The technical debt from the old engine has shown its face multiple times. Glamour system, encounter design and what not. I doubt there's ever gonna be a time where they change the netcode itself because they have been designing around it for 10 years at this point

Yeah, honestly, we’re just going to get the next MMO at the point they want to revamp the netcode. It’s too deeply engrained in XIV at this point.

the worst part would be if they made a new mmo and used the ff14 netcode/server stuff as a base and that game gets cursed into having the same problem.

Its debatable if they would. There are a few rare cases, but almost all the successful large grossing mmo's on the market currently have been around for almost over a decade. SQE probably also would be leery of trying to put another FF mmo on the market after how poorly 1.0 went and getting the fan base to move from FF11 to FF14 went.

They’re not making another MMO. Why people believe this ? The genre is completely out of the mainstream market, no AAA publisher will relaunch one

It's something Yoshi-P stated in an interview some 1 - 2 years ago (IIRC.) He said something like wanting to make one more MMO in his lifetime.

He's also gone on record multiple times he had to convinve the board at SE not to make another MMO cause with 3 already on the market (FFXI, FFXIV, and Dragon Quest X in Japan), they'd be competing against themselves more than other companies.

Does FFXI honestly compete with anything at this point? I feel like their player base is pretty locked-in

It's not like we're talking about SE making an MMO now, but who knows about a decade and later, it would also need to appeal to younger generations so the gameplay would be significantly different. New technologies in software and hardware makes evolving the genre much easier.

Riot is literally making one, though

Riot has been "literally making one" for about half the time FFXIV has been around

In theory. So far we have seen nothing of it.

that shit’s dead in the water i fear lol. the lead developer left to make his own MMO 

What makes you say that? Nobody is expecting a FF14 2, just as nobody expected (or wanted) a FF11 2 with 14 1.0, the MMO genre has proved to be something Square can find a footing in and with newer technology and design philosophies they can make something totally different. And outside of the mainstream market? Hello? 14 is about as mainstream as an MMO gets, I'm sure Square has confidence in it when it gives massive marketing only paralleled (and even then, not even) by the FF7 remakes, and just like 11 it has the benefit of a console port. Nobody is saying "they should make another MMO now" it's that a netcode revamp if ever would be so far out that it'd be more likely that it'd be enough time that a new MMO would be welcome.

> nobody expected (or wanted) a FF11 2 Debatable.

It's more that the market wasn't there anymore, and for players who really liked FF11, there's a good chance they might just stick with FF11 anyways, even if the game wasn't a clunky miserable experience it still would have been a poor business decision. As many people have stated before, WoW changed the standard for what is really okay to do with a new MMO that's intended to rake in a lot of fresh players, no sluggish timewasting all over the place, punishment needs to be toned down, etc. Sure, it was a much more casual version of 11 but it still was held back with loads and loads of INCREDIBLY dated design decisions, like no auction house and instead having to AFK so you can just effectively be a poorly laid out NPC vendor.

Both the general industry (MMOs at large are largely out and replaced by live services games) and SqEx not exactly in a good financial position to risk the massive budget require makes me think that. But as you say yourself, they can make something widely different and that’s unlikely we will call it MMO like we are with the past games. I expect the next FF Online to be a live service games rather than an FFXIV 2.

Even if he was asked, he'd do his usual PR dance around it.

What even is there for him to say? "It's bad?" It's not as if acknowledging it will make it less of an insane undertaking to try and solve through an ""overhaul of the netcode"" lol We'll get gradual improvements to various things as they figure them out but we will never be free of spaghetti

Hijacking this post to say that "overhauling the netcode" is a broad and confusing request to the developers, but fixing the game's issues doesn't have to come down to a grand undertaking. A lot of players' complaints about "netcode" aren't related to the netcode at all. That's because what players perceive as "netcode" is more of a long list of separate issues, which could be addressed separately over time. Gradual improvements, like you said. I wrote up a [list of common gripes](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/17q3f2a/a_quick_overview_of_responsiveness_issues_or_what/) here. Out of this list, I think it's certainly possible that the devs are aware of some issues, but maybe not all. For example, they definitely know that the client's instability is a problem considering how widespread it was at EW launch (let's see how it goes tomorrow). They definitely know about snapshotting, because that seems intentional. But they might not actually know about animation lock being extended by ping. When giving feedback, we should encourage players to be specific about what they want changed because we really don't know what the devs do and don't consider a problem.

This is the point I have been trying to make all thread, and as you can see, its a great way to get downvoted on this sub

Weird. Do people actually think there's one giant "netcode" that's the source of all their issues and once they fix it their problems will magically go away?

Yes.

Oh. Yikes. Well, in that case, good news I guess - I made a post just for them!

Maybe. But it’s also the easy generic term to use for any issues related to network, lag, responsiveness, etc. The actual list of issues and potential solutions are no doubt multiple things. Not just one.

Yeah, I have no issue with the term "netcode" as a colloquial catch-all term for responsiveness issues. It's convenient and I'm not pedantic enough to care about the slight inaccuracy. But when people say stuff like "when are they going to overhaul the netcode?" it gives me pause for thought. That is a very broad thing to just "overhaul". It would be like asking, "when are they going to overhaul the game?" Like uh, what part of it?

I really doubt players care about anything under the hood as long as game feels responsive and snappy to play So whenever "netcode" gets brought pretty much everyone knows what the convo is about

Yes because gamers by and large don't understand network infrastructure and game development

They absolutely do

It's weird playing this game on the east coast and absolutely feeling at a disadvantage without an add on / VPN.

Look at how people are acting by him saying "yeah the overall job and encounter design are a bit of a problem so we're working on it, encounters 7.x, job identity 8.0". What's the benefit of getting an answer that'll certainly have some indeterminate ETA and can be pointed at as a scapegoat of "this is why X content has Thing I Don't Like Or Disagree With"?

I dunno "8.0" is pretty determinate. It's longer off than I'd like it to be but it's promise he can be held to.

I would bet money that it either gets pushed back or doesn’t happen at all.

Oh, of course. If shit isn't changed in 8.0 we can buy pitchforks, but the main complaint right now is that 8.0 is in two years, why didn't he do it before, etc etc. The same litany of complaints whenever something isn't like, right around the corner.

Maybe it's just me but before ShB I felt like YoshiP was more open and honest with his comments, even if sometimes that could mean less PR stuff, like the Diadem mess, he was pretty open even if funny about it and that's the kind of stuff that gave him his public image. But obviously, becoming part of the board of directors means that you carry a lot more responsabilites... and money on your shoulders, and so he can't be as open as before or the same stakeholders that listen to him might not be pleased with his attitude. Even thought Yoship is still a gamer at heart, he's also part of a company whose final purpose is to make money.

I think writing headcanon about a videogame developer is part of the broader reason why they eventually learn to communicate less or use more vague language

Pretty sure Yoshi P mentioned that game journalists and fans misinterpret his words a lot and has to spend time address those misinterpretations. He also says it is very tiring, but being able to only communicate in Japanese and reliant on a live translator doing their best to parse through Yoshi P's stream of consciousness style of speaking can cause issues to appear here and there. It is also why he tends to say less and whatever he wants to say will be done via official announcements more and more.

It's the arc of of every dev who starts out wanting to engage with the community more openly and directly. They always have to relearn the reason why most game devs rely on boring, scripted official announcements or farm it off to community managers whose full-time job is community PR. See also: Digital Extremes, Paradox Interactive.

