Sorry SE, but endgame won't work if you don't fix something.

[reality_check]

PREFACE: Square-Enix, there is absolutely no way this game will work out as a wise investment for you or for your players if you do not fix some serious issues in your net coding. The players are baffled how the game was released in this state and continue to be baffled that there is no absolutely word on what will happen. The subpar (in comparison to many, many other MMORPGs out there) net coding makes unenjoyable play in the following aspects of the game:
-Strategic movement to avoid being hit by AoE.
-Interrupting enemy abilities.
-Twitch activation of instant cast abilities (e.g. benediction, hallowed ground, interruptions etc...) to situations that were not foreseen by the player.

There is absolutely no way that this major flaw will be accepted by the MMORPG community after the hype if this game wears off.

--------ORIGINAL POST-------------

If Titan is any hint about how the rest of the endgame is going to be, I'm out. I love this game but I'm just going to stick to levelling or gathering or more care bear stuff.

Why? Because I can't dodge the @#$%ing AoE. After hours of practicing in the duty finder and then going in with my free company I still failed over and over again.

Call me slow, I don't care. I don't think I'm slow. 80% of the time I made it. The other 20% of the time, I would think I made it, but then BAM WEIGHT TO THE FACE.

What makes it really frustrating is, you don't know if you've successfully dodged the weight until a second after the AoE goes off. In every single other MMO I've raided in, there's no ambiguity in the AoE. You know when you've been bad.

Then I tried to react before the weight actually casted. It worked the first few times but then I just ended up running into other people's weights.

EDIT: Thanks to the person who added this link to the discussion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4T...ature=youtu.be

EDIT: Thanks also to the person who added this link to the discussion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfu0i89gpI

EDIT: Another edit for the person who added this link. It's not Titan, but it shows how frustrating the AoE dodging in this game can be.
http://youtu.be/6vxn2Q2pv3o

EDIT: Please take a look at these two clips as well that demonstrate the disconnect between the client and server when dodging AoE:
http://www.twitch.tv/sunarierymshek/c/3084552
http://www.twitch.tv/sunarierymshek/c/3084630

EDIT: Thanks for the videos everyone, here's another.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg33BjzwLWw

EDIT: The evidence continues to grow...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOyUvYJZQ3I


Please like or bump this thread if you are having a problem with this issue. We have to communicate to SE that we're not happy with the current net code/engine design that is causing this game to lose its appeal very fast.



----------COMMUNITY FEEDBACK----------

Don't know whose idea it was to place 90% of the game's difficulty on AoE avoidance when the game doesn't provide an acceptable connectivity service. I mean, it's kind of uncanny. This game has probably the highest emphasis on urgent AoE dodging out of any MMORPG in the history of the genre, and it also has the worst connectivity service of any since the EQ/DAoC days. You need to either provide the infrastructure required to play your game or you need to design your game to accomodate the sub-standard infrastructure that you provide. You can't go in opposing directions on those two points. It's a self-evident disaster.

I don't have fun with the endgame here. I come away frustrated due to AoEs being overly difficult to dodge because of asinine limitations. 300ms. By design. I'm still unable to believe that nonsense made it to launch. That's just pathetic

Sadly, I have to agree with this. The current situation with AoE is ridiculous. What I find myself often doing is praying that I don't get hit by AoE even though I'm definitely out of the area in a timely fashion already. This is so frustrating

I want to know if they intend to fix it or are they just gonna stay with the copy paste 1.0 server code and its problems and pretend its the players fault.

Yeah there are alot of people claiming that there isn't a problem at all.
Are you telling us that they designed these bosses like this? where we need to actually predict every skill he will cast and move even before he does it?
If that's a true intended gameplay mechanic then that is pretty retarded. Whoever came up with it should feel bad.

I have 50ms latency and I have to time it perfectly to not get hit by stuff on the ground. And when I do get hit for some reason it does not show that I have been hit for about a second after the cast bar dissappears. Mr all pro video game player please teach me how to avoid a 400ms latency. I guess I have to avoid latency harder. There was something similar than this in SWTOR and it was fixed about a month after release. This is a problem it's just fanboi's cant see it. I have been raiding in MMO's for years and have never had a problem avoiding red stuff until this game. There are numerous threads about this, it is not just a select few having an issue with this.

