Thread: .3 Second Positional Update Delay (Requesting Dev Response)

Originally Posted by Xystic

The way SE runs this game is different from WoW or SWTOR. A recent thread had addressed it to the community. Also FF14 did not have a huge budget to go in with. Your comparing games with pretty huge budgets. Poor servers is probably due to lack of $$$ and thats pretty obvious when they had to shut down sales because of server overload. I was going to ask a question earlier this morning if we had upped our subs, could we increase the server check to 0.1s if we could get the money to get the server power to do it. Thing is, would the community be willing to up the amount their willing to pay for better game quality.

This argument falls flat when no other MMORPG has this issue, and some are crappy free-to-play with much less budget and manpower than SE threw at ARR overall, not counting the fact that most graphical assets were already made for 1.0 (it’s a reboot of existing content, not a remake of everything, like you’d restore old film for a blu-ray release, not like shooting an entirely new movie so to speak).

So, considering that SE is one of the major studios in the world (see: Tomb Raider), poor budget just isn’t an excuse for such a low quality netcode / network experience on the user end.

Originally Posted by Astarica

It's probably computational intractable for the server to do a significant part of the work, especially given it has to work harder than the client as the server operates with inaccurate information so it has to think harder to compensate for this shortcoming. This is why virtually every MMORPG has client doing most of the work. There's nothing inherently wrong or cheap about requesting an update from your client every 0.3s. I remember way back in vanilla WoW, there was the positive/negative polarity effects in Naxxmas the server used to check the status frequently and it simply overloaded the server, so they had to reduce the frequency the polarity buffs are checked because otherwise the server can't even handle all the information on time. Keep in mind despite MMORPG's seeming complexity, at its core the server is just rolling a bunch of RNGs against a formula plus some scripts, so the servers aren't exactly this mega powerful machine everyone assumes it is.

Exactly.

However, given that it’s quite fast, real-time sensitive, one should know that MMORPG’s servers are still quite costly compared to equally powerful standard-servers (they’re very much custom-made) and must be ordered usually 2 months in advance. Which is why I don’t really know how they could boost their datacenter so fast after release, because a September upgrade would have been ordered around July… makes me wonder what kind of hardware they use (or maybe they did anticipate the rush much more than they cared to admit.)

But granted, it’s not so much about raw power than excessively good optimisation, customised servers and OS (I know a few MMO’s than run on MS SQL Server for instance, that's not really special in itself). Basically, an MMO datacenter is just a very time-sensitive database, with lots of scripts, nothing more, nothing less. That is, until cloud computing changes all that, in a near future! : )

As for Yoshi’s claim that all MMO’s have this .3s check, I could agree. It’s not so much the check itself than how the mechanic is implemented in-game, and which interpolation is used client-side to account for discrepancies.

For instance, in most MMO’s, you don’t avoid the exact moment when the spell is launched, there’s just this « fire effect » (breath, floor area…) and it ticks (DoT) to force you to move out. It’s not OHKO (One-Hit Knock-Out) as it often is in ARR. Also, in most MMO’s, even if there’s this .3s (let’s assume, for the sake of discussion), the client is still able to override a wrong server assumption by sending an interpolated check:

« no, I’m telling you server, the player was out, so I didn’t apply the damage. »

Can’t do that in server live-state with internet latency and everything. Anyhow the client just isn’t empowered to do it.

Right now my concern though is that they've talked about Primordial fights and PvP. Great for that, if it works (will it work 100%? I surely hope so, for the sake of their game). However, how about Coil? CT? I know Coil just wasn't fun for me because of that (ADS laser etc.) I hated this instance, because it made me feel unjustly punished, not heroic at all. So, when would a Coil / CT fix come, if ever? That's quite concerning.