Quote Originally Posted by Zojha View Post
Are you implying people left en masse over the engine? Because I can hardly imagine that.
"The engine" being a representative example. The entire back end made the game almost unplayable on the front end.

Tanaka wanted to make XIV hack-proof, so he had the idea to do EVERYTHING server side. Every. Thing. There was a one second delay for every action you took on your UI, and what the game did in response. Auto-attack was not a thing; your character did not make any attacks at all unless you performed the hotbar actions. Crafting was okay, but gathering was a painful mini game that is now where it rightfully belongs in the Gold Saucer, as a MINI GAME.

I played during 1.23b when Yoshi P had taken the train wreck of 1.x and transformed it into a decent game, but it was still crippled by its own poor back end infrastructure, a bad UI design, badly optimized graphics. It was actually a fun game, but the massive nasty UI lag persisted up until Bahamut blew everything up.

I'd say 75% of the rewrite work on XIV 2.0 happened on the server end, not the front end, since many art assets were ultimately recycled. Now instead of asking the server for every request you put into the UI, it only does the important ones (e.g. crafting RNG, damage calculations, etc) and lets the server and client do pull notifications every 15 seconds for other less important updates (syncing your inventory) and lets the client handle actual menu generation. (Yes, 1.0 pulled all menu requests from the server. Bleagh!)