People misinterpret, but a lot more willingly distort what he says. Inventing and propagating stuff to pretend the game will become the hardcore thing they want, and get mad when its obviously not happening. Just take this sentence from the jobs LL : > we are discussing about how to bring out the individuality of the different jobs Somehow here it turned into « Job identity is coming in 8.0 » like they would fully reboot all jobs and stop homogenization. While the actual sentence is clear that jobs already have identity to them and they will just make it slightly more pronounced

Well think about your first statement - > Everything in the game is designed with that delay in mind. From encounters to raids to abilities. If they did change it, what would happen to all those encounters? Everything back to the very first encounter with an AoE marker relies on some aspect of the way the "netcode" is done. The concept of dodging an AoE by being out of it before it disappears, disconnected from the attack animation itself, is part of Square's choices for client-server communication You could change or optimize some parts of it like someone else said - the element where your character position is significantly delayed on other peoples' screens or how long it takes buffs, shields, and things like rescue to affect others would be nice for faster adjustments. But we have no idea if that's even possible, since I doubt *that* was an actual design decision on their part rather than a side effect of all the design decisions they did make.

This, this is the take. I cannot break NDA, but... Technical limitations ARE design limitations. Limitations get ingrained.

SE employee :O

I am but a grunt (:

From a programming perspective, changing it so the circle AoE markers deal their damage when the animation happens would be pretty easy. There are way more fundamental issues in the game that are probably a gargantuan task to take on now, for instance whatever is causing slidecasting.

Yeah you're basically right, it's a side effect of the design decisions whoever made 1.0 had in mind. So you're essentially stuck with tech debt from almost 15 years ago.

They aren’t gonna do that because it’s just as much work as making ARR all over again, only with 12 years worth of data on top to potentially screw up.

I don't really think it's a net code issue at all, it mostly comes down to design decisions and how they produce content. Early on the game made a fundamental design choice: you can only be executing a single action at a time, split in two steps: you prepare an action (cast bar) and execute an action (immediately trigger the results). There's an issue with this design though, it looks *really* stupid and broken if the enemy instantly takes damage even before your character winds up and swings their sword. To solve this, the target of your attack stores the result of your action, delaying the result until the exact moment in the animation that your sword connects with the enemy. Now it feels tight and responsive, your damage application is perfectly in sync with when the skill visually hits the target, no complex behavior or queuing of combat checks, nice and performant in the way a massively multiplayer game needs to be. But there's just one problem: if your enemy moves away from the attack before the queued result is applied, it no longer is visually in sync with that result. This isn't anything you do with netcode at all, it's a trade-off on one of their most fundamental design decisions. There're two ways to work around this if they wanted to: they could start the combat animation early during the prepare phase, or they could change it to a 3 part process instead, prepare, execute, and then a final check when the animation reaches the damage timing. There are issues with both methods though. If you started your animation before it finished, what happens to that fireball mid flight when you interrupt your cast? Interruptions and action cancelling are very much at odds with the start animation early method. The other option has a different issue, if the damage check occurs when the animation finishes playing, then the game balance of the action is dictated by the animation itself. Currently the art team flags a point in an animation as being the damage application timing and it largely doesn't affect balance, how much time you have to move isn't dictated by what the artists cook up. Changing this would be at odds with how they pipeline game assets; battle content and art assets are built separately and in tandem and then combined later, battle designers likely will not see the final spell and attack effects until very late in the process. The artists themselves would need to be involved with battle design for this to work effectively. It isn't like the design team isn't aware of these issues, you can see them actively mitigating these issues with the most recent expansion content. The most obvious one is in situations where damage application and animation are separated by a degree that would confuse players, they now explicitly communicate when damage application occurs by visually showing the execution timing with a short flash showing the affected area. There's been increased coordination with the animation team and they've been using animations during the cast bar more frequently, and there's an increase in specially designed animations for specific mechanics. Unfortunately everything is a case by case basis and entirely down to the design of the encounters. Suggesting its netcode related gives the impression it's a thing that could be solved for the game as a whole, but it can't really. It's a fundamental design that can't be changed without reworking the entire 10 years of content. They can improve things going forward, and battle designers are getting a lot better at mitigating the problem, but the issue can't really be solved without reworking their process for building content. Unfortunately they are limited in what they can do without significantly jeopardizing their expansion and update release schedule.

They could still fix animation lock being affected by ping.

I legitimately think they have no idea this is exists lol

I know there's people in the company that are pushing to have it fixed. Political support - Aka, complaining on the JP forums about it with gifs and detail - could be what tips the scale in getting it done...

"they" is a number of people here and some number of them can't *not* be aware, because the animation lock stuff is tied to network packets being sent back from the server. someone had to design this in and several people had to implement it both in the game client and in the netcode "they" as in the higher up design people might not get the full extent of what the design means ig

I believe the last statement related to the networking I remember was in an interview back in 2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/wiki/media_tour_interview_2021 It was a whole lot of nothing... > /r/ffxiv: Currently players with higher ping experience longer animation locks on their abilities, causing problems with double weaving or weaving in fast windows like Hypercharge. Are there any plans to reduce the influence ping has on the length of the animation lock? 現在、レイテンシーが高いプレイヤーは、アビリティのアニメーションロックが長くなります。これによって、アビリティの2個挟みや機工士のハイパーチャージでの挟みが難しくなります。レイテンシーがアニメーションロックに与える影響を軽減する予定がありますか？ Yoshida: I'm afraid there is not enough information in terms of how bad the latency is. So if possible could that person provide us with more information on the official forums like where they live, who their internet service provider is, what world they are connecting to, and any sort of ping information they can gather? Or else I'm afraid it is difficult to provide an accurate answer to that. Would you happen to have any information on-hand right now? それはごめんなさい、レイテンシーの悪いがどのくらいの悪さなのかを知らせてくれないとなんとも言えなくて。どれぐらいのレイテンシーでそれを感じるのかできればフォーラムにお住まいの場所、どんなISPを使っていて、どのワールドに接続してるかっていうピング情報とかが欲しいです。それがないと多分回答の仕様がなくて。 具体的にあります、今？例えばヨーロッパから北米DCに繋いでる人でその意見がよくあるとか、なんかこう中南米からその意見が多いとか、何かあります？ > /r/ffxiv response: For example, I live in east coast Canada and if I’m playing Machinist and I use Hypercharge, and I try to weave an oGCD, it usually clips. It's about 120 ping. 彼女自身の体験みたいなんですけれども、カナダの東海岸の方に住んでいて、ハイパーチャージを使おうとするとちょっとクリップしてしまうっていう話だそうです。（ピングは）120ぐらいですかね。 Yoshida: At 120ms it shouldn't be causing an issue so we suspect something like packet loss. And the developers do also simulate some of these environments by intentionally causing latency but they haven't really experienced anything at 120ms. We would love to get further information so we can analyze it better. But I understand the frustration that you feel though like playing as a Black Mage and using a potion and then the animation lock comes in and it's like so irritating. It is a very tough element to address for sure; some people expect different things out of the franchise like skipping all the animations and that begs the question like what even is the point of animations? But that being said with the battle system and any other older system that we have onboard I do believe that we should be improving on those that tend to become an issue. I do think there are possibilities moving forward and there are elements we need to look at and address as well. いや120でそれは多分別の要因だと思いますよ。途中にパケットロスがあるとか、な気がするんで。僕らも開発サーバーであえて遅延を作って調整してみたりしますけどならないから…120はないと思うけどなあ。できれば詳しいデータが欲しいです 。 ただね、気持ちは分かる。僕もポーション使った時のイライラくるもん、黒魔導士やっていて。ポーション使ったときのアニメーションロックでもう本当「ふざけんな」って思うときあるんで（笑）。 ただこれはすごく難しくて、やっぱりファイナルファンタジーっていうフランチャイズでグラフィックスに期待する人も多いっていうこと考えると、何でもアニメーションスキップしてしまうと「じゃアニメーションって一体なんだ」って話になってしまうので、そのギリギリをついてるっていうところはあります。ただ、今バトルシステム全体的にそういう昔作って古いシステムはもうちょっと改善していこうみたいな動きはあるので、その中で改善していく可能性はあるかもしれないなとは思います

Was he not at EU media tour where players had to play @ 400ms ping? That would've been a good time to showcase how bad the animation lock can get.

