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

[Fuz]

Because they are scared ?

There is no excuse they can give us that will work and they know they can't just fob us off like they did in phase 3.

The thing here is that they would have to basically rebuild the server infrastructure/netcode again (for the 3rd time) and I dont' think they have the time or money to do that, So I don't see this being fixed any time soon.

They will lose lots of customers this way. Don't know what's more profitable for them, rebuild the netcode or losing people.

I am part of a big italian gaming community, and they are all pissed. No one of them is subbing until they fix it. And this discourages other players that were thinking to try it.
And I think that not many will be back anyway, after a fix... they're playing and want to enjoy the game they payed *now*, not in a few months, also in the meantime they'll move to another MMO (ESO is coming, and it's not the only one), and I don't think you want to move back when you moved to another shiny new toy.

[CaldurSyx]

I'd Just like to add my 2 cents to this.

First of all, I think the issue, at least for the EU players, is that the servers are based in Canada rather than central Europe. No matter what techniques SE have set up to help with the latency, the issue of latency will always be there for as long as we have to connect 3-4,000 miles away to play the game.

As a result, I will not be paying for a subscription until this is fixed.

I really love this game, I enjoy playing it and the really nice difficulty 'setting' it has to it. I just can't put up with latency issues during intense boss fights, e.g. Titan Hard Mode.

[TerryBogard]

Me too, when is work avoid all AOE of Titan, is Lag for One Sec and I take Damage "Out" of the AOE. Canada>>>>Europe its very long latency, 222ms is to much.

[Sneakaboo]

If they didn't code in the 300ms you would not have a problem with the servers being in Canada.
At worst you would be playing with 150 to 250 ms instead of 450-550 which is pretty doable (still not comfortable though).

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

Clearly, the 300ms fixed timer is a real bugger. It's frustrating, it's sub-par with most AAA MMORPG, and it's clearly not the right way to netcode a game designed for high-level gameplay. I'm not sure I'll be interested in HL content if we wipe because of such a painstakingly high artificial delay. As it stands right now, many of my friends who would be able to avoid AoE are failing half the time, while "raging" because on their client "they were clearly out of the AoE". We even used fraps to confirm this together. It's good we don't "rage" for real, rather laugh at it together on our voice chat, but it's really frustrating. Especially in a game that has morbols for enemies.

Also, there is a strong inconsistency between clients: I would see myself hiding first behind some rock, and a friend would see the exact opposite, her getting to cover before me. The delay is way past several hundred ms. I don't think such inconsistency is acceptable for high-level raiding.

[CaldurSyx]

If they didn't code in the 300ms you would not have a problem with the servers being in Canada.
At worst you would be playing with 150 to 250 ms instead of 450-550 which is pretty doable (still not comfortable though).

I used to play Matrix Online and their servers were based in the US whilst I was playing in the UK. Constant ~150ms latency. It was the first MMO I picked up so I didn't really get a feel of how terrible it felt. Then I went and I played WoW and they had servers based in France for EU. Oh. My. God. The difference in how the game felt and played was like heaven and hell. I had no idea an MMO could play that well. Smooth as silk.

150ms is doable, but should in no way be acceptable. Especially for an MMO released in this day and age with so much competition.

[reality_check]

For those of you who are interested, I found this information on a MMORPG blog about netcoding and hopefully it can help you understand where your problems are coming from until SE gets around to fixing this situation:

When you move or attack or whatever, you send information from the server saying which way you're moving, what you're attacking, what gear you're equipping, or whatever. The server checks to see if the information is legitimate, and if so, records it into the official information on exactly where you are and what you have. If where the client claims you are at one point in time is close enough to where it said you were 100 ms ago, for example, the server will say, yeah, you could have moved there and allow it.

If the client claims you've warped halfway across the map in that time, then unless you used some warping game mechanic to allow this (which should have been in the information the client sent to the server), the server rejects it and says, no, you're wrong, you're really back where you were before, and sends that information back to the client. The server has to check a bunch of things to make sure they're legitimate. For example, the skill that you're trying to use has to not be on cooldown, you have to have enough mana or energy or whatever to use it, the mob you're attacking has to be in range, you have to have positive health (i.e., not be dead), and so forth. The client tries to check such things as well and reject illegitimate moves much more quickly, so usually the server checks won't kick in at all. But if you're using external programs to alter information in memory to change what the client thinks is legitimate, the client won't reject some illegal moves. The server has to check as well to prevent that sort of cheating.

The copy of the information that counts is the one that is on the server. If you try to move forward and the client thinks you can, it will show you moving forward immediately, while the information that you just moved forward goes to the server. If the server accepts the move as legitimate, it gets recorded into the official copy of the server information. If not, then when the server says, no, client, you're wrong, here's the correct information, the client updates its own copy to match what the server just said, and then displays that information accordingly in the game window.

This is where FFXIV is killing us. It's not extrapolating our movements enough when we move out of an AoE. The server should predict what the client is going to do. This is why we end up out of the AoE but dead a second later when the server check comes in and says: "no, you're bad,"

Meanwhile, the server is doing this for all of the other players in the area, too. The information it sends you to say where the other players are is wherever they are as recorded in the server information. If another player has altered the client information so that his client is out of sync with the server, you don't see that, but only see the official information from the server. The server has to constantly send updates of where other players are standing, which skills they're using, how much health they have, and so forth, and then your game client updates that information as it arrives from the server.

