Letter from the Producer LIVE Part X: Will the netcode issue be honestly addressed?

[Sybreed]

Bump for great justice.

[Kikosho]

I hope at the very least they sync the damage and animations. The game already tracks if I dodged or not, let me know at that exact moment not 1-2 secs after the game has checked if I properly dodged. This will at least make the game's combat flow better.

[Astarica]

I hope at the very least they sync the damage and animations. The game already tracks if I dodged or not, let me know at that exact moment not 1-2 secs after the game has checked if I properly dodged. This will at least make the game's combat flow better.

The client in fact does NOT know whether you dodged the AE or not, because it does not have the power to determine that, despite having all the information available. Seems ridiculous that the guy at the source (client) doesn't know what happened, but that's how this game works.

[SynMaris]

Doubt it, he will probably answer the 1 million housing questions that keep getting asked over and over again, even if they are repeats.

[Astarica]

Doubt it, he will probably answer the 1 million housing questions that keep getting asked over and over again, even if they are repeats.

I bet if someone asks if there are plan to make Lalafells serve as emergency meals, it'll get answered. I mean, the FATEs strongly suggest this is a good idea.

[Kikosho]

The client in fact does NOT know whether you dodged the AE or not, because it does not have the power to determine that, despite having all the information available. Seems ridiculous that the guy at the source (client) doesn't know what happened, but that's how this game works.

The client may not, but the server does which is part of the game. They need to sync this much better because the current implementation is very amateur. Yoshi-P even mentioned during a post in the beta forums that one of the reasons for animations not syncing properly were due to all the checks they had running in the background for beta testing. It's no longer beta testing and yet this issue still persists.

[Astarica]

The client may not, but the server does which is part of the game. They need to sync this much better because the current implementation is very amateur. Yoshi-P even mentioned during a post in the beta forums that one of the reasons for animations not syncing properly were due to all the checks they had running in the background for beta testing. It's no longer beta testing and yet this issue still persists.

Unless teleportation of data has been discovered, there's no way to sync this information in an acceptable time frame. If other games actually did this, then you're basically saying every game ought to exhibit the exact problem as FF14 at a lower %. Even 10% of the frequency of FF14's problems would be completely unacceptable in any other MMORPG, especially in a PvP environment. There would be riots in the streets if abilities such as Divine Shield failed even 1% of the time compared to how often similar CDs fail in FF14, mainly because PvP creates hundreds of situations you absolutely need those ability to work to not die.

[Kikosho]

Huh? Plenty of other MMOs, FPS, and fighting games sync damage seamlessly so I have no idea what you're on about. In Tera, I can dodge a circle AoE at the very last second or block at the same moment a monster swings his fist/laser/foot in my direction because it's synced properly and I know exactly when the damage will trigger. If I'm playing Street Fighter and I punch someone during a match, I see the punch almost immediately register on my screen.

Part of the main issue is how SE doesn't actually show you doing damage or receiving damage until the very end of the animation. Let's take Titan's Landslide for example. As soon as his cast bar is complete, if you are in the danger area, you will take damage but due to SE's design decision to not show this damage until the end of the animation, you have to wait 1-2 secs before you personally take the damage. If they would simply sync the animation so his fist slams down at the end of the cast bar and not just start his swing down, then it'll be a step in the right direction. It's also why you can see people actually run into Titan's Landslide or bombs and not take any damage (which looks just as bad).

[Astarica]

When Titan casts WotL, if you're in every other MMORPG it is the client that decides if you get hit, and how much damage you took, and then it reports that information to the server. This makes sense because the client is next to the player and knows exactly where the player is.

In FF14, the client instead checks with the server, which by definition cannot have the most current player position. Therefore, not only is this slow, you're also working with inaccurate data (the server can never have the most up to date info). This is why there's a delay in most ability (to check with server) and that it usually appears to give you the wrong result compared to what you observe locally (because the server can never have the most current info).

Now why would you want to do this? Almost certainly because it's more possible to hack the client than the server. That said, in reality it doesn't work this way. What is the client really supposed to say? If it says "I always dodged that", it still has to report the player position, which the server can immediately see it's a lie if you didn't actually move. If you lie about your position, then you might as well just use a teleport hack (which exists) to begin with. Certainly nobody would be surprised that a teleport hack reliably lets you avoid AEs even in FF14. You can lie about the damage you took from WotL, except I think WotL's base damage is fixed (if there's a variation, it's obviously very small). You can lie about what CDs you used to survive it, except the server also knows if these CDs ought to be up. Now, if WotL did a random amount of damage from 1 to 9999, you might be worried about hacking in the sense that I can legitmately report back '1 damage' every single time and technically you can't prove I'm hacking. But that's why MMORPG by design doesn't usually have significant variation on damaging abilities.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

The problem is actually that what you see on your screen is in the past, because the 'live-state' of the game runs server-side; unlike the vast majority of games which run the 'live-state' on the client side.

What Astarica essentially says is that, unless latency is equal to 0ms (which it can never be, so he calls that "teleportation", because he must be a Star Trek fan like me ^^; ), in a server live-state model such as ARR's, everything you see on your screen is a "lie", so to speak, since:

• events have already happened on the server side (the 'live-state' happens there, and it takes some time to reach your client before you can see it on your screen);
• likewise everything you do takes some time to reach the server (so if you dodged just in time but it takes time to be acknowledged by the server, and at the same time it takes time for you to see the cast bar ending whereas in reality it already has… yeah you eat that Landslide way too often.)

So in the server live-state model, latency basically works against you, and in both directions (server <—> client).
Edit: Astarica worded it pretty well just above while I was writing this

It's well explained, much better than I could, in this post.

You must add to that, in ARR, the .3s position-check (fixed interval between 2 checks by the server) which is quite long by all MMO and human standards (300ms is more than a gamer's average response time), so on top of your latency you may have to factor in these 300ms to figure out how much 'in the past' your screen actually is, and how long it takes for the server to register your actual position. Say you have 200ms ping: worst case scenario, you get the display .5s too late, and then the server knows you've moved .5s later, so yeah that's a whole second behind the 'live-state' of the game. Way too much not to get hit (best case scenario with that ping is still above 400ms).