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

[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.