Physical/regional servers FINALLY confirmed ??! (Y)

[Mirage]

By the way guys heres how you check your latency to your server

I only know 2 direct server adresses so here they are

Durandal - 202.67.51.111
Ragnarok - 202.67.51.121 or 120 (a bit hazey in memory)

So you basically ping those

to run a ping test got to CMD or command prompt in windows.

Type:

ping -t 202.67.51.111

And it should start pinging the address through your router.

Thanks for the IP. I've previously just pinged various SE sites I know are hosted in Japan to get my numbers, but they were all close to what the Durandal server is at for me anyway, which is 280ms.

As for regional servers being in Japan, that makes absolutely no sense. People (normally!) don't want regional servers because they have a strong desire to only play with people from their same region, but because they have a strong desire to play with low lag. Keeping regional servers in Japan for everyone would do absolutely nothing, and if that's what they're having in mind, they might as well just forget about it right now. I think (well, hope) the current dev team understands this, and doesn't do something that is really pointless.

I'm not though, my ping to japan is 350ms and I'm 10300 ish km away, it's roughly the same distance as most of EU players. Some slightly more, some slightly less.

Because I'm the same distance away from most of EU (not half the distance like you seem to think), I'm just not understanding why others complain so heavily about the lag.

I have a pimped out rig with the highest speed internet I can get and I'm right in the city, so I'm not faced with every problem that most are.
However, even with my internet, if I play on my laptop, I experience lag. I'm not talking framerate lag either, i'm talking serious delay in enemy response and when i get off my chocobo.
On my laptop I consider the game unplayable for most things, that's why i only use it to craft.

I've got it pegged as hardware related lag.
If I had to guess, it's the nvidia gtx 540m.

But it shouldn't be the distance. Google the distances, Toronto Canada.

Serious delay between getting on and off chocobos sounds exactly like the kind of issues you would get from your 350ms ping to japan. Basically, you tell the server that you want to get off your chocobo, and the server receives this data 350 ms later. The server then tells your client that you're dismounting your chocobo, and your client receives this data another 350 ms later. Add input lag on your client to all that, and you're easily looking at approximately one second from you want to dismount until you've actually dismounted.

Of course, dismounting your chocobo is a bit of a trivial problem compared to battle-related issues, which all are affected by the lag in the same way. Maybe you don't care that much about "twitch gameplay", but even relatively slow gameplay is affected by this. If a monster has a 3 second cast time for a spell that you want to get away from, that's normally a pretty big window for you to react, but with the current lag, that 3 second window is in reality cut down to a 2 second window. Even on a slow spell like that, you lose 33% of the reaction window. That could turn a spell from "easy to avoid for most people that don't like twitch-gameplay" into an attack that only the people with the sharpest reflexes can avoid. Now what this really does is letting japanese players have a relaxed game where they have plenty of time to react, while everyone else needs to have their eyes glued to the screen and not even blink even once in fear of missing the start of an action.

Even in FF11, which I think has a slower gameplay than FF14, there are plenty of instances where I have been hit by attacks that I could have easily avoided if I had half a second more time to react on. I'm looking at you, gaze-attacks. Japanese players would be able to avoid these without even breaking a sweat, simply because they're all sitting at probably less than 80 ms lag.

It is simply impossible for the current client and server to perform these actions faster than what your lag is, so I'm having trouble believing that you only have this problem on your laptop and not your desktop. Unless your desktop PC is enchanted with magic, making it precognitive, and able to know what the server sends to you before it sends it.

It's also not just distance alone that impacts lag. It is a combination of the time signals require to travel through the wires, and the time it takes for each network node to route the data to the correct network nodes. Also, the wires going from you and to Japan aren't exactly going in a direct straight line to Japan either, but how much time this steals is hard to figure out without asking all the network operators involved exactly where their wires are dug down.