Bad ping/latency/lag problems

[gifthorse]

There was a huge discussion about latency on the ffxivcore.com forums in alpha too. Many people insisted that latency would be detrimental to all players who aren't in Japan. Nobody seemed to take the issue very seriously though, and in the end decided that it was a sacrifice they were willing to make to keep the multicultural aspect of the game alive.

But, with the improvements they are adding to the combat system, I can see latency being a huge hurdle to these improvements. You cannot implement positioning or action-based combat without first accommodating it with appropriate networking, and at the present time FFXIV totally fails at that.

Have you ever asked a Japanese person to repair your gear? It takes them zero seconds to get on their knees and repair the item. Whenever I try to repair something, however, it takes me at least two seconds longer altogether.

Three seconds sounds quite extravagant, and I didn't know it could be that bad for europeans, so i really do agree that they should consider separating servers into regions. When you consider that many japanese players disliked the idea of multicultural servers when NA FFXI went live, and still to this day, resist playing with NA players, it seems like there is little reason to maintain the global servers other than for the convenience of having them right there at the developers disposal.

I think outsourcing servers in different regions isn't a difficult thing to do in this day and age, and SE would have little trouble doing that. So, compared to the other issues the game faces, this would be a minor adjustment from my point of view... and a necessary one.