Quote Originally Posted by Ruinfeild View Post
If I remember correctly the GCD is about 2-2.5 seconds. Lowering this to about 1.5-2 seconds would help greatly in getting more skills off cool down and meaning more actions per minute.

Allowing us to create our own combo's (such as what they give us in PvP) would be appreciated or working on the macro system so those who want to make our own macros to copy what is given in PvP do not have to worry about the extra .5-1 second wait per action in the macro for it to off.
This will never happen:

1) It updates movement every half second. So at most you can be 500ms behind and still operate

2) Combat status is updated every 3 seconds (also known as the server ticks), so your hp, status effects, and so forth are aligned against this.

Because the game is global, the maximum theoretical latency is about 266ms given no routing or bufferbloat.

The reason "regional" servers exist at all, for any game, is because 266ms is too much when the population center of places like Japan and Korea allows for latency of 15ms, and no routing nonsense by intermediate ISP's. Any game that was designed for Korea or Japan, tends to perform horribly in North America.

You only get to pick 1:

a) Tiny regional servers, low latency. Enjoy having servers of 32 players glued together by lobbies/hub worlds and finding out that everyone lives within 3 miles of each other, because the game is otherwise unplayable.

b) Large global servers, high latency. Enjoy exploring large worlds with thousands of players, but in order for all players to not get an unfair advantage over each other, all commands are time synced to 3 seconds to allow even players in Russia, Brazil and Australia to play on servers in Japan and California.

If unmetered, high-speed, low-latency internet access were available to all, you'd still see MMO games regionalized because game developers would, in the interest of security and availability, put all the "rendering" clients in their own data centers and stream it as video to the players. But until such time everyone has usable gigabit internet at home, this is a pipedream.

The "GCD" is 2.5 seconds because that is simply how it's represented. Skill Speed/Spell Speed can move this bar, thus it's not actually aligned with the server's time step, but actually against the game clock measured in microseconds. So when your command arrives at 5:01:05.825, and it sends a update command at 5:01:08.000, it is still processed in order that it arrives. Players are not locked against the exact same GCD. The server simply updates everything every 3 seconds with what it knows right now. That's why casters are able to land casts after a baddie is dead, because the command arrived after it was dead, but the game client animated it as though it was still alive.

It's not unreasonable for the game developers to improve the macro system so that it actually sends commands as a "package" of commands to be executed one after the other when CDG/oGCD is ready, however this largely takes a lot of skill out of playing the game, which is why you'll likely never see it as anything but single-second aligned for the player. Now... allowing us to "program" the AI companions (eg the Chocobo, the Squadron, maybe even the Retainers) combat would be a welcome thing, as they could actually be fine-tuned to be less stupid. However at present they basically trade off raw hp sponging for stupid. Like in Stone Vigil, they chase Isgebind around and thus eat every single AOE. In Halitali they all run straight into the fire at Tangata, and into the lightning water at Thunderclap Guivre (but are immune to this one.) These are things that would normally straight up kill bad players.