"I'm waiting until 7.3 to see if I'll quit"

[Gwenkatsu]

It's entirely subjective. Some people will like it, others will dislike it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and no one is incorrect.

To say that it's a problem that needs to be fixed (or that it's an accessibility issue) is wrong, though.

Area effect fires, I clearly stand outside of the area, still get hit. That's not a feature - that's a bug.
You might give the bug a name, you might find a way to work around the bug, but that does not make it a feature. And bugs need fixing.

When this happend to me the very first time, somewhere in a 40-50 dungeon, my immediate reaction was: "I will never raid in a game with such a bad net code". Surprisingly not: "whow what an interesting feature, let's try to find a creative way to deal with it."

[Uzephi]

Snapshotting, on the other hand, is a fundamental part of the game. A mechanic will always snapshot at the same time. It's consistent and learnable. You just need to learn when you need to be where you need to be and when you need to be there, and then be there at the correct time. Without trying to be rude, that's a skill issue.

Snapshotting is due to bad network handling. I have never experienced such bad delay in a game like FFXIV. Tell me another game where my shield visually applies on the target but doesn't get calculated in damage for a round trip. Many times in this game I have completed an adloqium or landed an e.diag before a killing blow, but snapshotting made the heal calculate after the killing blow. Plenty of times in this game I am literally on top of another player in a safe spot to 'die' because the server decided I was 5 yalms back instead of where my corpse is.

Any fight that has me play memory games instead of reacting to mechanics isn't something I want to do. Show me bad, I avoid given enough time. Needing to be psychic or 'study' a fight ad nauseum because the markers apparently are there as a reminder for next time not 'avoid now.' That is how your philosophy of this netcode jank being a "fundamental part" of the game and if you don't know the fights verbatim, it's somehow a skill issue. Would that be a knowledge issue, not skill? Especially for people who play (gasp) other games where their network isn't cups and string can actually respond to fights in real time.

[Catwho]

I understand that snapshotting is done because the fight calculates where you are standing inside the game on the server side, not on the client side, to prevent hacking. Because the game itself sips data from the client side in a continuous string, the biggest cause of bad snapshotting is packet latency or loss. (This is why a good cell phone connection with low latency can be a better connection than a cable line that is running through a degraded node.)

Unfortunately, because the data center for NA is 15 hops and ~2000 miles away from the majority of the east coast NA population, ping is often trash, and one bad packet loss = you are now dead.

[BigCheez]

Area effect fires, I clearly stand outside of the area, still get hit. That's not a feature - that's a bug.
You might give the bug a name, you might find a way to work around the bug, but that does not make it a feature. And bugs need fixing.

When this happend to me the very first time, somewhere in a 40-50 dungeon, my immediate reaction was: "I will never raid in a game with such a bad net code". Surprisingly not: "whow what an interesting feature, let's try to find a creative way to deal with it."

Telegraph happens. You were standing in it. You get hit. The visual effects are irrelevant.

You can blame the game instead of taking responsibility for your own gameplay but that will prevent you from ever improving at the game.

A bug is defined as software not behaving as intended, not by software not behaving as the user expects. Snapshotting is the intended behaviour. It isn't a bug.

[Striker44]

A bug is defined as software not behaving as intended, not by software not behaving as the user expects. Snapshotting is the intended behaviour. It isn't a bug.

Snapshotting in general I don't see as a bug/issue, but something brought up by another poster is. If I cast an instant-cast spell (e.g. Benediction) on a target, the target should not die *and* trigger the CD on my Bene. Either I got the instant cast off in time and he should have been healed to full (not die), or he should have died and then my spell not gone off trying to heal a dead target. The fact that both conditions can occur simultaneously is a problem.

[Valence]

I understand that snapshotting is done because the fight calculates where you are standing inside the game on the server side, not on the client side, to prevent hacking. Because the game itself sips data from the client side in a continuous string, the biggest cause of bad snapshotting is packet latency or loss. (This is why a good cell phone connection with low latency can be a better connection than a cable line that is running through a degraded node.)

Unfortunately, because the data center for NA is 15 hops and ~2000 miles away from the majority of the east coast NA population, ping is often trash, and one bad packet loss = you are now dead.

Even with good ping it's inconsistent and sometimes outright offensive what the server may throw at you. Speaking as someone who does a lot of pvp, this is where you'll see the stupidest server shit you ever have had the displeasure to see in your life, but it doesn't stop just to pvp.
The things I could experience when I was playing on NA with 200ms ping and zero packet loss, keeping the same ping with a VPN but suddenly gaining 1s of GCD uptime every minute because suddenly the connection is "better" somehow. Or when I discovered that fight instances gave me over 2s of GCD delays per minute compared to housing wards on dummies that played exactly like at low ping (maybe that's how Yoshida tests ping in house to tell us that it's fine up to 200ms ping)...
And then you go look at logs people post and you notice the actual delay between cast preparations, cast registration, and damage/effect application, and it's enlightening, truly.

