Server Tick Rate Is Holding the Game Back

[Shinku_Tachi]

I understand how the mechanic works, I have cleared the Unreal quite a few times. The snapshotting on it is just absolute bs, I guess because 90% of the time, I was just fine and then a bunch of times I just got hit despite the fact that I was VERY CLEARLY IN THE SAFE ZONE. Either actually apply the knockup quickly enough that it's clear that I dodged too late and don't let me walk to the safe side at all, or match the damn animations to the snapshot. This way it's just incredibly frustrating.

This!

SE either needs to break off the money and upgrade the technical side of things if they want fast and frantic fights. Or they need to give up the "faster = better" design philosophy the battle content team seems to have now, and slow things down a bit, so the server side can keep up.

I'd rather have slower fights, where mechanics hit as indicated than this BS.

[Jeeqbit]

Interesting... I upgraded my computer to a high end setting and while the combat with tons of people improved drastically, I didn't notice any difference in the menus not being snappy, especially the Retainer windows, turn-ins, etc.

I did notice a massive increase in the retainer window displaying when I got a better computer and increased my FPS, because some of it happens due to a cutscene interaction which is slowed by low FPS. But to a certain extent, there is also an animation involved - your bell going off and the retainer appearing, and even with good FPS that animation still prevents it being snappy. Often delays like this are actually just due to the game waiting for an obnoxious animation to play, one that we probably all tune out and don't pay attention to. This happens with quests too, where you will try to progress a quest conversation and it will take ages to progress due to an animation playing of you handing something over or them waving goodbye, which you can hardly see due to the camera being behind your character.

If you mean the retainer inventory window itself, that would need to wait for the server to confirm the contents of the inventory, but I don't remember that being slow really in comparison to opening a retainer.

[Jeeqbit]

This would not require new servers. SE already upgraded all the North American hardware

Agreed. They have done so many infrastructure maintenances over the years that, unless they've been trolling us and replacing 250 MB RAM with 1 GB RAM, it's hopefully extremely modern by now.

The server tick rate is a configuration that SE can adjust. Increasing the tick rate would increase server load, but the upgraded servers should be able to handle the additional processing.

The entire point of server player caps is meant to be to solve player load. Not to mention their many other arbitrary caps such as buff caps and linkshell caps.

Also, worlds are actually split across lots of server machines - each physical server in the rack holds dozens of zones each (it seems over 60 in some cases). The majority of them are dead zones such as one-off MSQ areas, with a small number of "busier" areas. Proof of this is in the Status forum here.

So in other words, different battles are actually happening on different physical machines depending on the zone (or in this case, depending on the duty). The battles for the entire server aren't all taking place on the same machine or in the same server program.

For context, duty servers are essentially their own worlds that you world visit to, so more than likely they split the duty instances across multiple physical machines like they do with any other world.

I have a very hard time believing that even a consumer machine would struggle with lots of ongoing battles, given they wouldn't have to process the graphics portion of it. Even if they did, the answer should be more physical machines or upgraded hardware, not an unwavering server tick from ARR. Unrelated, but I wonder if they could borrow a trick from AI training and use a GPU to process certain things faster. I doubt SE will do it.

Tick rates make sense for specific features such as enemy movement speed, DoTs, or to prevent excessive checking of something that won't happen that frequently, but ticks should be on a case-by-case basis depending on the game system. It seems like it is unreasonably applied to everything. For example, if I use an AoE on an army of enemies, it will slowly iterate through them over the course of 3 seconds. Bone Crawler takes ages to knock all players back and it's painfully slow to watch. I was able to find a YouTube video where it took 7 seconds on a large enough crowd, although that was 8 years ago. It's still slow the last time I saw it though, and no server or even consumer machine should have trouble processing the knockback of a crowd. It's a drop in the ocean for any modern processor to iterate, say, 100 times, and if they don't want to send so many packets, sending a batch of affected players would seem efficient.

[AvoSturmfaust]

They will never change it, that's the thing. This caters probably to consoles and their era. Sometimes you go out from snapshot immediately and it doesn't count. Sometimes you go 2 seconds earlier and it still counts. Buggers me but that's how the game works eh.

Another reason why everyone has GCD of 2.5 seconds which is mind boggling and slow compared to other mmos that use 1 seconds of GCD and it becomes even faster at proper haste gear,etc. But people with gamepads probably couldn't play with 1 second fast combat.

In PvP this is even worse. Play Crystaline Conflict, stand on a potion and some other guy that uses sprint and runs through it will take it over you who were standing on potion point. Sometimes you run ahead of that person like 1 second ahead, yet the person from behind you will take your potion and you lose a game because of netcode. Enemy monk kicks you in potion direction, you don't take it which is fine. You now play as Monk and do the same move, enemy takes the potion even though they got kicked. Yeah absolutely disgusting.

Yet again that "Its because of the Consoleplayers" Bullshit, is that the new "Casuals vs Raider" Topic? Now everything bad in Final has to do with Consoles?

But lets be clear about a few things, no the Server Tick has nothing to do with Consoleplayers, the GCD has nothing to do with it either, and yes as someone which played WoW with a Gamepad, you can press fast and even a 1s GCD would not change anything, if i press X Triangle on my Controller or press 1 2, it has both the same speed, Keyboardplayer arent faster then Controllerplayer.

