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

[Idolon]

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?

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.

[heyitsHrodric]

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.

[Kitfox]

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.

[Bec]

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.

[Socram]

As a Brazilian playing on the US servers I feel this. My ping is about 240ms without a VPN, and 180ms with a VPN. It's terrible that even paying a VPN subscription I still have a very high ping.

I'm used to playing MMO's on US servers but most of them have a much better route. In WoW for example my average ping is 160ms on US servers.

So combine the horrible route and the game code issue and I'm ended up with a nearly unplayable experience with some jobs like MCH

[Idolon]

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.

As promised, here is a video of the problem: https://youtu.be/-WgTTe9-ihk

This occurred around 8:30 PM US central time on Jan 23, 2022. My latency as reported by Resource Monitor was fluctuating around 100-150 ms. Based on where my GCD lined up with Chain Saw, I was consistently losing about 1.5 seconds every minute due to Hypercharge. At 2:15 in the video, my last Heat Blast cast canceled itself.