Quote Originally Posted by kikix12 View Post
I merely stated the reason for high cooldown. That's all.
The high cooldown has nothing to do with latency mitigation, and everything to do with strain on XIV's servers. Suppose that SE wants to handle 500ms latency: that's going to take no more than one second for you to get a response back from the server for an action. The server ticks (and, accordingly, the GCD) could be a lot lower than 2.5s, and still be fine for this purpose.

SE's hardware, on the other hand, would be brought to its knees, just as it was when 1.0 was originally released with much more frequent server ticks. The back-end wasn't up to the task, and the interface felt horribly laggy as a result, because servers weren't promptly sending responses. To remedy this, they'd need to either (a) upgrade hardware, or (b) improve FFXIV's architecture so as to require fewer server-side calculations. Unfortunately, they don't seem inclined to do either.

As an aside, while FFXIV operates fine as-is, there is a lot SE could do to improve efficiency of the netcode, so as to get more power out of their servers. For example, suppose you're lagging (or disconnecting) and you decide to click on an Estate door to exit into the Housing district. Notice that nothing appears? That's because SE doesn't just require server-side confirmation for transitioning to a new map (good behaviour) - they also require server-side confirmation just to display the door options. That latter is entirely unnecessary, serves no security role whatsoever, yet nonetheless places a burden on the servers. From vendor NPCs to dialogue options, there's a lot of unnecessary data being sent back and forth constantly just to make the game work. There is a chance that this was done due to PS3 limitations, but it certainly shouldn't be necessary any longer. So, they've got a lot of room for improvement, and constructive criticism along the lines of improving the feel of combat is perfectly justified.