How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Adrestia]

It's not wireless, but there actually is the technology that allows much lower PING all around the globe. And it's also the same technology that have significant bandwidth potential, so much that used enough it would make even DDoS attacks irrelevant. It's called fiber optics. You're not going to get anything faster than light, after all.

Fiber is a beautiful thing and I’m very happy to have an ONT mounted to my basement wall. However, it doesn’t have much to do with these particular things.

1) When thinking of ping, you have a few factors, and the factor impacted by distance and line speed is called propagation delay. A toll freeway analogy used in one of my networking classes explains it very well.

Imagine each packet of data you want to send is a car on a toll freeway. When that car gets to the toll booth (router) at the start of the freeway, if it’s a busy time, the car sits there for 5 minutes (in memory on the router) essentially not making any progress. Once the car gets through the toll booth, it accelerates to 100 kilometers per hour and then travels a 100km distance (from your house to the game server; ignoring additional “toll booths”/routers which make the argument even stronger) to the desired exit (game server), where it sits in line to pay its toll for another 5 minutes.

Total travel time: 70 minutes
Time spent at toll booths: 10 minutes
Time spent driving: 60 minutes
Distance/speed effect on ping: 60/70=85%

Wow, that stings. What if they increase the speed limit to 200kph but don’t add toll booth operators?

Total travel time: 40 minutes
Time spent at toll booths: 10 minutes
Time spent driving: 30 minutes
Distance/speed effect on ping: 30/40=75%

Hey cool. Increasing the speed makes the distance less of a factor and the time at toll booths more of a factor. What if the car now moves at the speed of light in fiber, 12,251,428 kph? . . . Oh. Better hire some more toll booth operators, because even if the wait is a few milliseconds, it’s still a big chunk of round trip time.