Animation lock is ping-dependent, as time spent before the server response is ignore

[Nekkowe]

Date & Time: The past several years of play
Frequency: Every weaponskill and ability cast
World name: All
Class/Level: All Disciples of War and Disciples of Magic, Level 1-90
Party or solo: Either
In-game time: N/A
Area and coordinates: N/A

This issue impacts the moment-to-moment gameplay on average-to-high latency, resulting in artificially sluggish combat as every action's animation lock is extended by twice the connection delay.

Some jobs, such as Machinist, simply cannot be played optimally on average to high latencies as a result - while a player with low latency has plenty of time to weave two charges of Ricochet and Gauss Round between their GCD actions, a player with high latency will only be able to execute these skills extremely slowly, fitting no more than one off-GCD cast.

Unfortunately, because this issue is ping-dependent, I believe it's likely to have flown under the radar of the development team until now - while it's an egregious and relatively well-known problem in the EU and NA regions, to the point of third-party tools being developed to address it, the JP region is geographically small enough for the latency to never exceed a critical point.

The issue in more detail:

Upon using any action, the game will normally apply about a half second of animation lock, preventing you from using another action for a brief moment. When the server processes that action, it responds with the total appropriate animation lock for that SPECIFIC action.

The problem arises with how the game seems to be handling this response.
At current, the game DOES NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT how long it took for the response to arrive after the action was used. This effectively lengthens the intended animation lock by the given player's latency.

As a result, on connections with even just around ~100ms latency, every action will take a full fifth of a second longer to fully execute. This interferes significantly with gameplay, making some move combinations impossible for some players without delaying their next GCD cast.

As an example, let's say a certain action is intended to have 600ms of animation lock.
With 20ms latency to the server, it will take around 40ms total after the action is performed until the game client receives the intended duration of the animation lock from the server - 20ms there, 20ms back.

By the time the server response arrives, the character has already spent 40ms in animation lock. Because the game erroneously does not subtract these 40ms from the intended 600ms, the total animation lock lasts for 640ms.

However, on a high latency connection, this becomes a lot more egregious - a player with a latency of 150ms will find each action taking a full third of a second longer than intended. 150ms as the game communicates the action to the server, 150ms as the server responds, and then the FULL 600ms of communicated animation lock, totalling a 50% longer downtime of nearly a full second.

The player with 640ms animation lock might still be able to use their following actions normally, but the player that - for the same action - is stuck with 900ms of animation lock might run into various issues. Primarily, they'll likely lack time to weave more than one oGCD action between each cast, even at a normal skill speed appropriate for their played job.

As mentioned before, especially in the EU and NA regions where continental distances between players and servers are likely to be much longer than within Japan, this has been known and debated for a while, resulting in the development of third party tools that directly rewrite the information received from the server to correct for the delay, in an effort to work around this bug.

But ideally, none of that should be necessary.
All it'd take to address this issue is to properly subtract the time between the action and the arrival of the server response from the communicated animation lock.

In case this summary did not contain enough information, here are some other occasions where this issue has been discussed, unfortunately so far never as a proper bug report:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...tions-normally.

https://twitter.com/perchbird_/statu...34091780186120

https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...nimation_lock/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...on_tools_like/

https://github.com/Soreepeong/XivAle...-timing-helper

[neola]

Personally I see this on jobs I play such as dancer where I can not press the next actions until the server responds.
This is a difficult problem to solve, but I hope a better solution can be achieved.
Some of this has to do with anti-cheat measures to force the client to wait until the server says it is OK to resend the next command.

What really needs to be resolved is the lag issues, which have been reported in other threads, and I believe this will also resolve these issues.

But, even if the client was able to send data to the server without waiting for the response... the client would eventually get queued up with many packets to send the server and will be playing "catchup" so some of these measure are also to assist with stability issues. How many packets can the client queue up, or how many packets can the server handle if it receives a "burst" of queued up packets?

