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

[MageBlack]

Yay! Lets create more threads! Its been working so far, right?

I think they know about it by now... just FYI.

[Sunarie]

Yay! Lets create more threads! Its been working so far, right?

I think they know about it by now... just FYI.

There are still less threads about this than about adding features from FFXI, or how great FFXI was... and at least thread about this is at least slightly different. This one focuses on the Live Letter coming out, the other two focus on the problem itself (though the first was often mistaken for an endgame discussion/QQ, prompting my thread).

Honestly, the majority of people have been awesome about posting into relative threads as opposed to starting new ones... and we don't know they know it's an issue because they haven't said so. I would rather see threads about this (because it has been, and likely will be a game-breaker) than repeated threads complaining about tanks/explaining tanks, complaining about the community, boasting about FFXI, or adding fluff features.

[MageBlack]

There are still less threads about this than about adding features from FFXI, or how great FFXI was... and at least thread about this is at least slightly different. This one focuses on the Live Letter coming out, the other two focus on the problem itself (though the first was often mistaken for an endgame discussion/QQ, prompting my thread).

Honestly, the majority of people have been awesome about posting into relative threads as opposed to starting new ones... and we don't know they know it's an issue because they haven't said so. I would rather see threads about this (because it has been, and likely will be a game-breaker) than repeated threads complaining about tanks/explaining tanks, complaining about the community, boasting about FFXI, or adding fluff features.

Sorry, wasnt trying to dismiss the issue people are legitimately having. I respect that you would like a response but I see a LOT of assumptions and accusations being tossed around by all the people posting in these threads. Such as "They havent responded to our posts so they are ignoring/dont know/dont care the issue exists." "The issue is in 'X' thing"

In past experiences from this dev team over the last 2-3 years I have come to notice that they do not like to post unless they have some concrete information. They dont want to give half ass'ed responses that could be wrong. They want to give accurate assessments of the situations they are commenting on. I also know they do have people who read almost every post on the forums and report it to the appropriate teams.

Like you and others are so proud to point out, you have two well maintained threads (kudos) full of information and testimony and many, many responses and likes. I can guarantee you, they have seen it by now. I posted in one of these before that with as many different configurations of software and hardware out there for PC's as there are people playing the game, it can be a witch hunt trying to find out exactly what the problem is. I work in IT for a school district, while its a completely different ball game I have come to discover no issue is as simple as people might think it is. It could be something like an apostrophe in the wrong place in a single line of code, needle in a haystack much? Not to mention that the issue is not a universal one. Not everyone experiences the problem. If it was a global issue, it might be easier to determine.

Has a link to these threads been posted in any of the Questions for the Live Letter official posts? If so, please link cause I think that would be the best place for it and I will throw my like in the ring, as I have for the OP's of the other threads. Best of luck and I do hope the issue gets resolved, I appreciate the ones commenting about it with cool heads instead of heated accusations about how incompetent and stupid the devs are.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

Has a link to these threads been posted in any of the Questions for the Live Letter official posts? If so, please link cause I think that would be the best place for it and I will throw my like in the ring, as I have for the OP's of the other threads.

I think it's a good idea.

I have skimmed through the Thread: "Ask Questions for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part X! (General Questions)" and found 8 posts asking specifically about the responsiveness/netcode/delay/AoE dodging issue. Unsurprisingly, the earlier ones gathered more "Likes" than the later ones.

I will add links to these questions in the OP of this thread. Here they are, for reference:

➜ Post #40 (41 Likes at the time of this writing)

Are you planning to do anything to address the incredible unresponsiveness & discrepancies between what players see on their screens and what actually happens that plagues the entire game? Why is this the only MMO on the market where spells can complete casting while you're on auto-run, and where you can be out of the red zone for an AOE for almost an entire second and still get hit?

➜ Post #57 (31 Likes)

Currently, many players are getting hit bye AOE effects when they have moved out of the red zone before the spell finishes casting. Are there any plans to address this, or is it a game design choice?

➜ Post #42 (23 Likes)

With PvP and new raid content coming in 2.1, one major concern with the game currently is the client-server responsiveness regarding player positioning. It is extremely difficult at times to avoid ground based boss abilities without the use of third party programs to change the routing process to the game servers or using applications to read in game log events and provide sound effects to help players react faster.

How do you plan to approach this problem?

➜ Post #246 (20 Likes)

There have been a lot of posts in the general forums recently regarding issues with the netcode.

Players have found that combat could use some tweaking in the following areas:

Dodging AoE: http://youtu.be/hg33BjzwLWw

Unresponsiveness in the activating ability system: http://youtu.be/ripyJWGWNIo?t=11s


Many of the encounters in FFXIV require fast reaction times or a lot of prediction on the players part to succeed.
Do you have any plans to either:
1. Review the current battle system to allow players to feel more in control of their actions?
2. Review the current battle system so that players won't require such fast reaction time or constant prediction to succeed?

➜ Post #89 (13 Likes)

Are there any plans to address the horrendous positioning check delay that causes no end of players no end of frustration, particularly in a game that primarily focuses on avoiding AoE ground effects?

5 MMOs with endgame experience and I've never seen one this bad (SWTOR came close but they fixed it quickly).

➜ Post #124 (9 Likes)

i keep seeing this issue being dodged but is anything being done about the net code? people are still getting hit by things they shouldn't just like in closed beta

➜ Post #319 (7 Likes)

Is there any plan, acknowledgement, theory crafting... anything at all being done to address in game latency? I believe most players would like WYSWYG (What you see is what you get.) gameplay, and FFXIV ARR is too far off the mark.

➜ Post #186 (4 Likes)

Why do I still have times when the game becomes unresponsive and lags? I play on an NA server and live on the east coast.

I think it's not my place to say which of those should be preferred, however there's a common theme which can be synthesised in the following points:

• There seems to be a delay between what players see on their screens and what's really happening (being confirmed) server-side: WYSI NOT WYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get).
• Players sometimes get hit by AoE's whereas they see themselves out the red area before the enemy's cast completes.
• There is a general unresponsiveness in the game (delay in display, delay in taking players' inputs into account) for a number of elements, including but not limited to: position change, performing an action, cast interrupting, UI confirmation of player input. Regardless of whether the observed subject is a PC (Playing Character, human) or NPC (Non-Playing Character).

I would encourage the authors of all these questions to link to some of the most-liked ones in their post, so as to show this is the same issue being questioned, albeit with a different wording. That would probably help unify our concern, to make sure SE sees them as a whole.

For your convenience, here's a copy/paste material referencing the 5 most-liked questions.
(simply hit "reply with quote" under my post, copy the following, cancel, then paste it in your post)

※ This question is in relation to Post #40, Post #57, Post #42, Post #246, Post #89. ※

[Bixby]

For your convenience, here's a copy/paste material referencing the 5 most-liked questions.
(simply hit "reply with quote" under my post, copy the following, cancel, then paste it in your post)

Done.

I tried to keep my question(s) simple and direct, and hopefully clearly aimed toward the underlying problem instead of specific symptoms. To me, as you said, the basic problem is that WYSI NOT WYG. I understand why (there's too much reliance on the server for checks and calculations the client could perform), but at the end of the day, I don't care why. You simply can not count on what's displayed on your screen to reflect the actual state/order/outcome of events. Clear, decisive input isn't recognized until it's displayed, and even then, that same discrepancy between what you see and what is actually going to happen adds another layer of uncertainty.

It adds up to an incredibly grating, frustrating, unsatisfying experience. We're doing something every 2.5 seconds at the slowest, and every single one of those interactions could end up not behaving the way we expect at any time.