Server Tick Rate Is Holding the Game Back

[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.