This happens a lot with me, and the only thing I can to as accept it as it is, the game is still playable but there will be issues with DPS and being able to perform "rotations" optimally.
Personally I accept it as there are times some routes in the internet can be flakey or inconsistent with response times do to the very nature of the internet and data packet congestion.

Ultimately I believe the server lag needs to be addressed, which is very difficult to identify the root cause, but I believe it is being looked into.
With issues in the housing system now though, attention appears to be spread out in the dev team to address other issues as well.

Here are a couple threads that are in a response to the latency issues.


You have not provided a system report so we can not see which client you are using but here are some related threads.
Please do specify your platform, as some bugs like this can be platform specific at times, if not provided this may be moved to "not enough information."

Please also search a little to see if the bug (or similar) has been previously reported before posting a new one, this helps alleviate the load on the community team whom review these.

PS4 (accepted for review bugs)
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...in-Aglaia-Raid

Windows 10 (accepted for review bugs)
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ed-after-patch

[neola]

With the above information, there are a few things that can be tried.
Without stating this information it is difficult to know where the issue is.

Have you disabled any firewalls or antivirus software? These can "shim" between the game and the internet and inspect packets causing a delay.
Have you contacted your ISP to see if there is anything that can be done on their end?

Please provide details if your ISP, it is difficult to see if there is a pattern without this information.
It is possible the route from your ISP is where the issue is, and that information is necessary to proceed with an investigation.

Please also provide your "system information" to see what drivers are being utilized.
There are a LOT of different PC configurations (if your platform is PC) that can have a variety of compatibility issues.

Are there any programs running in the background that are utilizing internet bandwidth?

Sorry to say all this above would be covered if you used the template to report your bug.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/65378

Yes it is time consuming to fill out, and the information is most likely somewhere on the server (server knows what client you use) but this is a burden for the team confirming these bugs to have to dig up, but please help them out and provide as much detail as you can, it will speed up the investigation.

[hyperion995]

Neola, this is a very well-known issue among high-end FFXIV players to the extent that some even go to third-party tools that directly rectify the issue described - and the problem goes away. While it's against forum rules to discuss third party or ToS breaking tools, there is a lot of research on this specific issue and it is completely game dependent. It is not ISP related. It is not "other software running on the computer" related. It is not FFXIV server related. That is a fact.

[Breakbeat]

If one is just complaining, then you can withhold any information you see fit.

If one is asking for help, one should provide information requested by the people being asked. Even if one feels they 'know it's not useful'.

Humor us.

[Nekkowe]

If one is just complaining, then you can withhold any information you see fit.

If one is asking for help, one should provide information requested by the people being asked. Even if one feels they 'know it's not useful'.

Humor us.

You're right, of course. Since this issue is known widely enough that I'm confident it's not a "me" problem, I initially skipped the step of providing information on my specific setup - since reducing my personal latency would not address the wider problem for everyone else affected. As far as I can see, the problem isn't that latency exists, it's how it's being handled by the animation lock system.

In any case, here goes:

Platform: Windows PC
ISP: Vodafone Germany
Type of Internet Connection: CATV
Internet Connection Speed: 500Mbit/s

- Disabling my firewall and antivirus did not affect the issue
- My ISP (Vodafone Germany) stated they were unable to help with specific software. If it helps, this problem is unique to FFXIV, I have not encountered anything of the like on high-latency connections in other games.

The issue is most egregious when playing on a data center far from where I live, such as playing with friends on another continent.
Again, it's not simply an issue of the latency itself - though this has effects on e.g. the timing of AoE indicators, these are unavoidable, whereas the animation lock handling is absolutely a fixable issue.

In addition to people in the threads I linked in the first post, several of my friends have reported being stuck with the same problem.
Some of them have used tools like XIVAlexander to address it, in the exact way stated, and the problem went away.

[Nekkowe]

I'd also like to clarify my perspective on some of the points stated here:

What really needs to be resolved is the lag issues, which have been reported in other threads, and I believe this will also resolve these issues.