[Umbrasin]

For context, duty servers are essentially their own worlds that you world visit to, so more than likely they split the duty instances across multiple physical machines like they do with any other world.

This is true in PvP as well. On entry you're transferred to another server that has a different IP address from your datacenter, which is easy to verify. SE could increase the tick rate in duty instances specifically, so their servers don't catch fire from a 100+ person hunt train going ham on a world boss.

I was able to find a YouTube video where it took 7 seconds on a large enough crowd, although that was 8 years ago. It's still slow the last time I saw it though, and no server or even consumer machine should have trouble processing the knockback of a crowd. It's a drop in the ocean for any modern processor to iterate, say, 100 times, and if they don't want to send so many packets, sending a batch of affected players would seem efficient.

The "emanation" code is still notoriously slow. This is obvious on abilities such as Assize, but you also see it on other AoE abilities. When Assize hits a larger number of mobs you can watch it very slowly heal your party members one person at a time as it emanates outward. I've actually seen people die because the heal reached them 2-3 seconds late as it worked through the mobs. One outlier is Liturgy of the Bell for WHM because you can drop it the instant that you're hit and it pulses outwards at a reasonable rate. Since it was a new "get-hit-to-cast with charges” type ability, I suspect it was coded from scratch by a different developer, and they did a much better job than the legacy code that generally gets copy/pasted.


That's a good point about packets. WoW's network engineers have spent years optimizing their system to use delta packets, so only changes since the last update packet are sent. The packets in FFXIV are enormous, so if they're serious about improving server performance then trimming packet size would be a necessary first step toward smoother gameplay.

[Jeeqbit]

The "emanation" code is still notoriously slow. This is obvious on abilities such as Assize, but you also see it on other AoE abilities. When Assize hits a larger number of mobs you can watch it very slowly heal your party members one person at a time as it emanates outward. I've actually seen people die because the heal reached them 2-3 seconds late as it worked through the mobs. One outlier is Liturgy of the Bell for WHM because you can drop it the instant that you're hit and it pulses outwards at a reasonable rate. Since it was a new "get-hit-to-cast with charges” type ability, I suspect it was coded from scratch by a different developer, and they did a much better job than the legacy code that generally gets copy/pasted.

Interesting that they work differently. Another thing I know from hunts is that they hit the closest 32 players, so when there are a lot of players you can simply stand far away and ignore all of the mechanics. They get you if there is a low turnout though. It's another of those arbitrary limits that wouldn't make sense in some of the larger scale raids they've been making. It helps back up that a lot of things are processed in order of proximity.

That's a good point about packets. WoW's network engineers have spent years optimizing their system to use delta packets, so only changes since the last update packet are sent.

It surprises me that a top MMO wouldn't use delta packets, but it doesn't surprise me if SE specifically doesn't.

[Yeol]

This change alone would sell me 8.0. Doubt they'll ever do it.

[PercibelTheren]

The "emanation" code is still notoriously slow. This is obvious on abilities such as Assize, but you also see it on other AoE abilities. When Assize hits a larger number of mobs you can watch it very slowly heal your party members one person at a time as it emanates outward. I've actually seen people die because the heal reached them 2-3 seconds late as it worked through the mobs. One outlier is Liturgy of the Bell for WHM because you can drop it the instant that you're hit and it pulses outwards at a reasonable rate. Since it was a new "get-hit-to-cast with charges” type ability, I suspect it was coded from scratch by a different developer, and they did a much better job than the legacy code that generally gets copy/pasted.

Yep, I have had people die because the heal took too long to reach them countless times. Byakko Unreal also taught me that tank LB has a travel time and it takes FOREVER to spread if the party isn't all huddled in one spot. My group did it the lazy way of just ignoring the second tiger and popping tank LB to survive the explosion and I, doing the physranged thing of standing in Narnia, died a couple times to simply being too far away for the LB to take effect on time. I don't even necessarily mind this being a thing, I just wish the game actually warned you this is the case, so you could factor it into how you play.

[Deedlit]

Someone probably said it before me, but it would be fine if snapshots were consistent. But, they aren't. And it's by dev choice. They change them constantly for the same markers.

[RedLolly]

I believe PVP only has the activity it does because the rewards are outstanding compared to most other systems in the game.

And I agree that saying the hang-ups and bugs are because of consoles is completely bullshit. It makes zero sense that both Sony and Xbox would have issues on their hardware regarding online connectivity. These machines are also designed for streaming and have other major game franchises that require substantially faster reaction speeds to work (FGC, anyone?). They do this all without any third party software to alleviate lag, too. It's entirely on SE.

What I think is that we should look harder at the battle design team than the server infrastructure team. Tells being inconsistent in timing, attacks across the board having variable AoE effects, making everything in the game noticeably faster than ever before, are all only problems because they don't work under what is apparently the common connection speed in international regions FFXIV is playable in.

It sucks but it is something that the lowest common denominator has to be catered to, and fixing the combat snapshotting issues would actually benefit everyone. It's worth the investment.