Quote Originally Posted by Driavna View Post
True action combat requires extreme low ping to really work, check this videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDtc3QqQeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwaz_aAih-A

Players with "high" ping will underperform so badly that people will request for "low" ping to do certain content.
Although less frequent due to the long animation times (i.e. internal cooldowns or animation-lock), we still experience the exact same thing in XIV. Just as the difference in B&S, BDO, and Tera quickly tapers off around sub-100 ping, any ping above ~80 at a 2.4 GCD on a double-weave class will typically cost uptime due to clipping the GCD. This can significantly affect the performance of min-maxed rotations on classes like Ninjas, Bards, and Dragoons.

It's not a difference of "true" or pseudo action games so much as the ability to queue and trigger a release of sequential skills at a certain portion of the first's remaining internal cooldown enough to recover for a given amount of latency. If a skill requires a 1.4 second ICD but already accepts and locks in the next queue at .7 seconds, the game would theoretically have .7 seconds to make the skills seamless in their transition. Of course, that's assuming it's not bottlenecked by some sort of check for the last skill's completion; if it is thus choked, then that choke would have to precede the ICD's completion by at least the player's ping in order to appear seamless or otherwise maintain the nominal uptime.

Changes to NIN enhanced the apparent reactivity, smoothness, and (for higher ping players) speed of Ninjutsu by allowing for those completion checks for each mudra on the client side, so that, as far as I can tell, the only thing actually being sent to the server is the final Ninjutsu. This effectively removed any additional uptime/clipping difference from ping for all but the last oGCD in a (multi-)mudra-ninjutsu series of actions, and reduced vulnerability to latency spikes and packet loss. Again, that as merely as far as I have heard or can guess from the information passed down and from NIN mains who've been testing with this. There might well be some other sort of check to ensure people aren't able to create exploits wherein the mudra ICDs are reduced. I haven't heard of any NINs finding such an exploit yet, and given the PVP scene this might point more at it being impossible than at the honor of our community.

The same might be done for all other oGCDs eventually, but I suspect there's an issue. The durations of mudras are irrelevant; they're supposed to be replaced as rapidly as possible. But even .5 seconds of duration, giving or taking an ICD, can allow a player to shave some otherwise inferior skill speed while still achieving, say, a double-EA opener on Bard. If the server really is receiving the GCD's worth of information together, that may have some effect on the relative duration of the first of a pair of double-weaved oGCD buffs, unless tracked appropriately by a client-side clock, which may then open the game up further to exploits...