[Data Center USA] Ping increased. Report your changes here.

[Risvertasashi]

Talking about this field is always a big pia lol, because there are soooo many reasons why you could be experiencing an issue. Definitely support the movement to tighten the ship wherever possible though, like HG you work when I touch you and don't you dare apply your debuff start to reduce damage and then kill me anyways lol.

used to be a lot worse, like this:


It's better now, but still not really 'good'.

That said, there's more than one thing at work here. The game uses a lot of snapshotting (precalculating the outcome), which is usually the gotcha with tank CDs... especially the invulnerability ones. The game already calculated the outcome (you dead), the rest is just watching the animation play out. Pretty much the same with T8 missiles and any other "you must have the correct number of people stacked" mechanic too.

And then, of course, there's plain old animation delays. The usual complaint with Benediction (it's also a factor in the above tank CD snapshotting thing). Many games consider this delay to be the cast time of an ability. FFXIV, you have actual cast times, then another delay as the effect plays out. In the case of mitigation, for it to work, the animation has to have finished and the effect applied before (usually) the tankbuster or whatever's animation has even started. Then add network and tick latency on top of all that.

[Hamada]

Now, my question is: What do you think? Is FFXIV responsiveness about right? Is it sluggish, compared to other MMOs? Do you like that there is an activation-delay between a GCD and an oGCD being available? I've seen people fall into one of three camps:
-They think XIV is a clunky MMO
-They think XIV is fine as it is
-They don't notice the sluggishness I an many other players talk about
I'm wondering how many people really think of this as a problem, and if so, how interested they would be in the game being overall more responsive.

"-They think XIV is a clunky MMO"
me.
Why I made this:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-unplayable%29

and posted this:

I was asking for upgraded servers so the processing speeds where faster so I am not releasing fail banes because it takes too long for bio appear on the target. I never asked for a relocation.

Here is why I was asking for upgraded servers and nothing of this effect was fixed, so just makes it worse the higher ping you got:

Deleting server tics (what game does this? my god and I think it effects BLM the most because of mp returns?)
Having dots appear like they should. Once I cast bio, then use bane, bane should transfer the bio, no reason for dots appear so slow. BRD also suffer from this and maybe some other jobs.
Lustrate/Benediction/hollowed ground/ Holmgang/ living dead are too slow.
All abilities are too slow and runs into clipping too much, meaning once i use an ogcd, I try cast a ocd, there is too much wait for me to wait for before I am allowed to release the ocd
Hitting abilities and failing to use.
Going with ^ hitting cleric, failing to drop, so you hit it twice right after because of that and you still have it on but on cd because it really read both taps that time.
Casting blizzard III and hearing the effect but no astral ice (rare)
Killing something when the chain timer is 2 seconds left to go then seeing "time up" We should get 10 seconds like the timer says, not 7.
Leve time bonus, same as ^ if you complete it say 15:02 you do not get the time bonus.
Lower queue tines when entering the sever
When something is dead, it is dead, do not let us keep using CDs on something dead.
When something is stunned it is stunned, do not let things still hit us 1 second after it got stunned.
Holy stun effect is slower then molasses
expanded fixes on inventory issues.

This is why I wanted new servers and so far nothing is announced in fixing these issues other then a tiny space increase, that does not fix the problem.

If the above is fixed maybe the game is completely playable 200 ms and under, but it just has too much delays right now.

Game is too slow, even if you are at 20 ms.
I also made this thread on this issue because people called it animtion lock:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...me-too-slow%29

[Takamorisan]

We need an official word from SE and see what are the cards in the table.

But it will take time for this answer, I think they are busy with some even in California right now?

[Belhi]

We need an official word from SE and see what are the cards in the table.

But it will take time for this answer, I think they are busy with some even in California right now?

While something like this might help/work (I have no idea as I know about as much about netcoding as I do about Quantum Physics ei. very little) but any such change would be something they would research, design and test over a period of time and not something they would rush into, particularly in a situation where they had just installed these servers, are probably still tweaking their operations and are in the last month of preparation for an expansion.