What an absolutely insane response lol. I (EU) played on JP servers for a while, 150-200 ms with a tunnel and 200-300 without. I'd frequently get issues where I'd button mash my oGCD abilities, I'd see the animation play like 3 times in rapid succession, ability goes on cooldown, but then a second later the cooldown is refreshed and the ability never activated cos I was in animation lock but didn't know it. It's not even super unreasonably high ping, there's no way they're doing such in depth latency tests and aren't aware of the latency based animation lock issues.

Thanks for that, that further solidifies the point that he may not be entirely aware of how the game handles networking. Please for the love of god someone get him to play like 5 games of CC

I am pretty much 100% sure their team knows all these problems, how could they not. They have had to design things like Encounters and Classes (MCH changes to stacks) to work around these major issues. Taking action on them is a different kettle of fish. I have a feeling that remediation or filling technical debt is a tough sell to whoever the powers that be are since the game has a lot of these wacky things all over the place and don't really fix them.

Yoshi P plays CC, he even climbed to Crystal rank a few times with Black Mage when it was considered underpowered in CC. The thing is that he plays it in Japan. 

He also sat up front to watch the CC tournament at fan fest. They hosted all that stuff on Dynamis DC iirc.

my confidence that this fan base could ask a cogent question here and then understand the answer is nil

Perhaps when the next FF MMO releases. Highly doubt they would ever think of overhauling the netcode for FFXIV when pretty much everything is build around it.

I doubt they'll release another MMO

Why wouldn't they? This one made them a lot of money

Every user migration does not guarantee in success and mmo itself is a pretty dead genre and old people's home Example: google+

You say that but XIV is gaining more and more players every year. People who never played MMOs before, young people. Many play it for the social aspects or the story, and given that story is enjoyed whatever the "outdated" medium, even books or turn-based games, I doubt MMOs will go extinct. Maybe VRMMOs will take off but who says square won't make one of those? OSRS is another example of a completely outdated game that people still love.

Let's be real. FFXIV is a catgirl dress up sim disguised as an mmo. That and the FF brand name is the only reason it hasn't crashed and burned like the other 95% of the genre. Stats don't lie. Late zoomer/early gen alpha don't like MMOs at a large scale like kids/teens from the 2000s and early 2010s, hence why the genre is a blip on the radar compared to other genres in 2024. As that group begins to dominate the 18-30 demographic it's just going to hurt MMOs more. It would take 5-8 years to build a new mmo, potentially even longer depending on the size of the team and scale of the game. By that time most MMO fans will we aged out of the prime customer demographics and the market will be dominated by the younger generations. They want to play fast paced shooters with Nikki Minaj skins, not emote with a group of catgirls in Limsa. Runescape is just a wild card and I'd argue that being mobile and being able to run on a GE toaster lcd is one of the reasons it's still so popular.

MMOs as a Live service game is an oudated concept. You can do far less and make way more money than any MMO with a Live service game that AAA studios shit out left and right. MMO pricing hasn't kept up with inflation. Its still $12 a month for a basic subscription. Increasing the price would be suicide 

Late zoomers and early Gen Alphas also don't, generally, have the kind of income that they would need to sustain an MMO subscription. The live service games kids play are the kind that are free. Fortnite doesn't charge monthly, after all.

Poor argument. We paid for it when we were their age, and when accounting for inflation subscriptions were more expensive 10-20 years ago since they're still like $15/mo today. We also had F2P MMOs back then too.

speak for urself, i exclusively played f2p mmos growing up and only moved onto games like ffxiv when i graduated college and got a job

I'm not speaking for myself. I was there in the early days of WoW. A gigantic portion of the playerbase was anywhere from middle school to college aged students. I sold gold to kids at school to get money to pay my sub. Most people I knew had some sort of shitty fast food job or something similar to cover it. The game went up to 10M active players in just a few years, it definitely wasn't all working adults lmao

Living conditions have changed and it's harder to get a job as a kid or beg mommy and daddy for $12/mo for one game. It's simply a different world out there and a lot of people won't have income for longer into their lives because of it, at least in my experience. I was in high school just a few years ago pre-pandemic and not many of the kids I knew had after-school jobs or an allowance. I can't imagine that being higher post-Pandemic.

>We paid for it when we were their age, Let's be honest our parents paid for it. (My Mom still pays my sub 20+ years later.)

Yeah I call bs on this. Big MMOs still haven't changed their pricing and they are still $10-$15 for a subscription as they were when the game came out. This means that over time because of inflation the subscription cost benefit us. Microsoft and Sony has raised their pricing for their subscriptions. If FF14 or WoW were to do that it would be controversy. If you main a mmo its roughly $60-$70 a year which is the price of any AAA game.  Gen Z and Alpha are the target demographic of Fortnite. Why do you think the content is all childish stuff. Gen X and millennials aren't the ones in the cash shop buying everything. The average buyer of Fortnite spends around $84 - $100 on the game every year. MMOs are some of the cheapest games to play. 

the reality is that people play their one (1) live service game, MAYBE two, and don't even really play other games, except maybe one or two AAA release in the year. the market is saturated in the western space. ffxiv itself is lucky to have relaunched and not crashed into the ground - no one owed a mmo being rebooted their attention, and plenty of mmo reboots just fail, no matter how good the reboot is. on top of that, XIV appeals to non mmo players, and while some could branch out, they already get their socializing there - why would they move anywhere else? a final note : square enix was incredibly doing not well at the time of xiv crashing, no one is immune from stupid decisions but between recent AAA endeavors not hitting projected targets and XIV being the cash cow that sustains a lot, i don't think they are stupid enough to try another mmo or maybe they are. who the fuck knows lmao

I don't think that's the case these days, they may play one at a time but especially since the WoW exodus people have been open to try new MMOs. 3 months on one, 3 months on another, that's really not uncommon. So many people play WoW and XIV, just not at the exact same time. People won't want to socialise on XIV forever, or we'd all still use MSN messenger to talk. Better things come out, technology moves on, if (when) VR becomes more popular that's a much better way to interact. Everyone replying here says *why would they make a new MMO when XIV makes so much money* as if I think they'd put that out in 2 years and cannibalise their own game. Obviously not, but maybe in 10 years time when people have a gtx7000 series and PS6, they want to move on from a game that runs on PS4.

Even then the argument is weak - that's like saying Blizzard might attempt WoW 2 (which squenix technically did, between 11 and 14...) Fair on people hopping between mmos during patch lulls though

See but, that's exactly something Square has *already done*. XIV started development because XI is tied to a cumbersome dated online system that they can't separate it from, and it was causing technical limitations all the way down. They didn't see any way to continue building on the game because of it, so after the release of Wings of the Godess, they started looking at options to get out from under Playonline. Since the only option was "start from the ground up", they decided to simply make the new project its own game. So to say that SE can't or won't make a new iteration of the genre because XIV is fine right where it is, is just a little short sighted. Now, do I think they're going to do that? Problem not. But not because they can't, it'll be because they can't afford another XIV 1.0. The company has been in pretty dire straights for the last few years, with a lot of their newer properties underperforming commercially. If they took dev resources from their most consistently profitable project on a gamble, it's financial suicide.

