Feedback: FIX YOUR NETCODE!

[caffe_macchiato]

It seems that Reddit and some influencers have asked posters to make new threads on the forums to "get the developers' attention", so I will do the same.

Across English and Japanese threads, there has been a main point of criticism regarding hitboxes in the first boss of Strayborough Deadwalk and the M2 raid. In particular, the "bullet hell"-style mechanic whereby particles fill the stage in a random pattern and players must dodge. Because it is random, they are not telegraphed and your "snapshot" area is invisible; and because they are numerous and fast, they cannot be easily dodged. This results in a greatly increased chance of being "clipped" by the "snapshot" from the particle than when we last saw this mechanic in the Nier raids. This is likely the reason why people are saying raids are "too difficult".

We have seen many other examples of "snapshotting" having a negative effect when a new mechanic is designed without mitigating it. See the Fall Guys thread for all the funny gifs of people missing yet being hit. "Clipping" does exist, and you would otherwise agree if this weren't July 2024.

Many people have lauded the new raids for "increasing the difficulty", but Square Enix has not improved the engine to accommodate. I am asking Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. to budget more staff to improve the netcode or reprogram hit detection accordingly. Specifically, you should not have to move out of a mechanic more than one second before it "snapshots". When you have 20 particles on the stage in a random pattern, the time it currently takes to avoid the "snapshot" is far too long. This was not as noticeable in Endwalker because content was easier and didn't have "bullet hell". I am not saying the mechanic needs to be removed, but either hit boxes or netcode needs to be fixed. The quickest fix would be to simply shrink the hit boxes of the particles. The best fix would be to see what the community has done to mitigate "clipping" and integrate that as an official patch.

Note regarding ping: The lowest-ping players in the world (JP) are having the same issues:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/505795

Note regarding "skill issue": a video game requires two things: a controller and video output. The controls are supposed to match the video output. This is called responsiveness. If the video is not responsive to the controls, then it has failed to perform its duty as a video game. Countless video games have been criticized for this issue over the past 40 years. Final Fantasy XIV is not a magical exception to game design. Yes, you can use "skill" (wasting time) to beat a bad game, but it is still a bad game. There is no excuse for a game which cannot match controls to video output.

[VioletCatastrophe]

Feedback: LEARN HOW TO DODGE!

It seems that Reddit and some influencers have asked posters to make new threads on the forums to "get the players' attention", so I will do the same.

Across English and Japanese threads, there has been a main point of criticism regarding hitboxes in the first boss of Strayborough Deadwalk and the M2 raid. In particular, the "bullet hell"-style mechanic whereby particles fill the stage in a predictable pattern and players must dodge. Because it is predictable, they are telegraphed; and because they are somewhat numerous and not too fast, they cannot be trivially dodged. This results in a greatly increased chance of being hit. This is likely the reason why people are saying raids are "too difficult".

We have seen many other examples of snapshotting having a negative effect when players who have played for 10 years without understanding how the game works encounter it. See the Fall Guys thread for all the funny gifs of people getting hit and being confused. People being subpar in this game exist, and you would otherwise agree if this weren't July 2024.

Many people have lauded the new raids for increasing the difficulty, but the playerbase has not actually tried learning the game to accommodate. I am asking the player base to budget more time to improve their skills or complain less on the forums. Specifically, you should have to move out of mechanics. When you have 20 particles on the stage in a pattern, the player should use pattern recognition to dodge it. This was not as noticeable in Endwalker because content was easier, even though many players are complaining about M2 despite the mechanic being identical to Barbaricca which was required by the MSQ. I am not saying the mechanic needs to be removed, because the issue is with the players. The quickest fix would be to improve at the game. The best fix would be to improve at the game and stop complaining.

Note regarding ping: it's a non-issue.

Note regarding "skill issue": I don't have one.

[caffe_macchiato]

Deflection

As I said, Final Fantasy XIV is not exempt from the basic principles of video games which have existed for over 40 years. I understand that people are fans of the game, as am I, but that doesn't change decades of solid design principles. You are asking FFXIV to be so beyond reproach that every single principle of good game design should be discarded just for this game.

If "clipping" was a classic gaming mainstay, then video games never would have become popular. This singular issue was enough to separate the good games from the bad for many years. Even Yoshida agreed that it is be an issue. You are alone in denying it.

I don't think you should post this in the "Dungeon Section"

The forums are being raided by Reddit which is where there are a flood of new threads here. Also, the most nagging issue is in Strayborough Deadwalk as previously mentioned. Unlike M2, there is no AOE visible on the dolls, which means you could "dodge" it but get hit even without snapshotting being a factor--which, in my experience, has definitely been a factor.

