometimes I faired better connecting to a tunnel in the midwest than I did connecting in Montreal--you can still hit congested nodes through a VPN. But, that is the hidden benefit of a VPN--you can change your route on demand to try to get around those bad nodes.

[ShizumiNeko]

Those aren't addresses used for the game...Canadian servers start with 199, Japan 124. If you want to test to the actual network segments used by the game, either lookup the address your client uses when in game, or use the lobby server addresses: neolobby01.ffxiv.com through neolobby06.ffxiv.com. Odd numbers are Japan, even are Canada....

Thank you so much for the info and help do you know will 184 have that much of a difrent compared to 318 to the point that I will be abke to not be hit but AOE and other when I move or at 184 will i still get hit? / what is a good ms to be able to play the game with so you dont have this issue?

[ShizumiNeko]

Also how do i use "neolobby06.ffxiv.com" do i use it in Command Prompt?

[ShizumiNeko]

Update : it looks like I get just as high S&R in the open world like in dungeon.

In-game you have the sending receiving icon what numbers is it good to have to get a good condition? when in a dungeon I get around S100 to S200 and R1000 to R3000.

When out in the open world this number is much lower around with R but higher in S (tho I have not monitored this much due to my main lag is coming when in dungeon with bosses useing AOE. But when I last cheek my open world S&R was S430 and R786