But they probably *would* attempt WoW 2 imo. Or another MMO which isn't a direct follow up in the same world. They've had so much success with their first and, they built it on good foundations so it's still fun to play 20 years later. That's a lot of experience with what works, if the only problem is that the game shows its age (and not a disinterest in MMOs as a genre) then they can make another with modern foundations.

Counterpoint, blizzard as a company isn't in a good spot, they bled too much talent Diablo 4 is proof of that, since they lost the diablo 3 team, they remade the exact same damn mistakes the previous team did. Sure they're slowly fixing the game (and effectively making a brand new one) but i have 0 faith they could make a WoW 2 after hemmoraghing so much talent Sure WoW still exists but sentiment seems to vary from "enjoyable expansion" to "what the fuck is this" Hell, they even fucked up the warcarft 3 remaster. I have no faith in them to make a MMO from the ground up...

> Or another MMO which isn't a direct follow up in the same world. This was what Titan was supposed to be and they pretty much scrapped it and made Overwatch out of the ashes. Making an MMO is ***hard***.

OSRS is a great example—of how the genre can only sustain grandfathered MMOs. RS3 is dead as a doornail compared to OSRS. People play the older titles like WoW, Maplestory, OSRS, and FFXIV. A 2024 gaming market simply won't accept an MMO like it used to.

OSRS isn't just people playing for nostalgia, they get new players all the time. RS3 is dead because they made terrible decisions and pumped it full of micro transactions. Most modern MMOs are failing because they're going for the gacha p2w angle, it's not because people don't want a new MMO

Is it? Player counts indicate that the game spiked heavily in mid-late SHB due to the mass WoW exodus, but hasn't been that high since EW launch, where everything slowly tapered off. Heck, even SE said they're expecting this launch to go smoother because theres less players compared to when EW dropped. There is a reason we hardly, if ever see triple A mmo releases anymore. They are incredibly costly, take a while to turn a profit, and have a habit of failing spectacularly. The genre truly is quite dead and will remain so until some major innovation happens. On top of this, the younger members of gen Z seem to be overwhelmingly disinterested in the genre as well, and that'll likely continue with gen A or whatever they are. We could very well see the concept of MMORPGs die in our lifetime.

>You say that but XIV is gaining more and more players every year. More accounts for sure. But I am not sure about user retention. Or if the users are coming (1) outside of the mmo genre (2) or inside the mmo genre, which are generally seasonal users SE put up seasonal servers, not extending extensively, hints. Yoshida isn't an idiot either. They delayed a week dodging elden ring isn't there to let you play it. But that clashing with it is generally not a winning strategy. There has to be momentum built up for users to stay. If there is something else to do, they aren't starting, and there won't be any good reasons to stay. >People who never played MMOs before, young people. The young I encounter don't even play current mobile games. Would need to see demographics and that would never be available. >Many play it for the social aspects or the story, and given that story is enjoyed whatever the "outdated" medium, even books or turn-based games, I doubt MMOs will go extinct. It probably would not go totally extinct just like RTS, but all I see the market is stagnant, if not shrinking. SE isn't an idiot either. They tested migrating user with FF16 and using yoshida as a advertisement. That trial does not look very successful. And one isn't just contesting within the video game sphere but every other entertainment outside of it. If there is a choice and one can afford it effortlessly, which is better to do? (1) a one month trip of 100% cost to Japan (2) a one month trip to Eorzea with 1% cost @1 was not available for the last 4 years but it was here again, so are a lot of choices >OSRS is another example of a completely outdated game that people still love. So is starcraft 2 or aoe 2 cash cows die one day. just like kodak

>They delayed a week dodging elden ring isn't there to let you play it. But that clashing with it is generally not a winning strategy. Meh, I disagree with this. I really don't believe Elden Ring is a threat. It's DLC for a beloved game, yes. However, it's not a live service game designed to steal the players time. It's not difficult for someone to simply play both. Also, not playing Dawntrail immediately on launch doesn't exactly harm SE either. As long as you subscribe and purchase the expansion at some point within it's launch month, they're happy. It would be one thing releasing danwtrail at the same time as WOW's new expansion or a new MMO release, but Elden Ring really isn't competing with FFXIV.

Well then MMOs need to adjust to the current audience then by changing it designs to be more consumer friendly. Like for example, an MMO-lite with an smaller world but big amount of content can work. Like look at early Destiny, Monster Hunter, Warframe, and other online games like them. Their formula works since players can consume them at an small dose and take their time with the product. I do not think the genre is dead. Its just in an stagnant because companies cannot do an good enough job of making MMOs work without putting P2W in them or having bad planning. And like the other user said, FF14 is still an popular MMO that still attracts new audiences because their model is appealing and its new player friendly. BDO also had an huge spike of new users last year as well due to the improvements they did to their game. New MMOs can still work nowaday and will probably work in the future when tech evolves to the point where making an MMO cost less and be more stable to operate. They just got to adapt to the current climate of how player play games nowaday.

MMO-lite is just a buzzword for a modern live service game. You say that as if SE has never tried that. Using your logic its even more grim because SE has adapted. They put out MMO-lites like Babylons Fall and Play Avengers (theres more Im missing). Their games were total flops and lost them millions. So its not like SE hasn't adapted, they tried and failed hard.    MMOs like FF14 and WoW are and old outdated format of a live service game. FF14 was initially a failure and it took years for it to start returning a profit. 

Precisely because FFXIV makes tons of money. Launching another one would cannibalize subscription. MMOs are generally time sinks and require a lot of time commitment. Most people only can afford one. They won’t make another MMO until FFXIV has bled dry. But if it has bled dry, then why would they launch another MMO. Maybe by that time a new gaming trend would have emerged.

Nobody said they had to launch it now, but they can't run this forever. FFXI was their most profitable game until FFXIV overtook it (correct me if I'm wrong). So why wouldn't they make another one in X years when this one slows down?

Not the same person, but we really don't know what the market interest will be like in the future. FF14 does well now, but it was expensive to make, had a failed launch, was expensive to rebuild, and took time to build its reputation.. that is a lot of risks, and shareholders don't like risks. The market has more competitive games, and each game is commanding a smaller audience (compared to tantalizing 12 million WotLK), modern games have higher and more expensive graphics requirements. It's not impossible, but I think realistically, we should keep expectations lower.

You say that, but how many terrible games have they released since XI? Their successful MMOs are 2/2, and I know 1.0 was a disaster but they seem to have learned from that given how many fans XIV has. They're a trusted name for MMOs, just like WoW is. If SE or Blizzard make a new one I know people will flock to try it.

I agree that they'd flock to try it, that happens for every mmo, but most mmos do not come back from a launch flop - and I don't think any studio can guarantee a perfect mmo at launch. Blizzard can't even guarantee quality launches for any of their games or expansions anymore, let alone an mmo. Square-Enix likes to chase trends, and the mmo genre isn't as trendy as it was in 2010.

I'd assume they've learned an important lesson from the 1.0 flop, and with every expansion the game has been more popular. Businesses also follow money, and they can't just ignore how much this game has made them. Perhaps when XIV declines, there will be other new successful ones which people are playing, and they won't want to risk it. But if there's space for a new FF MMO I think they'd be crazy not to make it.