[Smoozie]

If "clipping" was a classic gaming mainstay, then video games never would have become popular. This singular issue was enough to separate the good games from the bad for many years. Even Yoshida agreed that it is be an issue. You are alone in denying it.

I opened the link and read the interview, but I am kinda new to this, so not sure what you mean with "clipping" or which section of the interview you referred to (the formatting of the site isn't great so can't blame you there). Could you elaborate a bit as I want to understand the issue better?

[caffe_macchiato]

I opened the link and read the interview, but I am kinda new to this, so not sure what you mean with "clipping" or which section of the interview you referred to (the formatting of the site isn't great so can't blame you there). Could you elaborate a bit as I want to understand the issue better?

As Yoshida put it: "Every time you take an action in the game, the game will communicate with the server, check for cheating and come back afterwards. This creates a delay that an offline game doesn't have, since there's no need to check on the Internet."

FFXIV has some designs to mitigate this. One is called "snapshots". If you're in the telegraph (orange circle) zone when the enemy's cast bar stops casting, you are "snapshotted" to that zone. Then the boss animation plays, sometimes a few seconds afterwards. So it doesn't matter what the boss does, if you were in the AOE, you're hit even if you're not visibly "hit" by a boss animation.

This design works when telegraphs exist, a cast bar exists, and there is ample time to move. If there are no telegraphs or cast bars, such as in the Fall Guys event, people expect to be hit by the animation instead, leading to a few seconds' miscalculation per above. Or, as in the new raids: there are telegraphs but not a cast bar. If mechanics are too fast, you have to move in and out of AOEs quickly without time to deliberate the "snapshot" period per the cast bar, thus the Fall Guys effect.

Furthermore, there's an even worse issue when considering the lag between your movement and the server recognizing it. You move a second before the server recognizes it. This means that, even if you dodge the "snapshot", you can still be caught in the snapshot, called "clipping". When mechanics are fast, like the new raids, this can happen a lot more often. It's usually found with high ping, but even Japanese players are having an issue with the new content because of faster and overlapping mechanics.

Any and all design issues with the new content can be fixed with better netcode. The challenge would be seen as fair (improvable with practice) rather than unfair (random and not responsive to skill) with zero change to the fight design itself. Otherwise, changes to design would have to be made to reduce the complexity of mechanics. As a certain other poster said, we have had easy content for "two expansions" (actually longer) because of this. For Dawntrail, the dev team decided to remove their old precautions. The above problems are a result.

[TDawnstar]

As Yoshida put it: "Every time you take an action in the game, the game will communicate with the server, check for cheating and come back afterwards. This creates a delay that an offline game doesn't have, since there's no need to check on the Internet."

Not gonna lie, I laughed out loud when I read that. Because guess what, all MMORPGs work the same way. And yes, obviously it creates a delay (which can lead to horrendous pings - WoW's WOTLK launch says hi).

But that doesn't change the fact that FFXIV's netcode is garbage. Because of it, we get snapshotting, animation locks, animation queues, slidecasts and other stuff that has absolutely no business being in a 2024 MMORPG (or any game for that matter). WoW's client did that way better 10 years prior to 2.0 release.
I don't know whether it was because the devs had little experience in designing that stuff, or whether because they used a commercial protocol that wasn't designed for gaming in mind, but they absolutely need to change that. Problem is, they can't.

[Shurrikhan]

I opened the link and read the interview, but I am kinda new to this, so not sure what you mean with "clipping" or which section of the interview you referred to (the formatting of the site isn't great so can't blame you there). Could you elaborate a bit as I want to understand the issue better?

In typical XIV parlance, "clipping" refers to potential uptime (the amount of time for which you could be using an action, especially a spell or weaponskill) lost.

One of the most significant reasons for this is that whereas other games compensate your internal skill delays for whatever time is taken to verify server-side that your skill activation is legit, XIV does not. This means your roundtrip ping is added to the time after using a skill for which you cannot use another.

For GCDs, this is mitigated somewhat, but oGCDs are not. Therefore, a low-ping player can potentially triple-weave where a moderate-ping player cannot quite even double-weave without losing uptime.

[Luzzu]

Furthermore, there's an even worse issue when considering the lag between your movement and the server recognizing it. You move a second before the server recognizes it. This means that, even if you dodge the "snapshot", you can still be caught in the snapshot, called "clipping". When mechanics are fast, like the new raids, this can happen a lot more often. It's usually found with high ping, but even Japanese players are having an issue with the new content because of faster and overlapping mechanics.

