Mao has question for everyones about DDR-style boss fights.

[Jeeqbit]

Their pursuit to make a tab target game highly sensitive to ping into a wannabe-action game is one of their worst design philosophies .
"Faster fights" in this kind of game is punishing on ping that until a couple years ago was very manageable.
I don't keep contact with dozens of XIV players but the few I know cite the latency versus speed of newer mechanics as one of the reasons they don't log in much anymore.

I have 150 ping and have no trouble with these fights from a ping perspective. To be honest, I have even done mechanics on much higher ping data centers without a problem.

SE typically gives you about 3 seconds to do each mechanic. If for some reason you don't have that long, then you are probably meant to be in position for the mechanic already by that time.

Normally when people say that ping stops them doing mechanic, they actually just don't understand how that particular mechanic snapshots or its order of snapshot.

A really good example of this was in P9S, where rockbreaker seemed like it had lots of crazy stuff going on, but if you recorded it and played it back slowly, the mechanics resolved one at a time, with 3 seconds between each, and by knowing this order you could simply do 1 mechanic at a time. Once you were used to this order, it became super easy to execute, even while half asleep.

I don't actually like how fast the new raids are, but even those, with enough repetition, was able to anticipate and execute with my ping.

[Mawlzy]

I have 150 ping and have no trouble with these fights from a ping perspective. To be honest, I have even done mechanics on much higher ping data centers without a problem.

SE typically gives you about 3 seconds to do each mechanic. If for some reason you don't have that long, then you are probably meant to be in position for the mechanic already by that time.

Normally when people say that ping stops them doing mechanic, they actually just don't understand how that particular mechanic snapshots or its order of snapshot.

A really good example of this was in P9S, where rockbreaker seemed like it had lots of crazy stuff going on, but if you recorded it and played it back slowly, the mechanics resolved one at a time, with 3 seconds between each, and by knowing this order you could simply do 1 mechanic at a time. Once you were used to this order, it became super easy to execute, even while half asleep.

I don't actually like how fast the new raids are, but even those, with enough repetition, was able to anticipate and execute with my ping.

The thing is, it's not just formal ping that creates problems. I think you're right that if an individual has a stable ping and no other latency issues, they develop an inner timer that allows them to handle snapshotting and the other oddities it produces. And if everyone was using high-end rigs and GB fiber that would be the end of it. (Although even here, the "ghostly" snapshotting experience is sufficiently weird, I'm not sure why people would play 14 for its combat, particularly when solutions exist to make it much smoother that SE chooses not to implement.)

In practice, additional sources of latency create perceived variations in snapshot and other timings. I'm fortunate to be near the US servers, but an FC friend who has a 8 timezone offset tells me alliance raids play completely differently to dungeons. Moreover, within an instance, they experience significant changes in latency.

As we know, this is much less of an issue for those in Japan.

[Jeeqbit]

an FC friend who has a 8 timezone offset tells me alliance raids play completely differently to dungeons. Moreover, within an instance, they experience significant changes in latency.

One way to potentially combat this is a VPN.

See, all those YouTubers promoting VPNs to watch streaming services from different countries, are missing out on advertising what they are actually useful for: stabilizing ping and reducing ping, or potentially avoiding nodes that are getting a DDoS if it's not the server itself.

[Mawlzy]

One way to potentially combat this is a VPN.

See, all those YouTubers promoting VPNs to watch streaming services from different countries, are missing out on advertising what they are actually useful for: stabilizing ping and reducing ping, or potentially avoiding nodes that are getting a DDoS if it's not the server itself.

Yeah it helps. Equally paying for extras in a subscription-based game when the game itself can solve the problem strikes me as... typical SQEX.

[Valence]

I have 150 ping and have no trouble with these fights from a ping perspective. To be honest, I have even done mechanics on much higher ping data centers without a problem.

"It works on my machine"?

The true fact is that latency/ping as a metric is partially irrelevant in that game. This is also incidentally why Yoshida is still puzzled when we tell him there is problems past a point with server latency and tells us the exact same thing "it works on our machines when we simulate 200ms ping". Now you need to actually have tried playing through different setups and servers to actually understand. You need to have raided with high latency, and fiddled with a lot of VPNs. I happen to have done that especially during SB when I raided on NA with 180-200ms ping on SB MCH.
- At some point early in the expansion they tried to do something against the constant DDOS (yes, it was already a thing in SB), and changed the routing somewhere, and my ping jumped from 170 to 180ish, which is not much, but in result it was night and day and I had delays of over 1s every minute compared to what I had before their changes. This was not tied to latency as a metric.
- The 80-100ms ping I had when the servers was still in Quebec in HW had servers so trash that we had micro stutters and freezes all the time for no particular reason. This wasn't tied to latency numbers either.
- A VPN like battleping back then dropped my latency down to 140ms during SB. 40ms gain, that should be great right? No, it was as bad as normal. Meanwhile another VPN that worked for me was pingzapper, with barely a latency drop, but suddenly proved a lot better in play, smoother, more reactive.
- The icing on the cake, which made me understand what we were truly dealing with when I played through eureka: suddenly I had a way better experience out of nowhere in there. It wasn't stellar, but it felt playable in comparison. Then I tried to play serious openers and rotations not on stone sky sea but on housing dummies... And I was able to pull off the low ping MCH rotation. Barely, but I could there. A rotation that was indicated impossible with over 40-50ms ping. Meanwhile when comparing it to actual duty instances, there was approximately a 2s difference of delays and clipping between both. Same ping, same latency, but different instances.

Yeah, "it works on my machine".