r/ffxivdiscussion: What can Square Enix do to help fix the terrible netcode of FFXIV?

[kpxmanifesto]

Cross-posting this from the r/ffxivdiscussion subreddit. The comments have some pretty good insight on the game's netcode and server architecture and why the game's latency and response time can feel sluggish/janky at times.

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https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus..._the_terrible/

Original post:

The netcode in this game is quite awful. Every time I see someone's character on my screen I'm actually seeing where they were 0.5-1 second ago because the client receives character position data from the server so slowly. This is especially an issue in PVP when you're a melee class trying to chase down an opponent.

Also a poster from the slidecasting thread linked the youtube video: https://youtu.be/hToWKu79Jm0

One characters jump animation on the first computer is already complete by the time the 2nd computer even sees that character start its jump animation. Why is the time difference between seeing the character jump animations on the two computers so large? I'm assuming they're on the same network because both of those computers are in the same house.

It sounds a lot like this is also the reason why slidecasting exists. I saw from the slidecasting thread that slidecasting is "effectively taking advantage of the gap between the spell cast being completed on the server side and on the client side." Why is that gap so large and what can SE do to resolve that?

Is a fix for something like this plausible, or would it be too difficult for SE because it would consume too much time and resources?

Edit:

Some notes gathered from this discussion -

Poor netcode and player position update rate were intentionally designed as a crutch to prevent server overload.

Current server architecture is too old and inefficient to handle increased player update rate frequency.

Square Enix thinks fixing inadequate netcode/servers would cost too much money and time and won't significantly increase profits.

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Here's some additional links from a user's comment that I thought was worth mentioning:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/119219

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/444667

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/112171

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/461667

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Update 8/9/2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...res_a_visible/

Another post with more discussion on FFXIV netcode.

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Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves as well. Cheers.


Edit: Copying other poster's comments that have some good information to my original post.

Ping isn't really the issue here. It boils down to tick rate and throttling performance to keep server loads and costs in check.

SE have historically always been super cautious on all aspects of the infrastructure behind their MMOs:

Remember how unsubbing for a period of time in FFXI would get your character data literally removed from the live servers and swapped to cold storage? You had to contact them and politely ask to have your character manually restored originally.

FFXIV has always had a slow GCD and tick rate, both means to significantly lower CPU load. Another area where they saved server CPU cycles was launching the game with comical levels of client trust.

Memory usage? IMHO that's one of the real reasons we don't get a proper glamour log style system. It would require the addition of several extra data arrays per character, adding to the footprint noticeably when you're talking a few hundred characters per zone.

In WoW I had a better experience PvPing with ~200ms latency from the UK to US west coast servers. I PvP'd pretty much exclusively through Vanilla and BC to the highest level and had no problems whatsoever. It was only when WotLK and Arena landed that the ping gave me problems and that was specifically down to the amount of precision needed to pillar block long enough to get out of combat drinking in. No rubber banding, things didn't hit me when it felt like they shouldn't. I had no problems grounding pom pyros etc.

FFXIV PvP is just a lower quality experience all round because SE aren't willing to foot the bill on the backend with a faster update rate.