As stated, I'm certain that even on higher latencies, this problem can be addressed - it's exacerbated by lag, but not inevitably caused by it, and to a degree it affects connections of any latency.

But, even if the client was able to send data to the server without waiting for the response...

Yes, absolutely. This isn't the proposed solution - instead, after getting the response, the client must take into account how long the response took to receive.
By subtracting the wait time from the communicated animation lock, the actual animation lock of the character will be equal for players of any latency.

This happens a lot with me, and the only thing I can to as accept it as it is, the game is still playable but there will be issues with DPS and being able to perform "rotations" optimally.

Yeah, I thoroughly agree - it's a very unfortunate state of things.

Personally I accept it as there are times some routes in the internet can be flakey or inconsistent with response times do to the very nature of the internet and data packet congestion.

Ultimately I believe the server lag needs to be addressed, which is very difficult to identify the root cause, but I believe it is being looked into.

Since this issue has - from what I'm hearing, though I can personally vouch for having this exact issue since post-Stormblood - existed for about as long as the game itself has, I don't believe that it's tied to any current Endwalker-specific lag issues.

While the bug is networking-related, I'm trying to relay that (unlike many networking issues) it's categorically not related to any given player's individual hardware situation.
This is a problem that exists in the netcode itself, verified independently by several groups of players over the years, and so far not addressed.

Because the animation lock problem disproportionately impacts high-latency connections, the development team may not be fully aware of the extent of it.
(I'm fairly confident that most software engineers would be fairly disturbed to hear about it, at that...)
But addressing the issue would go a long way towards reducing the sluggishness of play on high latencies, and players that use tools like XIVAlexander to artificially implement the suggested fix have reported results to that effect.

[Nekkowe]

While I'm a complete stranger to you, having explained the situation as best I could, I ask that you trust my judgement this far - I posted in the Bug Reports subforum rather than the Tech Support one because this is a bug inherent to the game, affects all players bar none (though unequally), and can't simply be addressed on my (or any other player's) end, short of resorting to potentially disallowed third-party tools that I'd prefer to avoid.

I have no more direct way of ensuring that word of it reaches the people that can actually fix the problem at the root than by posting here.
But the problem can be fixed. In the end, it's more of an issue of developer awareness than a technical hurdle.

I'll cooperate any way I can.
In return, please take into account that this bug is neither unavoidable, nor will it go away on its own even once the server-side lag issues you mentioned are resolved.

Neola, this is a very well-known issue among high-end FFXIV players to the extent that some even go to third-party tools that directly rectify the issue described - and the problem goes away. While it's against forum rules to discuss third party or ToS breaking tools, there is a lot of research on this specific issue and it is completely game dependent. It is not ISP related. It is not "other software running on the computer" related. It is not FFXIV server related. That is a fact.

Hyperion has the right of it here.
Let me know if there are further steps I can take to help prove that this is not a personal issue - though originally, I'd hoped that everyone else's talk of it outside these forums would be proof enough.
I was amazed when I found no actual bug reports on it in this specific subforum - conversely, you'll find the bug routinely acknowledged by players in the General Discussions section. The aforementioned tools are commonly brought up, by name, as life-savers for circumventing the bug. But they shouldn't have to.

[geebster]

Surely, the devs look through commonly used plugins and third party tools and look through places like Balance discord to track these sorts of things? I sincerely doubt they dont know about this issue, and if they dont...thats not a good sign of their awareness of the community and how people play the game.

That said, I hope they see this and fix it. People shouldnt be using third party tools to level the playing field. Incidentally, in addition to ping affecting animation lock, your FPS also changes your effective GCD...and as such third party tools exist to fix your FPS at a level that shortens your GCD the most. Outside of extreme cases, players SHOULD NOT have an insurmountable gameplay advantage by having a more expensive graphics card or living closer to the server, especially when both can and are fixed by third party tools.

[Amaya-dono]

This is an incredibly important bug that makes the game feel worse to play and I really hope SE notice and address it ASAP.