Server Tick Rate Is Holding the Game Back

[Umbrasin]

There's a number of factors causing the problems that people encounter with the FFXIV servers regardless of the health or speed of their internet connections:

1) Data Center Location
Other major MMOs (WoW, GW2, etc.) distribute their servers regionally across the US: west, central, and east, or host them in central hubs such as Chicago or Dallas. The FFXIV servers are all located in the Sacramento data center. This means that players on the east coast, Canada, and other areas far away from California experience higher latency due to the physical distance their packets must travel. Playing PoE2 recently, I have about 5-10ms connected to a nearby server. It's not a coincidence, it's physics.

2) Routing Congestion
Since every NA world routes through the Sacramento data center that means any congestion or failure along major internet backbone routes leading to it can cause lag spikes or disconnects. Internet routing (BGP) tries to find the “best” path and will keep using that path, but if that route becomes overloaded or partially broken then your connection may not automatically reroute efficiently. This is why you may see packet loss or high ping in the game even when your actual internet is working fine.

3) DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks against the Sacramento hosting provider have occurred repeatedly over the years which flood the network with junk traffic that causes latency spikes, login errors, and packet loss. The centralized setup makes this worse. When Sacramento is hit then much of the NA player base is affected, though routing and mitigation usually limit it to certain worlds. It’s unclear whether these attacks target FFXIV directly or other services sharing the same data center.

4) Lack of Regional Redundancy
SE has used temporary cloud servers to ease congestion at times of demand (Endwalker & Dawntrail launches), but the core NA worlds still run on fixed physical hardware in the Sacramento data center. Once demand stabilizes then those cloud servers are spun down. This means if Sacramento goes down (maintenance, outage, routing event) then every NA player loses access. There’s no secondary region or cloud-based fallback that can spin up to handle the load during outages.

5) Outdated Networking Architecture
The core server infrastructure of FFXIV was built in ~2013 and still runs on a customized, low-frequency architecture that prioritizes stability over responsiveness. This makes it more tolerant to weaker connections but less suited for modern latency-sensitive gameplay and large-scale encounters.

6) ISP Routing and Peering Variability
SE hosts all NA servers through NTT’s Sacramento facility which makes the routing quality depend heavily on your ISP’s peering agreements. Some connections take inefficient multi-hop routes through several carriers before reaching the data center which leads to inconsistent ping and packet loss even on a stable connection.

[MuraBoy]

It's funny how you had to pre-dodge mechanics at launch because of how bad it was, so they increased the server tick rate, and now they've increased the speed that mechanics resolve so you need to pre-dodge again.

We really came full circle, eh?