Playing with Americans

[OliverQ]

My question is based around lag. I'm in the UK on the Chaos data centre however my American friends who will be playing the game for the first time next week will be needing to make their choice.

What I'm wondering is if they make characters on Chaos does anyone know how bad the lag might be? The same goes for me if I make a new character on an American data centre.

The only reason I ask about them making characters on Chaos is due to the fact that they will be able to play when I'm asleep due to the time difference and I don't want to hold them back by making a new character on an American data centre and falling behind in both the story and levels. Whereas if they make characters on Chaos I can assist them on my main and it doesn't matter if they play without me as I can just hop on and help them whenever we are all online together.

I have a character on Chaos as an American, and for normal gameplay I've never had any issues. But I can't speak to high end raiding if that's a concern. I'm not high enough on Chaos to speak to how bad ping is for high end duties.

That being said, lag has been pretty bad for me even on the NA servers.

[CaptainLagbeard]

There was this post on the lodestone last year
https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...a451d5a8daa66f

You can ping them, or trace to them I guess, to see latency and check the overall quality of the connection.

[Merryl]

Their lag would solely depend on where they are in the United States. I’m in Wisconsin and according to my calculations there’s little to no difference on the amount of lag between the us servers or the eu servers. The last time I checked the European server location was somewhere in Germany, which made the physical distance half again as far. I had a character on louisoix during the endwalker crash at launch.

[Hyperia]

A gaming VPN service will give you the most optimal route and reduce some latency. America to UK has the highest density of underwater fiber optic cables than any other link.

You can thank the stock market for this one as traders want faster and faster links.