I disagree. I know the pattern; I've clearly been out of range and have still been hit. It seems to be about 50-50. The fact that your success or failure in this battle is based upon latency issues with a server is a huge problem. That's not skill-based for people, it's a matter of luck.

Titan HM is THE fight that shows how clunky,outdated and messy aoes,positioning and mechanics are in this game.

I have had that happen to me, and I have witnessed several instances in which there is a 1-2s delay between Titan's cast ending and someone suddenly going flying. In the end, like another poster said, I got around this the vast majority of the time by continuing to run until after the animation for the attack ended -- but even that wasn't perfect.

I have an excellent connection and have played WoW and FFXI for many years with no problems at all. Yet with FFXIV, I find the abilities off the GCD to be non-responsive to the extreme and Area attacks almost impossible to avoid, as well as it being impossible to stun anything.

Sincerely hope this gets fixed (And/or, is even possible to fix) as were it not for this I would be enjoying the game immensely. However, as it is, it is just unplayable.

On a core, fundamental level, World of Warcraft works. If you push an attack, that attack happens. If you run to a spot to avoid an AOE, you avoid that AOE. If a boss starts casting a spell and you press an interrupt, that interrupt happens instantly and successfully every time. WoW has a fluidity and responsiveness that a many recent high-profile games (TOR and ARR especially) simply lack.

How any development staff can sit down and say "Let's make a hotkey, tab-target MMO" and then expend zero effort in nailing combat absolutely boggles my mind. WoW exists. It's easily accessible. It's free until level 20. Have your devs play it. If your WoW-like game feels sluggish and laggy compared to WoW, then you need to start over. You don't release a game with a similar monthly fee while offering what is clearly mechanically inferior to WoW. The final kicker is ARR even managed to have a terrible tab-target system, too! How do you even mess up tab-target? How?!? SE knows, apparently.

Australian here. As a player I enjoy a challenge, and would welcome Titan HM or any hardmode boss as long as I know that if I looked like I dodged it, I did dodge it. It's harrying whenever I dodge that *Insert One Hit KO/Super Heavy Damage* ability I have to hold my breath and wait to see if I really dodged it or not a short while later. I know that being a player of the Oceanic region places me in an MMO blackspot, but I've played multiple other MMOs with their challenging content and I've managed just fine with a 250-315 ping. Playing the boss fights in this game forces me to see into the future, which is manageable in content with a recognizable pattern, but eventually this will change if they hope to keep content entertaining no? They can't keep the dance going forever.

Imagine a fight like Titan HM with no step by step move-set and he just chose to do everything completely random, relying on players to react then and there to every ability. It sounds like fun to me, but it'd be hell on players like me and others affected.

Point is, I congratulate those players who have adapted to this current situation, but if SE wants to vary their content in the future by moving away from the 'dance style' boss fights this particular roadblock needs to go. It affects player accountability in fights by forcing them to constantly question whether or not they have played their part based on the whims of the server, rather than by their own ability.

The thing I've noticed with Weight of the Land is that if I tried to do Titan during peak hours (7pm - 1am EST) I would have sporadic issues with getting out of it. [...]Titan HM was frustrating in ways that perhaps no boss in any game I've played has ever been because there was such a disconnect between when I thought I was failing and when the game thought I was failing. And people offering "just move predictively" as a solution, I notice, are almost universally non-caster classes. I am glad that works for you; it is not tenable for everyone.

The majority of people saying there's no problem seem to make the case "I can avoid it, therefore everyone else must be bad."

It's weird that you can be good at split-second reactions yet lack the perception to notice all the very real problems the OP is talking about.

I dodge everything. My FC is done with Turn 4. I am very good at this game. I also notice and acknowledge the massive coding lag, poorly synced spell/cleave animations, delay in other player animations, constant "you are too far away" messages on moving targets unless you're half a foot in front of the mob, etc. All of those problems exist, as well as the "instant abilities are only instant as long as you don't interrupt a precious attack animation" mechanic. Makes interrupting things really fun.

Overall, the responsiveness in this game is garbage, and if they release PvP while the game is in this mechanical state, it will be the most widely criticized and laughed at attempt at success since Diablo 3.