A new difficulty level: after Extreme... it is Unreal!

[LalaRu]

There were also pretty significant ping issues if I recall. That, plus certain jobs were downright terrible back then. Dragoon, in particular, was a mess.

You've pretty nailed the issue.

At the time, the only datacenters were NA and JP. As playing from EU, the little bit of added ping was enough to me to eat each and every landslide. As soon as the EU datacenter was created, and I moved there, did cleared the fight at first try.