How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Dyvid]

because thats not a problem of server traffic, where youre receiving character data with lines like 42,45,51,91,24,05,15,15,15,25,25,25 all telling your client what to render, the problems come when you either run out of BUS speed (bottleneck) or you run out of ram allocation, or you overtax your graphics card (usually its the other 2 that run out first)

also when the devs say they cant increase something due to server stability concerns, those packets constantly hitting and leaving the server is what theyre talking about, now other than keeping track of the position of all those values at once and making sure they are consistent the server has no need to render anything at all, but any time they add more data to track its actually an exponential increase if it involves data others can see and a doubling of traffic if youre the only one that can view it

Wish more people understood like you. If I remember from my FFXI days, every avatar option has to have armor specifically mapped to it in the gaming files. So when a new race comes out, every piece of armor in the game has to be mapped to the new bodies; so when Viera comes out, every head armor needs to be mapped to the head and customized for the new design.

As for super custom avatar, I'm willing to bet most MMORPG use a trick in which the custom avatar you create is localized onto your PC and the actually model transmitted to other gamers isn't as in depth as what you are seeing. I other words, the game would have to upload your custom avatar and download that specific design file to every player you meet and vice versa. All the upload and download would really start slowing up everything and would be almost impossible for console gamers.

P.S. Korean MMORPG has a general stereotype; pretty but shallow. Meaning the focus heavily on graphics and making the game look great that they forgot it's a game and is a hallow experience. There are excepts to the rule of course.