Important Information Regarding North American Data Center Relocation

[Hamada]

To people who were affected by the being moved. Go to technical support forum. They are looking for people who have issues for data. The post is made by Zhexos.

here is the link:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Data-Center%29
report your findings, lets hope this adds motivation to do something or redo the coding for SB and remove those delays from abilities =/

[Hamada]

My alt (Ama) got in an expert pt in progress. It was one of those better parties that she got to find out later. So to hear the healer left simply because of bad ping is shocking. This server move is impacting a lot of people in a negative light, I advice SE to take care in making more research next time when they do something like this, and more testing on their game under different ping values.

Also this boss fight I only did one heal, Indomitability, soo to have ping impact you that badly....

[Hamada]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...44#post4144344

The game just responds too slow, like this is the real reason people complain about cleric stance. All abilities are like it, tank trying take off grit and do dps rotation, does not notice it failed to click off, so on. Can this be considered? change the coding so the game is more responsive so it does not feel worse when someone is over 100 ping? It is buried now from thread merging but I really hope this is seen and considered so people can enjoy the game more.

[Mature]

Game still feel slow. I'm hoping they looking into this and gives us an update

[Matrinka]

I'm in Florida and the game feels both way too slow and way too quick to me at the moment.

For instance, a few people in my FC and I are trying to defeat the HW ex primals. We're doing it pretty casually once every two weeks or so. Before the server move, we almost had Sophia ex down. While we didn't master everything, we got her down to about 10% before deciding to try again after the server move. After the move, we were wiping to portions of the fight we previously thought we had down pat. AoEs were going off almost instantaneously. By the time the markers came up, we had what felt like a 1/2 a second to run out of it and were getting hit hard. Arena tilts were telegraphed without enough time to run to the edge to avoid being punted off. We're all primarily in the eastern part of NA. We were able to take down Sephirot several times and know that fight. Again, AoEs were insanely difficult to dodge out of because they appeared and went off without enough time to really dodge out of them. We couldn't take him down, which we easily did in the past.

Here's hoping they are able to tweak or fix these issues. Seeings the abilities that are meant to make us dodge out of AoE in Stormblood makes me think that there are going to be a lot of AoE mechanics in the expac. It makes me worry that Stormblood is going to be a beast to get through due to this.

[Bongaboi]

Had some instances where I did get disconnected a few times. However, as it turned out, it was a client-side issue (blips to my ISP). Otherwise, Aether and Jenova have been reliable.

[LastCookie]

There's been no update over the last 2 weeks on the issues.
I'm part of the group of people that stopped playing because the ping doubled and the game because unplayable.

Is there really anything being done about this? Doesn't feel like it is.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

There's been no update over the last 2 weeks on the issues.
I'm part of the group of people that stopped playing because the ping doubled and the game because unplayable.

Is there really anything being done about this? Doesn't feel like it is.

Ping doubled to what? If it doubled to 80-100, and you think its unplayable, thats on you. West coast had been playing with that and more for years.

[KisaiTenshi]

here is the link:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Data-Center%29
report your findings, lets hope this adds motivation to do something or redo the coding for SB and remove those delays from abilities =/

That's actually a completely wrong finding.

Most MMORPG's have netcode that play that way, because if they don't, the bots, hackers, and other bad actors will just steamroll over the legitimate player base.

I'll give an example from 4 other MMORPG's, one of which one I've seen source code for unauthorized servers, and another I've had NDA privileges to, all had betas.

A) This MMORPG's earlier version
- Every time you press a button, it sends the contents of your character over the wire
- Every time a window is opened, that window sends the contents over the wire every time a button is pressed
- Because most of these packets are larger than 1500 bytes, it often exceeds the nagle algorithm and is passed with no latency for everything but actions.

The only thing that didn't was just running the mouse around the screen. The beta was sluggish because it didn't have a hardware mouse. Evidence of this remains in the V2.0 and later content because there is a tick box about using software mouse. The rest of the sluggishness came from having no "draw distance" on 2006-2009 era hardware. Literately so much was done in software on V1.0 that even if you run the client/benchmark on todays hardware it would slow down, where V2.0 would not. That was a consequence of developing a game client with the intent of being used on the PS3.

