Serious Performance Issues (latency/server response time)

[Raist]

Been at this for nearly 20 years now...back to the days of dial-up and the introduction of residential broadband to our area that only offered 128k to 2mbit bandwidth plans that costed a premium of up to $70 a month---and that was bundled or yearly contract pricing. Online space flight sim, FPS, RTS, MMORPG, video conferencing/VOIP, regular streaming A/V....been there and done it all. Hosted content off old x86 platforms that would be a toaster compared to today's standards (were a lot of games where you hosted missions and maps locally on your machine--the game server was just for matchmaking).

We have always had to wrangle with latency across the internet. Still the same now as it was then...often the great equalizer (or punisher depending on how good/bad yours is). Content can be served on the best and most expertly optimized hardware at the endpoint...and a flaky router in Cleveland can kill a group of users' service in a heartbeat.

The servers and this game are plenty responsive enough. We have frequently found that unreliable sessions across the internet cause a major chunk of the issues. This has been repeatedly affirmed on these forums...in general, people with good transit have a good gaming experience. Granted there have been issues on SE's side in specific cases, but in the general scope of things those are the exceptions. The general consensus is bad session means bad game play.

[Synovius]

That still doesn't address the idea that WoW's gameplay is extremely crisp and responsive even when going across a continent while FFXIV's responsiveness is very, very poor. Just a few examples from my latest DF run in Fractal Continuum:

- On the jump pads in the last room, without sprint popped, I am able to run completely over the glowing arrow by 3-4 steps before I actually get launched to the next platform.
- I had a Firestarter proc that I saved until there was a full 1s left on the buff. When I went to use it, it "consumed" the Firestarter proc and the Fire III animation went off but no damage was done and I did not receive my 3 AF stacks for it.
- Twice during the second boss (the minotaur), I was able to complete a Fire IV cast while only a bit beyond halfway through it despite the cast of "Deafening Groan" going off which knocks everyone back and should have interrupted casting.

The above are things I went ahead and allowed to happen for the purposes of demonstration and ALL are things I have to personally plan ahead for when playing this game but NEVER would have to plan ahead for while playing WoW. In raids, I know that I need to use Firestarter with 2s or more left on it or I won't get credit for it. I know that, if there's any kind of reactive AoE or "collision" that needs to take place, I should run to the correct spot and stand there for a solid 1-2s to ensure the server registers that I was there. In raids, I use the poor performance to my advantage to complete casts that realistically should have been interrupted or not gone off due to a phase transition.

What's more is that I'm not the only one doing this. Our entire raid does this every raid night. Do you know how many times we wiped to AS3 simply because the server didn't pick up that our off-tank and healer were standing on top of each other for a full second yet the damage-increased debuff didn't trade from the off-tank to the healer? We went as far as having a waymark as a designated spot and I watched for pull after pull after pull where the appropriate healer and off-tank would run to the A marker and literally stand on top of each other for a full second or two only to sometimes see the buff not be transfered and thus cause an immediate wipe.

This is not a client-side issue that I or anyone individually can resolve. At worst, this is a server-side issue that Square Enix needs to address or, at best, this is an ISP issue that Square Enix needs to address directly with the ISPs.

Like you, I've been at this for over a decade. I'm 33 and have worked as a web developer since 20 years of age. I love this game but if the poor performance of the servers doesn't get addressed, the best days for this game are behind it.

FYI: I just ran a tracert just like yours and my route is even faster than yours...

Tracing route to 199.108.62.157 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  CISCO52642 [192.168.1.1]
  2    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  home.Home [192.168.200.1]
  3    17 ms    17 ms    21 ms  RO1-DSL-208-102-248-1.fuse.net [208.102.248.1]
  4    17 ms    17 ms    17 ms  172.17.74.18
  5    18 ms    17 ms    17 ms  EV-ZT-1.EVE2.core.fuse.net [216.68.14.58]
  6    17 ms    17 ms    17 ms  EVE2.EVE1.core.fuse.net [216.68.14.44]
  7    18 ms    17 ms    17 ms  te0-0-2-2.nr11.b016343-1.cvg02.atlas.cogentco.co
m [38.122.234.101]
  8    18 ms    18 ms    18 ms  te0-0-1-1.rcr11.cvg02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.24
.0.125]
  9    20 ms    20 ms    20 ms  te0-2-0-0.rcr21.ind01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54
.84.166]
 10    23 ms    24 ms    23 ms  te4-3.ccr01.sbn01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.27.
82]
 11    28 ms    27 ms    27 ms  te0-10-1-0.ccr41.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.5
4.80.149]
 12    27 ms    27 ms    27 ms  be2216.ccr41.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.24
.202]
 13    27 ms    31 ms    27 ms  att.ord03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.12.86]
 14    30 ms    27 ms    27 ms  cr1.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.133.34]
 15    33 ms    32 ms    32 ms  12.123.251.17
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20  ^C

[Raist]

Glancing back through the thread just now, noticed something I missed earlier:

Just an hour spent on ANY WoW server - even one across the United States from you (I live in EST and often played on PST servers) - yield crispness and seemingly immediate response times where moving out of an AoE a the very last split second is perfectly fine, moving into an AoE buff buffs you literally the split second you arrive in it and a Warrior's Charge ability tracks you every point of the way from your source to destination - so much so that you can be stunned mid-charge at any point and you will freeze immediately at that location.

Begs the question if you are missing the cast bar factor on these moves. The animations and ground markers are not your indicators of when the move is firing...it is not notify you of the action pending, and where it will land. Your timing needs to be aligned to the progression on the casting bars. That is the indicator of when the server is calculating things. It was the same in XI...it is how we have always pulled off stutter stepping and such.