Regional Servers? (Opinions please)

[Mirage]

How do you know latency wont be a non issue for this game with the new server structure regardless where the servers are located?

Id rather put my gil on the devteam to keep their promises than making unreasonable demands,
we haven't even touched upon the issue of the immense cost and problems of multiple international located servers like location cost, 24/7 on location maintenance and development staff on the other side of the globe from the main development team, different laws and guidelines depending on the country its physically located at, the list goes on and on
and for what? some lousy milliseconds ping? seems kinda excessive

Answering a question with another question. Excellent!

I hope the new servers and client will alleviate a big portion of the lag issues we have now, but at the same time, most of this forum is overestimating how much that can actually fix.

Nothing would make me happier than me being as wrong as I could possibly be, but at the same time, the likelyhood of that happening is... very low. I'm sure the game client will handle NPC shops, trades, and all that other item management and user interface stuff in a way that will feel completely lag-free by smart command queueing and predicting, but that's much simpler than if you wanted to try doing something like that for battle.

Fights will have to be made easier in order to let those with high latencies win. In fact, I'm pretty sure even Ifrit Extreme does that already now. Higher latencies simply put a lower cap on how hard fights the development team can make, and how much of the difficulty would need to be overcome by character stats instead of player skill.

Player skill matters more the lower lag you have. I don't see how this could possibly be a bad thing. Battles balanced for high lag rely on gear stats making up for the player skill that is eaten by lag. But then again, I've always enjoyed fast paced action RPGs more than slow and turn based ones.

[Catalyst67]

If SE is going to the direction of PVP and faster gameplay, latency is a top priority (as well as others, I know). Another thing I think about is the animations of abilities. I can't wait to see live gameplay of v2.0, only a couple more weeks to go!

[BlueMage]

One of the nice things about the FF MMOs is the lack of segregation.

I say no to segregation.

[Ingolf]

If they make regional servers they had better not make it mandatory. I enjoy playing with my American friends a lot. I would quit if that were no longer an option.

I can't speak for everyone, but I know several people would quit.

[Vydos]

No, just no. Let me play with the US, EU and JP. It's the reason why I loved FFXI to begin with. I made lots of friends back then across the globe. And I still believe that it's one of FFXIV attracting points that differ them from all those other mmorpg's out there. Please don't suggest them to remove one of the few things that makes this game special.

[Dragonheart]

Answering a question with another question. Excellent!

I hope the new servers and client will alleviate a big portion of the lag issues we have now, but at the same time, most of this forum is overestimating how much that can actually fix.

Nothing would make me happier than me being as wrong as I could possibly be, but at the same time, the likelyhood of that happening is... very low. I'm sure the game client will handle NPC shops, trades, and all that other item management and user interface stuff in a way that will feel completely lag-free by smart command queueing and predicting, but that's much simpler than if you wanted to try doing something like that for battle.

Fights will have to be made easier in order to let those with high latencies win. In fact, I'm pretty sure even Ifrit Extreme does that already now. Higher latencies simply put a lower cap on how hard fights the development team can make, and how much of the difficulty would need to be overcome by character stats instead of player skill.

Player skill matters more the lower lag you have. I don't see how this could possibly be a bad thing. Battles balanced for high lag rely on gear stats making up for the player skill that is eaten by lag. But then again, I've always enjoyed fast paced action RPGs more than slow and turn based ones.

This.

If SE is going to the direction of PVP and faster gameplay, latency is a top priority (as well as others, I know). Another thing I think about is the animations of abilities. I can't wait to see live gameplay of v2.0, only a couple more weeks to go!

And even this.

[Yumi_Hibiki]

Answering a question with another question. Excellent!

You sure dodged that whole uncomfortable point i made of excessive expenses in equipment, location and manpower. Excellent! ^~^

but i am not here to fight, fact is this thread asks for an opinion, i stated mine that it would do a lot more damage than good and rip apart the community, i am done here.

[Kindra]

I enjoy being able to play with different people from different places all over the world. I don't care about a little lag. The experience of being around people from all over the world is something that, for me, is a very good thing.

[Krausus]

Well first they said they were making the combat faster, so that knocks out one of your points. Then they also said they wanted to incorporate a good PvP system in this game, so i doubt that having latency unbalance between different regions would help this matter. Then when competitive content appears, the speed of which actions are taken out does actually affect one's gameplay. No, I would have to say latency is important considering the path this game is taking. I mean, we've already seen the outcome of it in Ifrit Extreme. While it is still definitely possible to be beaten, you can't deny the fact that the regional latency difference makes it easier on others.

I don't understand why people are so against it. Some servers are located elsewhere, some are located in Japan. Why do they all have to be in Japan? If you ask me that's just selfish. Even if most people don't go to a global server, doesn't that mean that keeping them all global was a bad idea from the start?



While this is definitely true, this no where near means that it has no potent affect toward's one gameplay. Ifrit was obviously taken into consideration towards the poorly built foundation of the game, yet we've seen the difference that regions has placed on it. A simple separation from the east coast and the west coast makes almost no noticeable difference to an MMO player. However have you ever seen the difference between an east coast player playing a west coast server, and an east coast player playing in an oceanic server? I have when I played two different servers in Dragonica. The simple fact that the server located so much farther away made it so that some of the "rapid" skills in the game were not able to be used because of the delay experienced.

I'm not saying that close to nil latency is required, but I am saying that it is easier to work on something when there isn't as much latency unbalance. We've already seen how happy people were when XI moved some of their servers over to NA.

They would have to greatly greatly increase the speed of combat to make the general latency (and I'm speaking latency only not the current cluster fuck we deal with) an issue. I dont see it happening in fact as long as the game continues to support auto attack I never see it happening.