Quitting high end raiding due to latency

[Jeeqbit]

The scale of your ping issues give me the impression that your ping is 1000-2000ms. I know because I experienced it almost this bad when I had 1000ms ping due to my PC specs.

For the record, the worst ping people normally get is around 400ms. So some other factor is at play here and increasing your ping beyond what it should (such as computer specs, faulty network equipment, an ISP throttling you, or a really bad route to the server by your ISP).

How is this okay? How is it that they make content demanding such precise timing but don't provide reliable servers to do that content?

I believe the servers themselves are alright. The concept of snapshotting can take time to fully understand though, since it's not intuitive.

It's not only high latency, it's inconsistent latency. Lag spikes happen

Now this has been a major issue recently. The NA servers are getting a DDoS every day. I experience lag spikes that sometimes kill me in high end duties and a trace clearly proves the spike is happening at SE's server itself - meaning it's a DDoS attack they are not reporting or noticing.

I have used a VPN to completely, 100% change my route to the server. I have tried going through Texas and Alabama (bottom route). I have tried going through Nevada (middle route). I have tried going through Seattle (top route). From my immediate location, I have tried changing the route to go from south to southwest, west, and northwest. It doesn't matter - I still spike.

DDoS is a major problem and SE isn't even talking about it. I think they are stumped because they don't think they can solve the problem. But it's making me want to transfer away from the NA data centers altogether.

In case you aren't aware, a DDoS is where lots of attackers try to attack the server. It's possible SE isn't actually the target, but rather another company that hosts their machines at the same place, and SE gets caught in the crossfire. I'm not sure.

I've even heard more than once that the server-sided lag in North America is known and intentional on Square Enix's part

They don't apply lag intentionally. They originally moved the location of the NA data centers because the previous location was not good for server upgrades which they needed. Unfortunately this increased ping for many players, and got caught up in a political issue with NTT who were throttling network traffic for political reasons unrelated to SE - but this directly affects traffic to SE's servers.

Where it concerns lag on ability weaving, I don't think that is intentional. I think it is incompetence ie. bad code.

World of Warcraft offered better service with no snapshotting back in 2004. What am I missing?

Snapshotting is partly intentional (it snapshots on cast completion, executes the results of the snapshot as the animation goes off). But it's also partly a code issue that it takes as long as it does. They could make it at least look faster at high pings by predicting if it kills you on the client side. It would just require putting the damage calculation into the client itself so it can predict combat events that pertain to yourself. They may as well do it because we know the damage formula by now.