There are different types of micro lags/stuttering and they're indicative of different things. The types Valence are experiencing are probably indicative of the servers dropping packets or struggling to connect to players in whatever instance they're in, or in cases like mine, just a shoddy internet connection. These are typically pretty easy to differentiate from hardware issues because the rest of the game (i.e moving yourself/the camera around) will still be buttery smooth while everyone else freezes up for a second or two.

Yes, having a faulty/broken setup can also cause micro lags, but these (from my experience of frying my GPU by doing rendering work and then going straight into raid) freeze your entire screen, not just players.

Quote Originally Posted by Kohashi View Post
The net/ping issues usually translate into rubberbanding, teleporting across the map, because the server has delays in allocating you the new position.
This is true for other players looking into the person lagging, but FFXIV at least tries to make the movement look smooth on the player's own side. That means that extremely laggy players typically feel/look like they're moving smoothly on their side, even if they're lagging around or have outright disconnected from other players' perspective. I've never seen client-side rubberbanding occur in this game. This is also why dead bodies can move around sometimes, since the player's client is still giving the server information about their movements on their side long after the server's determined that they've died, but the server is simultaneously failing to deliver this information to the player's client.

Quote Originally Posted by Kohashi View Post
I think what they mean by that is that you are not required to play 100% to clear a fight, and even if you make mistakes, and even if you do clip and drift you should still be able to clear. If the ping results in a blatant inability to clear the fight, then they will maybe look at latency and ping. However, that is hardly ever the case.
Just as a note, I've definitely been killed by the game's awful netcode MANY times in normal, extreme, savage, and ultimate fights. On particularly bad days last patch, I'd watch the boss from m5s cleave both sides of the room at once, or get stuck in an infinite movement mechanic loop in m8s phase 2. The fights typically aren't impossible with ping, but they can be when the servers get bad enough on any given day, which is becoming more and more common.