Latency issue in this game...

[Whimsicalalien]

is terrible. I have brought the issue of latency before and people said that it's not SEs fault but mine for having bad connection( even though when I play WoW on the US server I have no problems at all) and advised me to use WTFast to improve it. WTFast gives me 25%-30% improvement yet I still get hit by Titan's ability when I run out, same goes for other instance bosses abilities. When I'm fighting mobs out in the open when doing quests I've noticed that I can dodge red stuff somewhat better. What is it that SE is doing wrong compared to WoW that so many people experience problems with the latency in this game?

[Vantwan]

I used to have the same problem until I zoomed out my camera.

Thanks, Square Enix!

[Whimsicalalien]

I used to have the same problem until I zoomed out my camera.

Thanks, Square Enix!

Yeah.. I wish that worked for me as well.

[Lii]

If things like WTFast and battleping help than the latency problems isn't caused SE servers but caused by one of the hops your connection takes to get to the SE servers.

[Kirosuu]

If things like WTFast and battleping help than the latency problems isn't caused SE servers but caused by one of the hops your connection takes to get to the SE servers.

this and people keep ignore this

[Sunarie]

FFXIV uses a different netcode structure than other MMOs. Basically what happens in other MMOs is your client can see whether you were in an AOE or not and tell immediately when you took damage. SE went with the server being in charge. So what you end up with is:

Boss starts AOE on server end
You see AOE on client end and start to move
AOE cast ends server side and damage is sent out

Now, whether the whole "you moved" part gets back to the server before the server ends the AOE and calculates damage depends on latency and packetloss. In one of the interviews that Yoshi did recently (available on Reinhart's translation thread), it was implied that playing with a "3 digit ping" wasn't good. This would mean you need to be under 100 ms to not see any sort of delay, with very little packet loss.

Most people in the US/EU aren't going to have that steadily, and if you get into the higher range for latency it's going to start being difficult, if not impossible for you to dodge. Changing their netcode would involve lots of time and money, and unless they lose a bunch of subs to that issue, I don't see it happening. Instead they like to blame player's networks it seems (again, implied from most recent interview). Part of that probably has to do with Japan having a much different (better) internet infrastructure as a country. I imagine that anyone getting over 100ms ping there is a rarity, here it's common.

All of that being said, with the 2.1 patch they did try and help it along by increasing the positional update interval to .1 seconds. I don't believe it's possible to get it any faster than that realistically. If you're still unable to dodge, then endgame may not be for you in FFXIV :/ Yoshi said in the interview that people who want to do the endgame stuff and hard content need to have excellent setups, which in this case also means internet connection and hops.

[Ri_ri]

Yoshi said in the interview that people who want to do the endgame stuff and hard content need to have excellent setups, which in this case also means internet connection and hops.

Can I have a link?
My face is turning red after being palmed so much over reading this.

What it boils down to is that unlike most AAA mmos they don't provide multiple data centers so many people have quite a long distance between their computer and the servers. This gives many heavy latency.

I'll go ahead and say that it boils down to their over reliance on "dodge it or die" mechanics. In WoW most AoE is a debuff, you take a lot of damage (not at once) but you won't die. In other words, get out of the fire.
Here, you don't have a chance of getting out of the fire... once it appears, you're dead. Doesn't matter if you're near the edge or didn't even bother moving... you'll take the full damage, at once, and probably die. So if your character lagged one "yalm" into the circle... tough luck, dead.

If it didn't came down to "dodge it or die" mechanics, I think most people wouldn't even notice how bad the coding is in this game. I heard FFXI was a lag fest like this one (being in japan and so), but being a slower paced game, it didn't matter.

Edit: thanks Sunarie!
Why is he designing a RPG instead of an action game or danmaku? lol

[Sunarie]

Can I have a link?
My face is turning red after being palmed so much over reading this.

The latest interview with Game Watch that Reinheart kindly translated. It's a long one. Important bits regarding the latency are in the second half of the interview. Basically this bit:

GW: I forgot how long ago but when I started playing FFXIV I checked the Ping to Square-Enixs server. (Laugh) reason why was because I had experience of being pushed off the edge with land slide from Titan Hard Mode, I was thinking to myself “I dodged that for sure, why!” and that’s when I checked, at that time I was using the smart phones tethering to play. So when I checked it was slow. Went back home and checked again and the Ping was in the one digit and was easy to dodge. The previous FFXIV’s server lag was really horrible, but for FFXIV ARR for the lags it’s most likely a problem with the local side environment. However, there are many out there that claim it’s the game sides issue and it’s hard.

Yoshida: I can’t talk about that from my end so please do so from GAME Watch’s side (laugh).

GW: It’s really simple matter, if you can just release ping check tool to game server it will resolve this issue.

Yoshida: It’s not so easy to add that officiallly when there are several ISP’s involved.

GW: But, since we all know the IP it’s possible to add it in the benchmark program to show when players check the PC performance so they can understand the issue. I really think the current situation is unfair. People still mentioning it even after FFXIV ARRs launch must mean that there are that much people that is misunderstanding.

Yoshida: What I can official say from my end is that if you’re really going to fully go into the contents please have the best environment. But this is really hard, there are those that will say “You are the one creating the Online Game, you prepare that type of environment”, or look over it and make adjustments so you can dodge those.

GW: That’s impossible.

Yoshida: It is, if we do that we can’t make difficult contents.

GW: If you’re able to dodge with 3 digit Ping then it’s not fun as a game

Yoshida: We would need to extend the time players have to dodge. But doing that will make the content super easy, so it’s impossible.

[Billie21]

[...]

Thank you for sharing this, I hadn't seen it. I guess that answers the question of wether or not it will be adressed. They are unable to make a challenging fight that will work for people with decent equipment, so I guess the matter of renewing my sub or not got solved.
I wish I could say I was very disappointed, but although I had hope, I didn't have enough to be crushed by such a news. Just enough to wait and see.

[Maplekoya]

Thank you for sharing this, I hadn't seen it. I guess that answers the question of wether or not it will be adressed. They are unable to make a challenging fight that will work for people with decent equipment, so I guess the matter of renewing my sub or not got solved.
I wish I could say I was very disappointed, but although I had hope, I didn't have enough to be crushed by such a news. Just enough to wait and see.

What they should have done was probably to have east and west servers for NA and EU specific servers while the rest of the world continues to use tunnels as it is the norm for them. This way such threads won't keep popping up.

is terrible. I have brought the issue of latency before and people said that it's not SEs fault but mine for having bad connection( even though when I play WoW on the US server I have no problems at all) and advised me to use WTFast to improve it. WTFast gives me 25%-30% improvement yet I still get hit by Titan's ability when I run out, same goes for other instance bosses abilities. When I'm fighting mobs out in the open when doing quests I've noticed that I can dodge red stuff somewhat better. What is it that SE is doing wrong compared to WoW that so many people experience problems with the latency in this game?

Nothing wrong, I had 400+ms in WoW and was forced to use a tunnel to reduce the ping by about 30%.