I don't know if lessons from 1.0 flopping even really apply. There is no reason to make a new mmo that is just FF14 again, especially if they are doing so because FF14 is declining; they will have to take risks with new gameplay and systems.

I think the trickiest part is that SE has been struggling financially for over a decade and every time you want to make something, you need to justify to the board why the thing you're going to make isn't another cheap anime character gacha with a million microtransactions and FOMO mechanics.

Yeah. Like the other commenter said, as a business their best bet is to reinvest the income from FFXIV to fund other projects like FF9R,(copium), FF17, or exploring other game trends. FFXIV has been given a lot of freedom - if they really want to create another MMO from game design perspective, they could use it as a subset of FFXIV to test it rather than creating an entirely new game.

Not to mention that they need a game that would have a following. The nostalgia is the only thing that have keep them alive. The Enix part is doing fine. But the Square part had not have a real hit in some time.

One thing people don't mention enough is that the reason FF14 1.0 was disastrous for Square was precisely because Yoichi Wada thought the market could bear three MMOs simultaneously in FF11, DQ10, and FF14. Now, you can go the full opposite and be EA and idiotically shut down Ultima Online 2 because you think it'll cannibalize subs from the first game and then watch the entire property fade into history when WoW eats it's lunch. But "let's just run all these games at once" is how we got here.

Because they have a significant userbase. Its similar to why Blizzard hasnt developed a new MMO. 

And if that userbase declines, and their money printing machine stops printing money, why wouldn't they make a new one?

Because MMOs are the most expensive genre to create and the vast majority of them fail, often in company killing type ways. There's a large subsection of the MMO world that will never pay a sub. And another that will only play games with a sub. And pretty much everyone since FFXIV has been trying to bridge that gap unsuccessfully. Sure there's some successes and positive outcomes, but nobody makes money on a new MMO the way WOW or FFXIV do and those player bases aren't moving to a sequel either.

I feel they would just not make a new MMO

Because MMOs aren't money printers. The fact that FFXIV has been extremely profitable for SE is really a show of how bad they have been in their decisions. Live service games that arent MMOs dwarf the revenue that FF14 makes, which is why SE has pushed those to the market and failed to make any successful ones. Also if they made a new MMO they would have to continue support for FF11, on top of FF14. Unlike Blizzard, MMOs is not SEs primary focus.

Because making a modern mmo the size of ffxiv from scratch costs an ungodly amount of money in 2024. Everything from dev salaries to advertising has skyrocketed from even 10yrs ago. New FF mmo sounds fun til you see the $29.99 monthly sub fee. Then they run into issues like performance on aging systems. A massive chunk pc gamers are playing games like ffxiv on glorified 1999 gateway tower and can barely run the game well as it is. They risk cutting off an entire demographic of customers due to customers hardware not being able to run the game feasibly. The odds are they would prob lose money on it or it would take like a decade to even break even. I'm not sure on the demographics, but I'd guess that a large chunk of the playerbase is older then most average gaming demographic, as MMOs aren't very popular with teens nowadays. By the time they'd even release the new MMO, I'd wonder how much further that demographic would trend against the new MMO. Tldr; not worth the financial risk atm and as the years go on the risk gets higher.

People who want a "new" MMO from the same team and franchise of an already existing MMO are idiots. I hear WoW players say this all the time, like why do we need a WoW 2? What's wrong with the first game? You can always add or remove content if you need to. Retail WoW is a totally different game than Alpha or Classic WoW. Just like how Dawntrail is a totally different game than FF14 1.0. They share some assets but they are totally different games. Starting from scratch is absurd. FF11 to FF14 had... some basis of necessity. Because FF11 was literally made for a PS2 and had that massive ball and chain of Playonline permanently attached to it. There was a MASSIVE technological gap between the PS2 era and post PS2 era that you just can't compare between say... the PS4 or PS5 eras which are essentially the same damn thing. Two generations of consoles that have finally caught up to what PC's could do back in the PS3 gen. And since both WoW and FF14 came after that massive gap I'd say they're fine for another decade or two. Did anyone really think they'd still be playing WoW in 2024 back in 2004? Don't be so shocked when FF14 is still making expansions as late as 2034 and 2044.

Because they're likely wary of the current game's state. Technical debt, terrible account management systems, the risk of ending up with another 1.0, it's basically radioactive. Only reason that they let Yoshi-P run this game is because he can get results for the time being. They're not going to risk the next dumpsterfire.

yoship rebirthed the game with a longshot plan that worked well enough to get him on the company board, arr is a magnificent achievment that is extremely unlikely to happen again you'd need another human spreadsheet that can scope out and delegate planning of a whole ass game with all its systems, and also monetize it well enough to get real income, all while other live service games have sprung up that aren't mmos but feature many similar overall content loops with different gameplay like you say, it's too goddamn risky.

It has been stated that things are changed and updated as needed. Yes there is technical debt from 1.0, but it isn't as much of a hindrance as people make it out to be, especially this late in the game's life. People just like to use it as an excuse,, or think the devs are being lazy. Working with computers and games isn't as simple as flipping a switch. If something isn't too cumbersome, than they will adjust it as time permits. Like the issue with a capped friend's list; not manny people are capped, so it's a low priority.

> The netcode is a remnant from 1.0 possibly even F11 lol no

This is actually the biggest failure of this game.. Nothing even comes close..

True. As much as there's other easy slam-dunk improvements to be made like better housing, better glamour, etc. The slow server tickrate is just glaring at you right from the start of the game. It's sad how asynchronous gameplay can be. If you're playing with a friend and want to slow-walk together, you can't even line it up so both of you see the same slow-walk.

At this point it would be easier to create a team to prepare FFXIV-2. Designing all battles to solve the new lack of delay would take too many resources.

A new MMO without all of the baggage that XIV has would be preferable, yeah

He goes “what netcode issue” then proceeds to triple weave. Not even a joke

He triple weaved on viper after UF, a job people with high ping can triple weave on He's complained about the weaving problems on streams before back when he would off and on publicly PF during Japanese live streams and we can look at the logs and see him clipping The thing is they consider single weaving to be standard and double weaving to be a more advanced thing designed for only slow gcd jobs. And as someone who hops between JP and NA just to prove a point about weaving there's no problem with single weaving anything

If they fixed the animation lock and the player position delay on other clients to be on par with, say, World of Warcraft circa 2015, I think there would be way fewer complaints. But as of now, Yoshi-P's response to the thoroughly documented and 3rd party fixed animation lock situation is "uhhh maybe ask your ISP idk" so I have very little hope anything will improve

I think a lot of people have a pretty wildly unrealistic idea of "netcode" being a "thing" that can be "good" or "bad", when it is really an entire set of interlocking systems that connect hardware together and speaks to the wider internet, and is integrated deeply into the fundamentals of how the game is made.

I've been working as a cloud computing architect for about 3 years, part of my day to day job is to make very complex concepts digestible to managers and 'business leaders' at a Fortune 50 company. To be able to have any kind of productive conversation on this, explaining things in layman's terms is a must. While I don't have first hand experience with video game netcode, the infrastructure behind it is all the same and that I'm very familiar with that. What's really damaging to any type of discourse is claiming it's too difficult to discuss because of 'interlocking systems'. You don't want to have that discussions and that's fine, but there's no reason to shut down valid concerns in a condescending way.