Any and all design issues with the new content can be fixed with better netcode. The challenge would be seen as fair (improvable with practice) rather than unfair (random and not responsive to skill) with zero change to the fight design itself. Otherwise, changes to design would have to be made to reduce the complexity of mechanics. As a certain other poster said, we have had easy content for "two expansions" (actually longer) because of this. For Dawntrail, the dev team decided to remove their old precautions. The above problems are a result.

You're conflating two separate things. The perceived rise in difficulty isn't because the server's response time to player input is too high - FFXIV has always had this issue. Even a 0.5 second delay is not going to make a difference fundamentally - if you are late to respond to a mechanic, you're going to get hit by it. That's how they all work. The difference in the case of DT content is that enemies will telegraph their attacks in ways we aren't used to seeing. I'm not even sure what design issues you're talking about with the new content, outside of the usual FFXIV snapshotting.

I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I'm just unsure that anyone who is asking for this is in network engineering or does back-end of any kind because if they were, they'd know it's likely a monumental ask that would require rewriting most of the game. If it's at all possible, I would love to see the FFXIV experience improved by having less latency and more responsiveness. It's not a likely prospect though so it might be worth taking the time to understand how to make the most of server ticks and snapshotting. Pretend you're a Time Mage or something

[Urielparadox]

In typical XIV parlance, "clipping" refers to potential uptime (the amount of time for which you could be using an action, especially a spell or weaponskill) lost.

One of the most significant reasons for this is that whereas other games compensate your internal skill delays for whatever time is taken to verify server-side that your skill activation is legit, XIV does not. This means your roundtrip ping is added to the time after using a skill for which you cannot use another.

For GCDs, this is mitigated somewhat, but oGCDs are not. Therefore, a low-ping player can potentially triple-weave where a moderate-ping player cannot quite even double-weave without losing uptime.

There is skill clipping and there is hitbox clipping. They both exist since all races have the same hitbox regardless of size. This is where my confusion over what you were saying because of the context of the rest of the post.
It is 100% impossible to get a triple weave with 0 clip without 3rd party tools. The only people who can triple weave without clipping are people using 3rd party tools. the reason is below.
Every Ogcd is given a minimum amount of time b4 the next one can be triggered essentially giving the netcode time to work and allowing players to plan what they are gunna do based on that information. it is part of the equation to try and create balance amongst dps output so that low ping players aren't putting out more damage, and high ping players aren't being banned from partyfinder.. If you have 0 ping(not feasibly possible), or similitude 0 ping through a 3rd party tool there is enough time to fit 3 in. This is because the intention is for double weaving so this extra time allows for above average ping players to still double weave. It requires a rather high amount of ping to not be able to double weave without clipping. this is made worse with bad ping that takes longer to register the entry late thus preventing your from getting a second weave. They recently changed the way the timer on pots, to allow for double weaving with pots, because previously they had wanted to restrict the pots to taking up a whole window. Something that would be in the way of doing a modern rotation on some jobs. This is not bad net code or unexpected. it is an intentional design to try and create a fair playing field between low and higher ping individuals. I used to play on country internet, and while my ping was awful I could still, just barely double weave without clipping 95% of the time. Dodging mechanics on the other hand was very challenging. This has no relationship to the snapshots of mechanics in the game and weave clipping, except that both them are effected by the players ping. Which exists in every mmo.

This is not to say there isn't an issue with snapshotting in this game, cause there is. it just has nothing to do with skill clipping.

[VioletCatastrophe]

The forums are being raided by Reddit which is where there are a flood of new threads here.

No. The FF14 devs only listen to the forums. The forums are inhabited by and large by some of the most entitled and awful players in this game. I don't use reddit, I'm just tired of my voice, of the voice of basically the entire damn playerbase being overshadowed by the loudest and whiniest voices. If this is where I have to go to be heard then I go here. The healer strike was bad enough, but I didn't make an account for that because I genuinely didn't see that going anywhere. This topic on the other hand is extremely important to me.

I've had to deal with absolutely brainmelting trivial content when doing non-endgame stuff for two expansions. I've seen jobs gradually have identity and complexity eroded from them. I've seen the fruits of this forum's complaints manifest in the degradation of this game for multiple expansions. I've had friends quit because they just can't deal with another expansion of falling asleep while playing. These aren't toxic turbo hardcore players either. These are players who play for the MSQ and normal raids and alliance raids and that's it.

We FINALLY have a step in the right direction and we have the forums complaining and demanding SE backpedal. So I'm finally speaking up. You aren't being raided. Your expansions worth of monopoly over getting to say how the game goes is ending.