[Hyperia]

To be fair, quite a lot of houses popped on the market as of late on a lot of servers. Midgard has 697 plots that emptied in the last week. So there are people leaving. How many were from the housing freeze purge? /Shrug

The housing owners are supposed to be considered the safe and dependable subs. The fact that thousands of houses are being vacated, and some rumors are saying over 15,000, that means they have lost close to $300,000.00 in subs per month. Loosing ordinary subs of that level can be written off as they will come back but housing subs hold on way past I’ll take a break, if they give up a house, they are in retiring / quitting territory.

The alarm has been sounded and I believe they are changing direction, but like the Titanic, their turning speed is very slow and like the Titanic, it was too late and they hit. They are tens of thousands of subs down and loosing more by the minute. The big question is if they can shore things up enough to make it to 8.0.

The critical part is getting 8.0 out at or before the 2.5 year mark from release. If they try to push for 3 years and make us wait a full year with the 7.5x content, the sub losses will become dramatic, if not unrecoverable. If 8.0 isn't December 2026 but July 2027, my 11 year sub will be let go.

[Jeeqbit]

Area effect fires, I clearly stand outside of the area, still get hit. That's not a feature - that's a bug.

It's not a bug. It's just that the way the game functions is not clearly conveyed to new players, so they often mistake it either for a bug, bad net code or them being unskilled (usually they assume the last one).

They assume it snapshots when the animation goes off, but that's too late to avoid it. Or they assume it snapshots when they actually die, but it's much earlier than that. And that's actually intentional and how it's coded.

Snapshotting is due to bad network handling.

It's not, or not entirely. In most cases, the snapshot goes off when the cast bar completes, then the animation follows it. Around the time the animation goes off is when it actually carries out the process of reducing your HP or killing your character.

Regardless of their netcode, they could begin the animation at the start of the cast bar then have the animation going off align with the cast bar completion.

I also don't think it's just their netcode. Their server processes everything slowly in general. If you've ever fought the S rank Bone Crawler and seen it knock a huge crowd of players back, it takes a good few seconds to push everyone back. A few seconds is ages in a fight. The same thing happens if you wall pull Sastasha unsynced and use your AoE - it takes 3 seconds to cycle through all the enemies and apply your AoE damage. We are talking about server machines with what I would hope is a lot of cores and they intentionally take 3 seconds to iterate 32 times. I hope I am missing something, because I seriously struggle to believe this is necessary.

Their netcode is a problem though. Specifically, they use TCP instead of UDP. If you know anything about video game networking, you know that UDP is the protocol of choice for video games... so naturally, SE chose TCP.

[Shurrikhan]

It's not, or not entirely. In most cases, the snapshot goes off when the cast bar completes, then the animation follows it.

Except not even that is consistent. The majority go off when the AoE indicator disappears, if any, or the cast bar completes if not, but some snapshot slightly earlier or slightly later.

Some may even 'double' (checking at multiple points so that you're hit both if dashing out at last second and if dashing in at the last second despite that whenever the first checked would be outside the hitzone if the second were inside the hitzone at that time) by checking across multiple server ticks (ours is allegedly 24 updates per second but often feels more like ~4, though that may come down to the average ping actually being rather varied moment to moment and/or packet loss or simple desync).

And then of course you have the persistent AoEs that don't always look like obvious persistent AoEs (e.g., looking like a standard cleave, rather than a laser).

Their netcode is a problem though. Specifically, they use TCP instead of UDP. If you know anything about video game networking, you know that UDP is the protocol of choice for video games... so naturally, SE chose TCP.

What's funny is that the advantage of TCP should be its reliability, and yet across repeated tests over the last dozen or so years, XIV has constantly had vastly more dropped packets than WoW, GW2, etc., for me, even despite the short and straight shot to XIV's NA hub since they moved them from Montreal to Sacramento.

[Jeeqbit]

Except not even that is consistent. The majority go off when the AoE indicator disappears, if any, or the cast bar completes if not, but some snapshot slightly earlier or slightly later.

True about the indicators overhead disappearing being a snapshot indicator. It's very rare that others don't align with the cast though. Doom in World of Darkness is an example of a rare exception. Anything else is likely just ping/latency since it's been super reliable for me personally.

I think there are some cases we have seen in Savage with subsequent hits though. A good example was P9S where there was a dummy cast followed by a series of snapshots during rockbreaker. But I believe each of those were their own casts, they were just casts without a cast bar (similar to when a melee DPS does an instant attack that has no cast time). Nevertheless, you could still time it (3 seconds) and pretend there was a 3 second cast bar all the same.

I've also been able to adjust my battle log to only display cast start and cast end and sometimes it will say when they are preparing an attack despite that it's not casted.

One thing that will help a bit is SE is adding cast bars above the heads of enemies so you can see them better. But it's not going to solve all the difficulties people have understand the game. It's probably one of the primary reasons players think they aren't skilled. The snapshotting gets them.