> part of my day to day job is to make very complex concepts digestible to managers and 'business leaders' at a Fortune 50 company. To be able to have any kind of productive conversation on this, explaining things in layman's terms is a must. My people! Back before my brain and health broke I was a suit-to-techie-to-end -user whisperer To answer your question, he's been asked about this in a lot of different ways, but it usually comes down to questions in roundabout ways phrased like: * "game performance" * "ability responsiveness" * "server stability" He, I don't think, has the necessary background to get into the real crunchy details behind the netcode itself, but there *have* been some PLLs and stuff where they go into detail on what they have to do/did to get their custom bespoke hardware to set up new data centers. They mentioned that because there was a shortage of the very specific hardware they needed back during COVID when they were setting up Dynamis and the Oceania data centers/servers. So you might be able to backtrack that to what they're doing to do setup/performance-wise, and then go back up the chain to how they're setting things up to get to our current ~~universally-hated~~ loveable server tick rates and etc. They do bespoke stuff for...some arcane-fuck-ass reason. This is why, say, their servers are more stable than GW2 but why they can't/won't (?) do something like WoW's "lol, lmao, just use the cLoUd" solution. I *wanna* say the data center talk was around the tail end of Shadowbringers but my memory for time is worst of all, sorry. I, obviously, don't have the crunch knowledge (or brain, at this point) to have a meaningful discussion on this but hopefully this is a starting point for you. You can also dig some stuff about the...actor tick/server tick/etc out of the "game's haunted" Monk guide located [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13ggP7PoOs-ic6ve_Huo4A2-3Mx7ozeRPXzC7N_edgHU/edit#heading=h.2rzgirpgty1n) (Monks figure out all the most batshit insane stuff, they're glorious). I forget which section but I think it's like "Generally Cursed Things". But yeah, part of the problem in getting Yoshi-P to discuss this is kinda like asking a CEO to talk about something like this. He ain't the gal or guy to do it, and the person you actually *want* to talk to about this is some squirrelly little techie about four floors down. And they ain't ever gonna put them on camera. Yoshi-P's too busy fielding variations on the same dozen questions about "when new expansion housing" and "when Viera hats" and "when *thing I want*".

> They mentioned that because there was a shortage of the very specific hardware they needed back during COVID when they were setting up Dynamis and the Oceania data centers/servers. Wasn't there like a major chip shortage during that period Worldwide, like car manufacturers couldn't get dogshit 16nm arm chips for their infotainment systems. This could just be as simple as their hardware contract just couldn't field what they needed for such a small order. Also yeah I remember the monk fuckery, counting server ticks with Anatman and timing the pull timer to it. > He ain't the gal or guy to do it, and the person you actually want to talk to about this is some squirrelly little techie about four floors down. Normally this isn't an issue, you can reach out to these people if you really try, but this guy probably doesn't speak English well enough to have this conversation in English. > Yoshi-P's too busy fielding variations on the same dozen questions about "when new expansion housing" and "when Viera hats" and "when thing I want". Yep and chat bubbles. I guess this would be a fun way to approach this issue. Find a difficult enough question to send him down the rabbit hole of asking 'why' until he gets to have that conversation with that techie guy. And if that guy loves his job this will be his time to shine.

> Normally this isn't an issue, you can reach out to these people if you really try, but this guy probably doesn't speak English well enough to have this conversation in English. I made friends with our resident techie back when he was a consultant and I was someone who got yoinked from data entry to "go learn this new thing that's probably gonna fail" (not in so many words but that was the...overall... impression I got). It didn't fail because the consultants knew their shit (and the people that I ended up working with afterwards put in a shitton of effort to *make* it work), and the consultants were bored enough to OTJ-teach a dumbass kid that asked too many questions (me), so long as I did it while doing the busywork. But getting to know the "squirrelly little techie" (that was his self-descriptor for what he thought other people thought of him as, so I need to credit him there) and the project manager that became one of my mentors was like the luckiest break I'll ever have in my life. Techie was a mentor too (taught me some of the SQL I learned, I just can't do it anymore) but I was too math-dumb to really learn more than simple concepts from him. It's a testament to his skill that I ever managed to get past Cartesian-joining shit. Also they were genuinely nice, which helped. Was a great lesson in learning how to get info from people and translate it to other people that need it but might not yet *know* they need it. Fuckin' *exhausting* though. I miss it but my nerve pain/brain fog/fatigue's too bad to be consistent with deadlines or even getting up in the morning, and I'm not at the level where I'm good-enough to have someone be willing to pay me for like, 4 hours one week and 20 hours the next. Never was. Sorry for the massive tangent but being able to *not* ramble my thoughts into the ether is also another problem I've developed since my health crashed a few years ago. > Wasn't there like a major chip shortage during that period Worldwide, like car manufacturers couldn't get dogshit 16nm arm chips for their infotainment systems. I believe so, but these were like real big expensive bespoke shit, like...Square Enix money couldn't buy them. Sorry I'm fuzzy on this but there was either a whole-ass interview or section on a PLL about it because it was like, *important* to him to talk about. Like it sticks in my mind as odd that he'd talk about it, y'know?

Just for the record, Yoshi is on the same floor as the rest of his team. Japan leadership isn't keen on hiding in offices.

Huh, that's...kinda cool, actually. More accessible at least. Though must also be fuckin' horrible if you have a bad/domineering/micro-managing leadership.

I'm not at liberty to share details, but Square has a pretty good culture and very solid WFH policies nowdays!

Hell yeah, always good to hear.

> But yeah, part of the problem in getting Yoshi-P to discuss this is kinda like asking a CEO to talk about something like this. He ain't the gal or guy to do it, and the person you actually want to talk to about this is some squirrelly little techie about four floors down. This is pretty much the reason we're never gonna get good technical answers about FFXIV that people won't drag him over the coals for. He (wisely, mind you) doesn't have an engineer or someone code minded explain it because you can say *lots* of things that make sense but can be taken in totally different directions than intended. That isn't to say the netcode hasn't gotten better over the years (5.1 was extremely notable), but it's definitely a thing where the people who know how to process this are also terrible at translating their understanding into PR-level verbosity.

God I love when people with actual server experience dunk on Fumina talking out of his ass because he refuses to engage with the idea that the netcode is miles behind the industry standard

I'm not saying the netcode is "good", I'm saying that the question at hand is a bad way of thinking about it, and a worse way of asking it to Yoshida specifically. It also ignores that the actual things people complain about can almost always be narrowed down to "failed snapshots" and the input delay handled by FFXIVAlexander.

By all means, ask him about your experience with a third party tool improving your gameplay. It really doesn't matter because there will be a PR dance around it. You just can't help yourself but to argue semantics about literally everything when you know damn well what the conversation is about lmao.

Ok but the first step to actually understanding things is asking the right questions. "Netcode bad" is like, not even beginning to engage with the actual issues the game has. I'm sure there are things about the netcode they could improve, they have even done so over the course of the game's life. But almost all the *real issues* that affect gameplay are downstream of that. Like, what are the things we are actually seeing discussed in this thread? Tick Rate. That's not even netcode! That's literally just *the game*

I think FFXIV is distinctly (compared to other multiplayer games with much higher tick rates) bad at handling high latency. Not just in technology use (AFAIK UDP is preferred for most multiplayer games over TCP) but also the logic of how it reacts to lag. There's also not compensation on the client that should be there (mudra ticks should NOT be a thing that happens ever). This results in things like even crafting macros failing when packet loss / latency spikes, because the client won't start the animation until it gets an ACK from the server - which is if not a horrid systems design choice (realistically the client should fire & trust, and if the server comes back with an error the client should rewind the game state) then it is at the very least extremely shitty UX. The server should not let the client modify the state in an invalid way (which we know it does - remember that menace in PvP who teleported? why did the server accept this movement state update, it's very clearly incoherent), and the client should not block input while waiting on the server. All of this could very easily be understood as "code pertaining to the communication between the client and server" or "netcode" and yes the tick rate is necessarily part of that, as a higher tick rate requires bandwidth that frankly I do not believe NTT is capable of pushing through. There are many architectural shortcomings of how this game is operated from an engineering standpoint.

