Serious Performance Issues (latency/server response time)

[Synovius]

While I'm a web developer and not a networking expert, I do understand everything you're discussing (although you no doubt know a great deal more about it than I do or ever will).

What you're saying, however, is still not adding up to the fact that literally everyone I have ever played this game with and everyone I currently play this game with, complains about the same thing: the lack of responsiveness from the game servers evidenced by raid environments where every player has to be exceedingly deliberate with every action and plan to play "around" the latency issue. In many respects, the strategies we implement in a raid environment are based around latency. Taking AS3 for example, it should be enough to say that, when the off-tank gets the damage up debuff from Digititis, he and a healer should simply run into each other and thus transfer the debuff. What we've had to do, however, is mark a designated spot and both of them, literally, run to that spot and stand within each other's hitbox for a solid 1-2s until the debuff finally transfers from the off-tank to the healer. Even if this was strictly a latency issue from the two players' PCs to the data center, it still would not account for the majority of this poor responsiveness.

Again, I repeat, I have raided in WoW at 200, 300, even 400ms before. The latency to the game server is listed right in the base UI for you. Even at such terrible latency, the responsiveness and crispness of the gameplay therein was a substantial improvement over what I see on a day to day basis in FFXIV.

If there is something specific and actionable you think I should try, I'm all for it but I have a feeling that, were it this simple, there wouldn't be such a vast collection of players suffering from the exact same issue and it wouldn't be so consistent as to be a 100% certainty every time we all log into the game.