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

[Fiel_Tana]

It was so bad back then that even as someone who lived like 20 minutes away from the og data centre I had to memorize the mechanics to the point of predicting them before they occurred simply because of just how much latency there was due to the tick rate. You'd be a solid 3-4 seconds (give or take a couple hundred ms) out of an aoe and it'd still consider you in it and you'd be thrown off the edge without his line aoe landing even remotely near you.

I still experience having to memorise and move at least 1-2 seconds (or more) before any mechanic tells, that's the main reason I'll never do any hard content in this game. Even doing fights in normal mode is a terrible experience since I obviously can't memorise what I've never seen so I'm tanking the floor very often. I've even recorded fights to see if I missed tells and watched guides to be sure I was looking for the right things when I go back to try again and still get hit.

Spread mechanics are also terrible in this game since the locations we see other players is not where they are. Often I'll get hit hard or killed when on my screen we'd spread but am sometimes told I was "chasing" another player when on my screen they'd stopped so I continued to move for the spread. I've seen others struggle with it too.

This is called ping. It takes time for the information to travel from your computer to the server, for the server to process it and then for a response to be sent and received by you. If it's where they were that long ago then maybe the ping is that high.

Again, ping. It doesn't matter that they are on the same network, because SE's server is not on the same network. The information travels from computer #1 to SE's server then to computer #2. This affects all games and MMORPGs, but you wouldn't know that it does unless you put 2 computers side-by-side.

It is yes, but other games must do something different since it only happens to this degree in FFXIV for me. Lag is often a thing in other games but not to the degree that combat is simply an exercise in frustration.

It's not a lot of fun when the lag / latency / ping is a mechanic in itself.