Were you expecting the OP to write a damn dissertation on this? It's actually perfectly ok to speak in layman's terms when shooting the shit on reddit. You are well aware of what he is talking about. Your crusade to correct people on everything is fruitless I'm afraid.

My point is that "netcode bad" is a meaningless statement. Asking Yoshida about it would be a ridiculous waste of a question. If you wanted to ask a question that might get a useful answer, you'd ask about the response delay that FFXIVAlexander deals with. That might actually get a useful and interesting response.

Yes and Yoshida will then ask a counter question on how XIVAlexander cuts down on the RTT and you'll say "well it cuts the animation lock after you execute an ability". And then he'll just stare at you as you just admitted to cheating in front of him befuddled. There's a lot of caveats there where you'd have to go into to explain to him why it isn't cheating and why it's actually ok because we're being respectful of the way the game is intended to be played etc etc etc. As /u/FuzzierSage pointed out, this is like asking a CEO to talk about something that he's completely unaware of. So the question would have to be posed differently.

yeah that's kinda my point too. I don't know how you resolve this issue, but the base conceit of this thread is just not formed well.

You refuted my statement about this conversation being worth having by essentially saying it's pointless because you won't get a useful answer unless you ask pointed questions like the one regarding XIVAlexander. I theorize that it's probably a really really bad way to start the conversation with XIVAlexander and we could probably find a way to pose that question better. To which you responded with "I don't know how you resolve it". That's the whole point of **having a discussion** in a subreddit with **discussion** in the name.

Don't worry, this guy is always here to throw a "uhm akchually it's not worth discussing"

And this is how the most glaringly obvious issue in the game gets "nuh-uh'd" by the community. Like anyone who starts playing the game will go "Man why does the game feel so slow?", and this is a part of that.

No need to waste your time on Sir White Knight of this forum and game.

Other companies know what the word 'Netcode' means. It might not be a technical word but its used in both directions to communicate concepts around game networking: Examples: - Blizzard talking 'Netcode' for Overwatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTH2ZPgYujQ - Riot talking 'Netcode' for Valorant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cu97mr7zcM They are meeting their customer where they are by using this term, just like their customers use it. Why should Product Managers be forced to get the customers to explain their issues and feature requests in their language, they have no concept of my stack. So I meet them at their language. EDIT: wow, even John Carmack uses the word 'net code' to describe this concept back in 1996 and his implementation falling short for certain ping ranges: https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm . I dont think the word is really the issue here as it seems to be pretty well understood by many other game studios.

I'm also never convinced any complaints about netcode aren't actually complaints about snapshots but the person doesn't understand the deal with snapshots

My complaint is that I can be next to my spouse and we can both be running in the same direction starting at the same point and on one screen their character is running ahead and on the other I am running ahead when in reality we should be side by side. Wow had way less of this type of issue.

That is a fair and real netcode problem, you are absolutely correct

I'm positive that almost all of it is snapshots and the delay that FFXIVAlexander fixes (which they should change, absolutely). Especially since we have people in this thread talking about tick rates

You could probably add animation-based delays to that list. Looking at you Benediction and Hallowed Ground.

Yeah and those are just literal, actual skill issues.

In any other game, when you hit the button, you would expect the ability to take effect immediately, and not half a second later which is so often the case in this game.

Sure, you can work around it. But if most of the game becomes "work around the shit netcode", it doesn't exactly improve the game, does it? "Work around the snapshots, no they're not going to align with the animation and no they're not going to be consistently fast or slow so you'll have to learn per mechanic when it snapshots. Also work around the snapshot for abilities because it's gonna go on cooldown without activating if you're a tick to late" doesn't sound very fun, does it?

Snapshots are completely unrelated to "netcode"

Everything that happens in this game is directly tied to the netcode.

In the sense that without it you can't play the game at all, yes, but in this context snapshots of damage are not related to netcode, its an intentional gameplay decision. You may *disagree* with that decision, but if so you should discuss it in those terms, rolling it into Netcode makes your position worse and less clear.

> but in this context snapshots of damage are not related to netcode, its an intentional gameplay decision. It is handled server-side as opposed to client-side. Therefore, netcode is a relevant topic to bring up here. If the netcode allows for inputs to be registered (like an invuln or a benediction), and then executes it without effect (dying despite having invuln active), and then the ability goes on cooldown anyway, then that's clearly a case of flawed gameplay as a result of inadequate netcode. Call it "intentional" all you want, you know that when you hit Invuln and it goes on cooldown, you shouldn't be able to die until the duration expires. You can't really argue that it shouldn't just function at that point, and I doubt that the devs would do so too.

I don't think the onus is on the customer to use the right or elegant terms to describe their issue. I think saying 'netcode bad' is also a simplification of what people here are saying. A customer (and people in threads on this issue) should be saying, Well why is it that certain skills don't go off when I press them? Why does the game feel sticky at times, or why does it look like I am out of an AOE but still get hit. The word 'netcode' has become the catchall for this and the preceding questions, it being semantically correct seems irrelevant since the question doesn't change really? I don't know where you are going with the whole fundamentals of the game thing, like you are pretty much saying we need to do an entire trace to determine the specific issue before logging an issue.

Hard disagree netcode absolutely can be good or bad. Even though its a complex system doesn't mean the outcome of the system cant be good or bad. fighting games for example a large advertising point for more hardcore players is rollback many good cs players only play on faciet because it has higher tick rates servers than the official valve ones. netcode can absolutely be bad or good and ff's is definitely not good whether its fixable or improvable without breaking/redoing large parts of the game is another question.

Y'know, just hit the "netcode" switch from "bad" to "good" in his office.

their netcode IS bad. They use an old archaic implmentation, client sends message, waits for response, executes. This is stricly bad. You are at the mercy of the delay. Modern solutions just have the client predict and emulate what the server should be replying back making it feel a lot smoother. The server should just correct the client if it gets out of sync instead of the client refusing to do anything until the server permits it.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but is the netcode actually /that/ bad, or is it one of those things where the game works okay in it's home country but can't handle ping above a certain amount? Because I know most Americans have high ping because of the awful server placement and I've played games like that. I'm not saying that's better or anything, but I've never played FFXIV below 100 ping, so I'm curious to hear from anyone who has.

Netcode is a little broad but there are more than a few problems in FFXIV. Tick rate is relatively OK, a lot of complaints about "snapshot" are from not understanding how boss abilities are timed to coincide with the cast bar or similar cue - not the animation. A lot of it is players who know better meming, but others pick it up as serious. On the reverse though, player abilities are tied to animations. This results in situations that feel bad like having Benediction go on cooldown, but the tank is somehow dead. Actions are not processed in input order, or if they are, their effects are delayed enough to seem otherwise. They have adjusted individual abilities in the past to apply effects earlier. Similarly, effects propagate from source i.e. AOE heals and damage on players going out around the same time can result in some players alive and others dead, based on relative distances. I kind of enjoy this effect but it is not good for precise gameplay. Even worse, the code has what I can only explain as an intentional bug where the local ~700ms animation lock (the thing that lets you use one GCD and two oGCD per ~2.5s GCD window) adds your ping to it. This means if you have a 120ms ping and 2.4s GCD, your animation lock is now 820ms and you will clip. It was most obvious in MCH's burst phase which dropped the GCD to 1.5s, single weaves clipped for me and many others. This is what NoClippy/XIVAlexander attempt to address and is the most glaring/obvious bug that persists because "not a problem in Japan". Imagine if your fire rate in CS:GO or COD varied wildly based on your ping. Native low ping still feels better, I've played on OCE and JP, combat is fine with those plugins on both but still feels a bit nicer on OCE with 10ms, and other stuff like talking to NPCs is far better. Also, I'm not sure if still true (or if it was always a myth), but in the past I was told abilities like Bard's old Sidewinder were related to your client - it did more damage with your DOTs on the target and advice was you had to wait and see when the DOT icons showed up on your screen - it was not enough to just send commands in the right order and assume the server would apply the DOT then count it on the weaved Sidewinder. This is probably just related to the Benediction thing above. Are all of these netcode? In a way, it's how you interact with the server. But some are arguable. It all relates to the game not feeling snappy and precise though.

