They need to find a way to detect XIV Alexander and ban people

[Shougun]

To be fair, they're not entirely wrong, albeit they phrased it wrong.

So far as I know (without digging too deeply into the game's netcode to verify this), the client wants an acknowledgment that the packet saying "I weaved this ability" got there before it lets you weave another ability. So if you have a 100ms ping time to the server, you can weave an ability and the client sends that to the server and it takes 100ms to get there, and the server goes "Okay, ability received" and it takes 100ms for that to get back, and the server goes "Cool, excellent, now you can weave another ability." So you'd have 200ms after one weave until you could get your double-weave in.

If you have a 500ms ping time, however, now you have to wait an entire second after one weave before the game will accept the second, which means people with a terrible ping are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to jobs that have a weave-heavy playstyle.

My understanding is that -- and I'm vastly oversimplifying here -- XIVAlexander doesn't actually reduce your ping time, it just tells the client "Yeah the packet got there" so that the client goes "Cool, you can weave your next ability now." Meaning someone with a 500ms ping could have XIVAlexander go "Tell the game the packet got there after 200ms" and instead of having to wait an entire second to weave, they can now do so after 200ms, just like the person who has the non-terrible connection. Meaning that now they can double-weave effectively, putting them on an equal footing. But so far as I can see from skimming the code for this thing, you could hypothetically tell it to reduce your perceived ping time to 0, meaning the instant the packet was sent it's treated as received and you can weave another ability.

However, when you move past a reasonable number of abilities sent in a given amount of time, one assumes the server goes "yeaaaah that's not right, we're gonna flag this" and you might (quite rightly) get banned.

So, like, someone in Argentina using XIVAlexander to reduce their perceived round-trip time to something akin to mine, to account for a terrible ping preventing weaving? I'm not gonna really begrudge them leveling the playing field. Someone using XIVAlexander to lower their perceived round-trip time to something where they can consistently triple-weave, that I feel is way less cool and deserves a ban.

Hence my "I have mixed feelings on that tool" position.

Yeah the tool doesn't actually do anything to your 'actual' ping (doesn't magically make your internet better), which I agree is messing with the whole conversation lol.

What is changing if I can read right is a hard coded 500 ms delay that everyone has. When you have a bad ping on top of this, then it obviously puts you at a disadvantage than one who has good ping. So you can count 500ms as the 0 starting point in a situation without this tool and therefore ping is the ping.

Now though you introduce the ability to change that though and 0 is no longer simply 0. Of course laws of physics still apply :P, and it's still not magically making your internet better (but it does do stuff).

The developer says themselves:

Reduces the negative effects from playing with high latency (ping).

When you use an action, the client will apply 500ms animation lock, which will prevent you from using next action for a short amount of time. When the server processes the request, it will give your game client instructions about the supposed duration of animation lock (usually 600ms). Ideally, you should be able to use next action 600ms after the previous action, but the game client will let you use next action 600ms after server response, meaning that you're waiting for time taken for server response + animation lock time. Ideally, XivAlexander would simply get rid of time taken for server response part, but the server will rarely respond immediately even on sub-1ms ping, so you are given choices on how to make time taken for server response exclude your ping.

WARNING: Because of how it works, this addon is only a step away from flat out cheating. Changing temporal constants in code below the limit means you're effectively claiming that your latency is below zero, which is just impossible. Do NOT modify temporal constants in code, or you ARE cheating. You have been warned.

Example
[0.0s] Action A Request
[0.5s] Action B Request
[0.6s] Action A Response (1.0s lock)
[1.1s] Action B Response (1.0s lock)
By default, the client will let you input at 2.1s.
This addon will force the next input to be accepted at 2.0s.


Subtracts the round trip time measured from ICMP ping (or TCP_INFO_v0 if unavailable) from animation lock information response from the server.

When your ping fluctuates, it might take more than 500ms to receive a response from server, in which case, by game design, you are allowed to use next action regardless. Your client will receive two responses from the server, and only the latter animation lock information will take effect. Mode 2 and 3 will compensate for that by adding up animation lock information received.

Mode 2: Simulate RTT (75ms)
Simulates the environment where you would be receiving server response exactly 75ms after you use an action. From testing on sub-1ms connection to server, responses often took somewhere between 50ms and 100ms. Sometimes it takes less or more, but in any case, 75ms is the average.

Mode 3: Simulate Normalized RTT and Latency
Same with Mode 2, but will sample time taken for server response - round trip time measured from ICMP ping values, and use stabilized value in place of 75ms.

Which does read to me that even people with decent ping could use the tool for better responsiveness, but if you had king ping or truly truly god awful ping then there isn't too much the tool could do.

Not that I'm suggesting I think it's some great evil people with bad ping are getting to enjoy combat better (in general I think addons is a sign of strength of game, and often a symbol of stuff Devs themselves may better understand their player's desires), this tool allowing some a situation similar to those with great ping, but I do like the conversation not to be "it does nothing and has no impact on the game bro, don't complain about it" or "it literally bends warp space time to make you a better more fit human player" .