High latency

[Lurkios]

Why exactly does Square decide to use a different metric on the UI than every single other game in existence? Just to mess with their players? I don't get that lol, leads to misunderstandings all over the place, and makes their latency problems seem even worse than they are.

What's on the UI isn't a metric of latency at all, at best it can be used to approximate how many folks are in your zone. I'm not really sure what the point is.

[RaineMagus]

Why exactly does Square decide to use a different metric on the UI than every single other game in existence? Just to mess with their players? I don't get that lol, leads to misunderstandings all over the place, and makes their latency problems seem even worse than they are.

It's similar to FFXI's network-status display, only XI's was a bit more advanced in what it'd show without mousing over the icon (animated + color coded). Basically this has always been SE's style for their game-series, and isn't based on any other's.

-Changing the description from "sending / receiving" to "sent bytes per second / received bytes per second" may help there.

(It's feasible that people could also assume it's send / receive "data-packages per second" [rather than bytes] as it's currently displayed)

What's on the UI isn't a metric of latency at all, at best it can be used to approximate how many folks are in your zone. I'm not really sure what the point is.

It's to determine if your connection to the server has been lost or if you're in a window of packet-loss, rather than typing "test .. test ... am I lagging?" in local chat to your party, LS, FC, etc. You can instead mouse over the network-icon and inspect your receive rate.

-That all said, you're right in that it's not terribly useful and probably should be improved to at least the level of detail that FFXI's revealed.

(if not more, such as adding a plot -- MRTG-style)