Latency issue in this game...

[Will01]

This is bad advice. We should not be altering our gameplay to make up for terrible latency/game design. I /facepalm every time I see someone say that you need to memorize the fights and start moving BEFORE the AOE goes off. We shouldn't even need the red circles on the ground. As the monster raises his hammer way up in the air and emotes IT'S HAMMER TIME you know that you need to get away before the hammer hits the ground. In this stupid version of said events he would raise his hammer up and a circle would appear on the ground. I have to move out of the circle asap THEN he starts his swing and the hammer comes down. I could have moved out of the circle and then back into the aoe area when the hammer hits and yet I take no damage. What kind of idiot came up with this nonsense? Seriously. It's some of the worst game design I've ever seen.

Clearly you dislike the game design.


I like it as it is, I like moving in advance of time and learning an encounter.

I can't see SE changing direction on this, so if it really is game breaking for you, you may need to play something else. Adapt or do something else is really all I can suggest.

Complaining about it, as people have been since release, is not changing things.

[Sunarie]

Complaining about it, as people have been since release, is not changing things.

That's actually not completely true. The complaints have gotten SE to reduce the time between position updates from .5 to .3 seconds going from beta to launch, and from .3 to .1 seconds (for end-game dungeons) in the most recent patch.

They are not likely to actually change the netcode itself though. Which is why I've started to suggest if people are still having enough trouble, they should play a different game. That doesn't mean that I think the game is fine as is. I think that if they can't make it less clunky, and don't eventually fix the netcode and/or fight design, then people will just quit out of frustration. Kinda like a portion of what happened with 1.0.

The problem isn't even having to move in advance really, the problem is that if you experience a latency spike, if their servers are bogged down, if you get packet loss, you can still get hit.. regardless of how much you learn an encounter, or how much in advance you move. You position just isn't hitting the servers before the servers decided you take damage. When you combine the frustration of being hit when you saw you were clearly out, plus the players in game yelling at you (this mainly happens in duty finder or pugs) for getting hit and calling you names.. well it really doesn't make for a good gameplay experience. I've had several friends who quit due to it, and then came out to see if it was better in 2.1 before canceling subs again.

Getting hit when you were clearly out of an AOE before the cast bar ended should never happen. Not even .1% of the time. Seeing a heal go off for more than I got hit for, but still getting killed by the hit that came right after should not happen. Those are not things that SE purposefully programmed into their game. They are side effects of a netcode that was built around the infrastructure Japan has for internet. People complaining about them have very valid complaints, and SE obviously realizes this to some extent as they have tried to bandage the problem twice now.. in addition to highlighting that as one of the things that was going to be fixed from 1.0 to 2.0, even though it wasn't.

I definitely don't think people should stop complaining. The moment they do is the moment SE figures everything is hunky dory as is, and stops attempting to do anything to address the problem, even little band-aids.

[Shadex]

The aspect that Square seems to keep sticking their fingers in their ears over is that if this is absoutely none of their fault and all the issue of player's ISP... why are those exact same players able to play countless other MMOs with dodge mechanics just fine? THAT is the answer neither Yoshi or Square has been able or wanted to address. If their net and server code is just as good as any other MMOs out there we should see similar performance. Until we can get a solid and verifiable explaination for this discrepancy the weight will continue to sit in Square's lap.

[Tiggy]

After the last server update before Christmas I haven't had any issues whatsoever. Sorry to hear so many people are having trouble, but I seriously doubt it's the server anymore. People need to diagnose their connections.

[Badger]

After the last server update before Christmas I haven't had any issues whatsoever. Sorry to hear so many people are having trouble, but I seriously doubt it's the server anymore. People need to diagnose their connections.

It's still the server. I play several other games, some MMOs, some FPSs, and I have zero connection or latency issues what-so-ever with an average ping of 43ms. This is the only game where I can dodge an ability and still get hit by it. It's shameful, frustrating, and has killed any desire for me to do extreme battles.

[Shadex]

It's still the server. I play several other games, some MMOs, some FPSs, and I have zero connection or latency issues what-so-ever with an average ping of 43ms. This is the only game where I can dodge an ability and still get hit by it. It's shameful, frustrating, and has killed any desire for me to do extreme battles.

^^ This 100%. Square can keep shaking its head and saying, "not my fault... not my fault...", but so long as all of these players can play all these other MMOs with NO issues Square cannot blame the ISP. If they keep it up eventually these players will end up playing those other MMOs because this is rediculously frustrating. I am with him. I am not touching XM Primals until this is fixed.

[Tiggy]

The aspect that Square seems to keep sticking their fingers in their ears over is that if this is absoutely none of their fault and all the issue of player's ISP... why are those exact same players able to play countless other MMOs with dodge mechanics just fine? THAT is the answer neither Yoshi or Square has been able or wanted to address. If their net and server code is just as good as any other MMOs out there we should see similar performance. Until we can get a solid and verifiable explaination for this discrepancy the weight will continue to sit in Square's lap.

Yoshi made a post about a month back that broke down the situation and did give a solid explanation.It isn't bad netcode. They choose a paradigm that performs best in low latency conditions which exist throughout most of Japan since they have a great national network. Other countries have poorer networks and have higher latency. The paradigm chosen has weaknesses in less than ideal network conditions and this is what we are seeing. That doesn't make the code itself bad and more that the paradigm chosen was a weak for for the use case. Changing the entire paradigm now will never happen. So as some users suggest this game may just not be for you if you can never get an ideal connection to the server. Also, as others point out, this is the reason the connection between you and the server tends to be where the best optimizations are happening such as using battleping since it helps you get a better connection to the server. People need to grasp the differences between bad code and a bad paradigm. No amount of making the code better will fix a misused paradigm. The reason other mmos don't have this problem is because they don't use this paradigm. It's just that simple.

[Timethiuas]

I find it very interresting that playing on a PS3 in Massachusetts, USA, my login and zone in times have increased substantially. Loggin in can take upwards of 30 seconds and zone in times can come close to that. It may not sound like much, but I was going into an instance for WP and it took quite a while to get in.
Before 2.1 they weren't that long.
Inititally they were very quick, but I was on Zalera. I transferred to Hyperion to play with a friend and it got worse. Now I wonder if I will get kicked.

[Sunarie]

Yoshi made a post about a month back that broke down the situation and did give a solid explanation.

Agree with the rest of your post, just a minor correction. Yoshi has never stated anything about the paradigm chosen. There was a very helpful forum goer that explained server live-state and client live-state, and how it's an early design choice and not likely to be changed now as it would be extremely costly and require a lot of time. I'm not sure if that's the post you are referring to or not.

If you do actually have a post from Yoshi about it, I would be interested in seeing it. I try to keep up with everything surrounding this particular issue and the only things official from Yoshi I've seen on it are the announcements that users are experiencing issues, so they're reducing the intervals between position updates (both during launch and the most recent patch), and then the comments from the interview I posted earlier in this thread that Reinheart was awesome to translate.

[Tiggy]

snip

I may be remembering his post incorrectly then. It was several weeks back and I don't remember where the link is. So I could very well be wrong about that one.