Why the netcode issue exists, and why it cannot be fixed.

[Garnatian]

and how exactly is that going to fix anything? did you even read the OP? the DISTANCE is not what is causing the latency. your connection will STILL be 'bad' even if the server is in your country. if the problem was the lines underneath the atlantic ocean then that would mean the following:

a) people from NA would not have any issues
b) everyone from EU would have the issues

neither is the case.

That is simply incorrect.

Latency is directly proportional to distance. European servers would vastly improve the situation for Europeans.

[amnie]

That is simply incorrect.

Latency is directly proportional to distance. European servers would vastly improve the situation for Europeans.

latency can have different issues. distance is one of them, yes. however, the ping to Montreal for me are better than they are to the european (!) servers for SW:TOR for example. I play on a US server (ping ~180 to 200 usually), and I never ever have any issues with dodging (and timewise it's often a lot shorter in that game). I play tsw on a server located in NA, too. lots of aoe to dodge, no problems except 'derp'.
I play PS2 relatively competative on a US server. I know my legitimate server distance lag.

ARR?
not a chance. a ping of 120-140 does NOT cause this latency. people with a ping of 20 (!!!) have the same issues that I have.

european servers would not 'vastly' improve the issues, but be a waste of money SE should spend on actually changing the system. they need any penny/cent for it.

[Garnatian]

latency can have different issues. distance is one of them, yes. however, the ping to Montreal for me are better than they are to the european (!) servers for SW:TOR for example. I play on a US server (ping ~180 to 200 usually), and I never ever have any issues with dodging (and timewise it's often a lot shorter in that game). I play tsw on a server located in NA, too. lots of aoe to dodge, no problems except 'derp'.
I play PS2 relatively competative on a US server. I know my legitimate server distance lag.

ARR?
not a chance. a ping of 120-140 does NOT cause this latency. people with a ping of 20 (!!!) have the same issues that I have.

european servers would not 'vastly' improve the issues, but be a waste of money SE should spend on actually changing the system. they need any penny/cent for it.

Where are these people with 20ms ping complaining about the issues?

As for your comparisons to SWTOR, I call bull.

[Sybreed]

Bump, this thread DESERVES more exposure.

[Babydoll]

How did they fix this issue immensely from beta where the server check was even worse so quickly? Legit question lol not being sarcastic.

I remember it was way worse in the beta and yoshida acknowledged it pretty quickly and "fixed" it for beta 4/release.

Either way its quite clear if they want to keep customers they need to fix this. if there is a yes option then they need to do it.

[Djeserit]

How did they fix this issue immensely from beta where the server check was even worse so quickly? Legit question lol not being sarcastic.

I remember it was way worse in the beta and yoshida acknowledged it pretty quickly and "fixed" it for beta 4/release.

Either way its quite clear if they want to keep customers they need to fix this. if there is a yes option then they need to do it.

Decrease time between location checks, and reduce the size of "you" from a circle roughly your size to a miniscule dot in the very center of your character.

[Babydoll]

Decrease time between location checks, and reduce the size of "you" from a circle roughly your size to a miniscule dot in the very center of your character.

Yeah so he should do that to get rid of it entirely >.< It really saddens me that they are ignoring this for so long On my server, Mor Dhona is getting less and less populated...

[ArcyEvil]

Without "proper vpn help" that game is unplayable for me. The question is why the hell I must pay for this game and for vpn to play normaly ?
Fix it devs, silence doesnt solve that problem and u know that Yoshi-P.

[Astarica]

Having most (if not all) important decision done on server-side is a flawed model. There is NO possible way to fix it fundamentally. By definition the server can never have the most up-to-date information regarding a player's status, so some of the time it has to be wrong. For the server to always have the correct information you'd need the ability to teleport data. The only workable band-aid is to increase the time it takes certain abilities to fire to compensate. This is why virtually every MMORPG has the client making most of the important decisions, not the server. The server doesn't try to 'predict' or 'compensate' information it doesn't have in other MMORPGs. All it does is let the client answer these questions. This makes the game slightly more vulnerable for hacking, but as can be observed by empirical evidence, there's no reason to believe FF14 is hacked less than any other MMORPG, so it's obviously not that big of a deal either.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

I think we should keep in mind that:

• The nub of the issue is the server live-state model SE chose for this game (see: OP), and that this model only performs well in a low-latency scenario, and is unplayable (game-breaking) otherwise.
• Latency from most countries is simply too high, or packet loss is too important to get a good result (apparently more from/to the Canadian DataCenter here, compared to the JP DC). Consider that people living in Montreal still have issues dodging AoE's and can cast while running —with a ping of 20!
• Placing more datacenters (EU, South Am., South-East Asia…) would make the issue less apparent but no less real for a number of players.

Also choosing TCP over UDP is a bad choice for games since TCP is used for non-time critical applications, whereas UDP is used for games and applications that require fast transmission of data (its stateless nature is useful for servers that receive large amount of small queries, which is exactly what MMORPG's are).

Therefore the only definitive solution would be to change the netcode architecture from server live-state to client live-state, and probably move to UDP, as 99% other MMO's (and fast-paced online games in general) do out there. The quality and reliability of internet connections in most countries is simply not up to the task of sustaining a server live-state model in 2013. Add to that the fact that many ISP's are confronted to global internet traffic saturation and resort to throttling bandwidth and request delay (TCP only? I'd suppose, but don't know), which further compounds the issue (which is probably why using VPN's may help some people, should their ISP be a lousy, but doesn't entirely solve the issue).