What it really has to work with, however, is not exactly where other players are right now, but where they were recently, say, 100 ms ago. From that information, it tries to guess where the are right now and display the information accordingly. If it knows that a given player was at a particular spot 100 ms ago and moving in a particular direction, it guesses that he's kept moving in that direction in the meantime and posts where he is now. If it knows that he was 370 ms into activating a particular skill 100 ms ago, then it guesses that he's 100 ms further along into activating that skill and displays the animation appropriate to that.

When the next server update comes, the client finds out if it guessed right, and if so, it looks perfectly smooth. If it guessed wrong, then the player may warp a bit to move him to the correct location. For example, if he had stopped and turned around just after the server sent the information on where he was, then the next time you get the information, the correct information of where the other player is will be slightly off from where the client guessed. Games try to smooth this out, but if your ping time is high enough, there's going to be a bit of jumping around.

On the other hand, the game server knows exactly where NPCs and mobs are. If it wants to, it can usually predict where they will be far enough in advance that, if so inclined, it can make sure that the client guess is nearly always correct, so long as you keep the ping times down. For example, the server could say, this mob is moving this way right now, but it will turn left in 50 ms, so that the client assumes that the mob will do that and displays it correctly. It will still be wrong sometimes if it finds that another player has knocked the mob down, interrupted it, killed it, or whatever shortly after sending you the message. I'm not sure whether games try to do such prediction of telling you where mobs will go, and it could easily vary by game. But it would allow displaying what mobs do to be much smoother than displaying what players do. It's also conceivable that that sort of information could be used to cheat slightly, so games might shy away on that basis.

Displaying mobs for you is going to be smoother than other players anyway, as when the server sends information on other players to you, the information is already a little dated. If right after it sends information to you, it gets information saying that the player has stopped and turned around 50 ms ago, it accepts that as the correct information, but takes a bit of time to send that information to you. Apart from mobs getting knocked down, killed, or whatever, the server always knows exactly where they are with no delay.

Where things really get out of sync is when you have Internet lag. An update on where the server said various things are might not make it to your computer at all. Or it might make it there, but take two seconds to arrive. When the client has to try to predict where things are based on where they were 1 second ago, rather than 100 ms ago, it can be far more wildly wrong, which leads to far more severe rubber banding.
The client knows when its information is very outdated, so if it hasn't gotten an update in long enough, it will give up on trying to predict. I'd assume there is a time stamp of some sort saying not just, here's the most recent information on where mobs are, but here's when they were there, too. How games handle this varies greatly from one game to another. Some will assume that everything has stopped and won't let you move. Some will show everything else stopping but let you keep running around and just rubber band you back later. Some will show mobs keep moving in the same direction as before, even when it's obviously ridiculous. After some length of time, if the client hasn't gotten further updates, it figures the connection is simply gone and removes you from the game world entirely.

When the server rejects the client's claims of where you're standing and says, no, you're really over there instead, the client rubber bands you back. This can be for complicated reasons, such as that it looked like a path was open at the time and the client let you go through, but then the server found out that another player moved into the path and blocked you, but the client didn't find out soon enough and let you go through, and then when the client says you've kept on running, the server says, wait, you couldn't be there, so it sends you back to the last place that it knows that you were. Then the client has to warp you back, too, so you can get a big instance of rubberbanding even without that high of ping times, because it took a lot of sending information back and forth to catch what was illegitimate.

There are some things like how much damage a hit does or what loot a mob drops that the client presumably won't even try to guess. The server has information that this player is trying to attack that mob, accepts it as legitimate because he's close enough, computes the damage on the server, and then sends that information to everyone else nearby.

The server usually only sends you information on what's going on near you, in order to limit bandwidth usage. What's going on near you is the only thing that would display on your screen anyway.

[Menubrea]

I used to play Matrix Online and their servers were based in the US whilst I was playing in the UK. Constant ~150ms latency. It was the first MMO I picked up so I didn't really get a feel of how terrible it felt. Then I went and I played WoW and they had servers based in France for EU. Oh. My. God. The difference in how the game felt and played was like heaven and hell. I had no idea an MMO could play that well. Smooth as silk.

150ms is doable, but should in no way be acceptable. Especially for an MMO released in this day and age with so much competition.

World of Warcraft have without a doubt the most responsive combat controls among all MMO's currently on the market. Comparing these two games and it's not even a contest, it's a slaughter. Much of WoW's success can be credited to it's incredibly crisp controls, just like this game might end up doing less than favourable unless they do something about their lack of it.

[WhiteWings]

I've got about 140 ping to the server and I manage to get hit by aoes when I'm nearly finishing a 2.4 second cast outside the aoe area. Specifically Titan HM push.
It hurts to see this even more since other aoes like Ifrit or Titan eruptions seem to have nearly no lag in comparison.

[Dastard]

The reason community reps are replying on threads with 2-3 pages is because this is a no-no topic for them.

I saw it all through the beta. If it's a huge gamebreaking issue, they're not allowed to comment.

It's not the Community Reps, it's the higher-ups who are taking their sweet time to answer.

Which would be Yoshida.

Unfortunately, seeing the Community Reps comment on silly topics while big ones like this are left unanswered is really the worst kind of customer service any company can provide.

It's akin to going to the store and asking someone in blue vest where the brown sugar is and them saying "That's not my department".

SE is the KING of "That's not my department".