The game is still quite playable at higher pings even if it effects performance so its probably not highest priority immediately. That said its worth making an issue over. Still, expect little in the way of committed response for some time as they generally don't give responses until they have some formalised official company response and that will take time.

I think if their is a faster reaction it will probably be for SA players who have been more severely effected by this change.

[Averax]

The server response rate is pretty weird, when i use lightspeed as ast, i can pretty much run while casting spells that aren't made instant by it, because it takes the server too long to tell whether or not i'm moving. Also, you can be running directly at a wall (no slowly moving to the side) and cast spells without being interrupted, because the server sees you not moving, even though you are clearly treadmilling against the wall on the client.

[Risvertasashi]

i can pretty much run while casting spells that aren't made instant by it, because it takes the server too long to tell whether or not i'm moving.

This also applies to swiftcast (won't make a spell instant, but will still be consumed at the end of cast), and used to apply to the AST proc (back when it made benefic 2 instant instead of an autocrit).

Of course this all depends on your latency. My new ping is 25ms (I lucked out on the server move lottery) so I myself probably won't see it anymore. Still, it's one thing that should be fixed...

[Amiral_Benson]

FFXIV responsiveness is awful, and I always felt it could be improved a lot, to the point that high pings would not prevent us anymore to reach the best DPS potential of our job.

Smashing buttons with no response, during what seems to be an eternity, in savage raids, in order to trigger an ability, is very frustrating. It feels like you need to wait for the server permission for most of skills, and it feels dumb, pointless, irritating, and even discriminatory as to why some abilities have such a bad responsiveness and some don't, why can't they all be responsive.

I'm praying since a long time in the hope SE will modify the Netcode in such a way we get full smoothness and responsiveness when clicking buttons, pressing keys. I have some friends who tried FFXIV and couldn't bear its bad responsiveness in fights and they didn't want to give a chance to the game.

High pings shouldn't be an issue with an optimised Netcode, the problem lies within the Netcode, not the pings, as long as they stay below 250ms, anyone could be able to reach the full DPS potential of their job.
This is a serious issue, that we can feel all the time in the game.

[HanchuJi]

Good post to get straight to the heart of the issue.

It would be great if Square thinks about long term revenue by maintaining a decent game rather than short term cost cutting for a data centre which doesn't make geographical sense (even if we are only talking about NA players).

FFXIV performs well in several areas, but playerbase treatment is still lacking vs other games / developers

Then again, maybe I'm just an idealist wanting the best thing for everyone.

[Shurrikhan]

snip.

It definitely seems to queue following abilities with a lower percentage of the internal cooldown than other MMOs, such that throughput/uptime is penalized at a surprisingly low ping (~80+) compared to the game's GCD (not to mention its tickrate...). The amount of commands it drops also seem fairly high. Without WTFast, I get several per fight, whereas I have no memory of any input loss outside of massive lag spikes in WoW across many years of play, and have seen very, very few in BDO, BnS, GW2, PSO, etc.

I'm not sure which annoys me more, honestly, the polling frequency / tickrates and however that might restrict the kinds of mechanics we might eventually see (e.g. fading percentile effects), or how long we're waiting for each confirmation in order to queue consecutive abilities. Overall, it feels sluggish. Not badly so at sub-100 ms, just comparatively.

[YitharV2]

TL;DR: If more actions in the game functioned like Mudras, where the Client is trusted without requiring a response from the server, much of FFXIV's clunky action execution problems would evaporate. That's what I think, anyway.
What do you think about FFXIV's overall responsiveness, relating to Ping and in general?

Hmm, my suspicion was that this was the case. You may be interested in reading this tumblr post, which is about a certain thing that was made to counteract this problem of server validation and ping tax, but for a different MMO.

I fall into the category that FFXIV is clunky and slow. I'm used to being able to rapidly cast skills one after another and being able to animation cancel a lot of my skills, so it just feels somewhat slow to me. Like if I don't have any oGCDs to cast, I'm literally sitting there either waiting for the GCD to reach under a quarter of its duration, or I'm spamming the skill (if I don't want to look at my hotbar). From what I understand, WoW has a much shorter GCD (1-1.5s).