B) A Japanese MMORPG game based on another popular series in Japan, but actually originated in the west. Permadeath and PvP being fulltime.
- This game literately came off looking like a bad clone of FFXIV at release due to having races that are exactly the same size. The storyline and animation however are completely lacking.
- This game, because it was action oriented, required having sub-200ms latency, but a default nagle-enabled setup does not do this. Each of the individual commands are sent over the wire, and if nagle is not turned off, they get buffered into 200ms packets.

C) A Korean MMORPG that started in the early 2000's
- This game even pre-dates FFXI.
- The developers of the West's port opted not to give players any of the expanded storage options because of latency. Literately the bags could be programmed to be any size, but opening/closing them was exponentially more time consuming. Hence many bags only had like 20 spaces, even though they could make them have 500. They later came out with crafting bags that only store one type of crafters materials (eg a leather bag for leathers, a wool bag for wool, etc) as a way to just create a larger stack, but still only one item could go in the bag. Basically instead of having stacks of 10 in the base inventory, it allowed for a stack of 1000.)
- Because it was originally designed for Korea, many of the features depending on low-latency, and everyone learned how to turn the nagle algorithm off in North America. This completely unbalanced PvP aspects of the game because one person in California on Fiber had 7ms to the data center, while anyone in NYC had no less than 70ms. So that person in California could fire off 10 arrows before the person in NYC could even fire one. If nagle was left on, that increased to 200ms.

D) A Japanese MMORPG of another popular series that NA players play anyway with no official translation
- This was the game that "ate peoples OS installations" in a bad patch
- This game likewise relies on low latency, and because of dynamic battles (like FFXIV's V2.0 FATES) you're often in competition with others for the same monsters in instances. Some instances you have to yourself, or just your party, other instances have areas that multiple parties are involved with.
- Like FFXIV every single key press was a round-trip process, and the battle system was closer to FFXIV V2.0's than the action MMORPG I mentioned in B.


Pretty much ALL MMORPG's netcode work like this, especially those designed for Korea and Japan because they tend to not have high latency connections. FFXIV V2.0 was designed to be usable in North America in the first place, because a lot of complaints about V1.0 centered around sluggishness caused by too much stuff being within sight of the player. The consequences of this is that the world got smaller, broken up into much smaller zones and instances. Even these smaller zones have the occasional overloaded section caused by people farming F.A.T.E's. Had we kept the much larger "open" world of V1.0, and the larger models from V1.0 the data required to be sent to update the map and character inventory-appearances would be much larger.

Anyway no changes in the netcode AFAIK has occurred with FFXIV V2.0 to 3.5x, at best you could make a claim that if you had nagle off before, and still have nagle off now, you would notice an increase/decrease in latency. But that doesn't make the game unplayable. Not at all. If anything with nagle off you were playing the game in easy mode and may have had an advantage over people in PvP. Games are still designed to deal with 200ms latency because people still play on wildly inappropriate network connections like satellite and 2.5G/3G connections.

Only recent LTE wireless devices even reach the lower latencies of a wired connection. Countries like Australia and India don't have many wired connections, most of their population is reached by wireless. Funny enough I know someone in Australia who played all these MMORPG's high latency and all, pretty much it's a thing that people who feel they need to unsub, have not truely felt an unplayable MMORPG game until they've tried to play from Australia. You'd think Australians could use a SEA or JP/KR server for lower latency, but because these aren't typically setup for english users, and subject to geo-blocks anyway, that typically means they have no choice and have to do something that breaks the ToS of the game just to play it.

So usually what people do to setup their PC for MMORPG use is the opposite advice used for downloaders/file-sharers.

- Not enabling jumbo packets, sometimes downgrading packet size to dial-up to force routing equipment to send packets out faster (don't do this)
- Turning off nagle (usually results in faster data being SENT, but the server will not send a response any faster) (this is often called the leatrix fix, but it's just turning nagle off)
- Tuning buffer sizes down, and automatic features off
- Downgrade your internet connection if you don't have fiber to a setup that doesn't employ channel bonding.
- Turning all power management features off while the game is running (this can be done automatically using something like process lasso)

If you haven't done those three, now's a good time to try it.

[Fourbestintoner]

Ping doubled to what? If it doubled to 80-100, and you think its unplayable, thats on you. West coast had been playing with that and more for years.

They also have been complaining for years, and so did Euros before their DC was moved.
Almost like 200ms being perfectly playable is a lie.
130ms on the NA data center.
110ms on the EU data center.
Guess I'm EU now.