Server Tick Rate Is Holding the Game Back

[Jeeqbit]

It may seem like a small thing, but in a game with so many redundant menus, it adds up to the bad feeling of navigating through screens. I feel it can only be explained by the server tick, unless somebody proves me wrong.

Menus are clientside, which means they happen on your machine. Most of the information in those menus is stored in the files on your computer. The speed of those menus increases as you increase your FPS. Loading files from your computer can be increased a lot by having the game on an SSD.

There are a few elements that are probably slow due to the server. For example, loading the friends list and it only loading in 10 at a time. Either the server only sends you 10 names at a time, or the client only processes 10 at a time. Either way, this is an arbitrary limit set by SE that could simply be increased.

Most likely if you ask them why, they will claim it will crash the server or the client if it's increased - like how they said having more than 1 FATE in Occult Crescent would crash the server. Which is obviously not true considering the open world has lots of FATEs and we engage with more than 2 battles due to gold farming and pots anyway. Arguably, we have had 400 people fighting hunts and loads of others fighting big FATE bosses in the open world as well, without issue.

Another aspect that involves the server is handling inventory, so discarding or moving an item will require interacting with the server and seeking confirmation that it succeeded.

[Raikai]

Menus are clientside, which means they happen on your machine. Most of the information in those menus is stored in the files on your computer. The speed of those menus increases as you increase your FPS. Loading files from your computer can be increased a lot by having the game on an SSD.

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.

[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.

[ThaneEndergeist]

Far to the contrary, the rest of the complaints is the icing on the cake on what is holding this game back as well as KILLING it. The real blame4 falls to yoshi and the devs talentless lack of thought process" forget strat or mob spases or even curese put more AOE and AOE back with another and make them stupid fast. This is the mark of novice game designers at best. You want imput on good strategic stuff look ath the rest of failed games insted of ADD AOE and MAKE AOE FASTER. I understand the need for difficulty but there should be a bigger buffer between extreme savalage and standard. this is not call of duty for fast reaction speed asnd if i wanted to play that garbage id play COD. This is the last time I ever buy an expac or feature untilkl this is rebalanced

[Kohashi]

FFXIV has had a fixed server tick every 0.3s (~3.3 Hz) since its inception. While that may have worked well with the originally slow-paced content, it’s become a major issue as the pace of fights has increased. For comparison, WoW has a server tick every ~0.05s (~20 Hz). The game would play and feel much better if SE gave serious consideration to increasing the rate, at least halving it to every 0.15s.

I began seeing it as a serious issue in Savage fights during Pandaemonium with my static. We’d do the stack to spread mechanics. The stack works fine, then when the spread happens everyone just dies. We’re all in our correct spread spots, clearly reflected on my screen, so nobody made any last movements. The problem is the game is very slow to update positions. Ironically, stacks work more reliably since they’re client-side driven, unlike the spreads. Since FFXIV uses a zero-client trust model, the server only considers your last reported position, which may be up to 0.3s old. And don't even get me started on the healing lag.

I mean, random snapshots can happen due to random lags; however, the fact that your entire party got wiped tells me you guys don't understand how snapshots work in this game.

There are generally 2 major snapshot mechanics in this game.

1. That happens at the end of the cast bar
2. That happens at around 75% of the cast bar.

The one that happens at the end of the cast bar can be used with the AOE disappearing from the ground. You can use that to shimmy into the safe spot before the actual damage/ additional effect of the mechanic is applied to you. Very useful, for example, during the Landslide mechanic done by Titan.

Anyway, with that being said, I wouldn't mind them lowering the server tick as well.

[Umbrasin]

Apologies for any formatting issues, this is my first post here.

I don't know what goes in to alleviating something like this. Would this need new servers or is it something that can be retrofitted?

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

I mean, random snapshots can happen due to random lags; however, the fact that your entire party got wiped tells me you guys don't understand how snapshots work in this game.

My static and I understand how snapshots work. The issue isn’t misunderstanding the mechanic, it’s the inconsistency caused by the slow tick rate failing to track positions accurately. Combine that with global player latency, faster encounters, and the fact that one death often means a wipe, and it's a recipe for frustration. My group has been very successful, but there have been some real head-scratching wipes in the new encounters where it's obvious that the servers couldn't keep up.

The issue that I'm raising is that success or failure in high-end fights can entirely depend on whether a server tick happens towards the beginning or end of a mechanic. Status quo shouldn't be defended simply because it's the norm - encounters should be fun and intuitive. It's a game.

While my initial post focused on raiding, this affects new players as well. Most of the people I’ve introduced to FFXIV quit early, calling the game clunky and unresponsive. The combination of animation lock and slow server response drain the fun. Personally, I wish that SE would build in their own AlexanderXIV animation smoothing into the game itself. There's no good reason for animations to extend based on your ping on top of the already high server latency.

[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.

[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.

[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.