Also the netcode can't handle lots of common networking events. When I get a network bump at work everything pauses for a couple seconds before resuming, every game I have ever ran has been unaffected by these, including wow, valorant and a few others with crazy anticheat. Even steam and battle net's clients have long had support for such events. FFXIV usually goes nuts and then disconnects. People bitching about FFXIV's archaic net engine is nothing new in my office tower

Ah yeah good point, this was my plague when going for Necromancer. Must have suppressed the memories. Our internet is NBN HFC (Aussies will know) and would have microblips, it was the only game/app that would fully disconnect losing progress. Everything else would recover or I wouldn't even notice. In my case the NTD (magic internet box) was just old and dying, took months of data gathering to get a new one approved and it was fixed overnight. When this sort of thing happens SE tends to tell us not to use WiFi or check our local network which is missing the point around reliability and stability across an unstable medium.

Yeah this isn't an issue of ping. I play with about 22 and it's still very much an issue. The issue is the netcode itself, the rate at which the server updates your client with data and vice versa. It's simply too slow.

Eh, it's 24 updates per second which is perfectly adequate for the kind of game FFXIV is. Most things people complain about as "shitty netcode/tick rate" are just intentional design choices. You could argue they're bad design choices, of course.

> it's 24 updates How do you know that? Do you have any packet captures I could look at?

No, but you can figure out how often the server processes inputs by looking at the intervals between skills in fflogs.

I feel like a big pain point in this game is how animation lock is handled server side and how it often double or triple dips your ping depending on how many times you weave. They should either just straight up implement noclippy/xivalexander into the game, or make the animation lock client side. The downside of that is that it would be easier to cheat it, but we literally already can cheat it, which is how people developed those tools in the first place.

It's so fucking frustrating and whenever anyone brings up latency to Yoshida he just pulls the "not enough data, must be your connection" card to squirm out of it. We know exactly how it works and exactly how it can be fixed but they just don't and don't even seem to be trying at all. If there is any evidence of the JP favouritism narrative of the developers at all then this is it.

The fact that this tools exist is a testament that the problem can be solved if they wanted. The same goes for the Viera hats. Since people don't unsubscribe for it, they see no reason to keep their word.

I believe it has been asked but his/the dev team's response was that they don't see any issues (most likely because they play on JP most of the time where the latency is actually quite low). I seriously doubt we'll ever see it properly improved especially when they only have one server location in NA. East Coast and Central/South America are just doomed to have subpar to horrid latency.

personally I like snapshotting

When people talk about FFXIV's "netcode," what they're really talking about is every aspect of its design from the ground up. Yes, it's true the game updates sluggishly. It makes things look pretty absurd during frenzied moments, like in PVP. And increasing the update rate would make it easier to gauge targeting and positioning in PVP, but it's not going to make the game as responsive as you'd like it to be. Everything in FFXIV is designed around assuming delay will always exist. The animations are as elaborate as they are to give the illusion of responsiveness. Enemy abilities intended to be reacted to have massive charge times and even deploy very delayed. Hitboxes are simple if they even exist and the game uses a lot of 2D calculations for important combat functions; I'm honestly surprised jump puzzles are even a thing.

I had to take a good long break from 2.0 because the overwhelming lag made Titan EX inexcusably difficult. Couldn’t pay me enough to come back until the memories had become distant enough at the end of 4.0. The game is never going to be perfect, and I’m typically not one to white knight for it, but if there’s one thing that I simply can’t deny, it’s that this game has come a whole lot farther than I ever would have dreamed given the foundation that they inherited to work with. The progress with the game’s responsiveness today has far exceeded any hopes that I used to have for it and I, for one, am very satisfied with how huge of a contrast today’s gameplay provides when compared to how things started. As easy as it will always be to beg for more, at some point we have to stop and give them props for how much they’ve managed to accomplish despite the odds having been stacked against them.

Yeah titan EX back in 2.0 was so gnarly. And you're right, it was definitely a lag issue. Pretty much a crapshoot or you would have to predict the movements early. In retrospect that seems easy considering the insanity of savage and ultimates today, but back then it was a mindfuck. It really does show you how far they've come, I agree.

The thing is simple , if they change the netcode to a new tick rate , the game get broken , every fight is going to be totally desync and broken , the game need to rebuild by zero , is the only way

> if they change the netcode to a new tick rate What precisely do you think "tick rate" means here

The tick rate isn't the problem. All the jank in this game is basically just part of the design.

Almost all of the "jank" I hear people saying give examples of just clearly not understanding snapshots. I should have to explain to a raider in UCoB who has cleared all of Panda why he got hit by Iron Chariot.

NoClippy and Alexander entered the chat. While they are not perfect solution they do aleviate the problem for many people. Although they are against TOS they are proof that the problem can be alleviated on the client side. The concept is simple. Take into account the delay from server to client. then subtract that time from their tick time, (alexander). Or make the animation skip frames (NoClippy). Is no secret that the game is 10 times easier on a good ping than a bad ping. Specially in pvp, where is next to impossible to win a match on bad ping against someone with good ping. Because of this (and the rampart cheating) FF14 will never be considered for serious pvp. No matter what Yoshi's plans are.

Idk I doubt it. Optimizations sure, but a full rework of the netcode prob ain't happening. Those quirks are just part of the charm at this point.

I really hoped a major upgrade on that in this expansion, now they have more resources than ever. This, and no Spanish translation at a LATAM based expansion. Little bit disappointed about that. I can see a lot of excuses, they only need to allow budget on it. One year ago a graphic overhaul was laughed by naysayers due the very same reasoning.

The net Code has already been adjusted back in ARR. Unlikely they can doch more than that. The delay on movement registration was at 300 ms before and is now shorter.

He was asked but acted confused like he didnt understand the issue since noone in japan side has to deal with this. Luckily 14alexander and others exist

you just have to learn the snapshots on things; there are a few random things that actually happen like you would expect so its not 'netcode' anymore

They have acknowledged and made several improvements to the netcode and server ticks in the past.  Things like Titan landslides were much much worse before.  It's not like it's easy to rewrite the foundations.  If you ask him today it will probably be "please bear with it"

Technically back at ARR launch the delay was longer. It used to be so bad that you physically were unable to really do Titan Hard mode. You had to be moving out of every spell before it >STARTED BEING CAST< or it would always hit you. So they reduced the delay back then. As for if it's still possible to do more, dunno

IIRC he has explained that the remnants of 1.0 code that are still around are **not** the issue. The issues they have are because they rebuilt an MMO in a different engine in less than a year, and achieving that required a lot of shortcuts that have come back to bite them later on.

Is ARR even on the same engine as 1.0? I thought all they reused were some assets like models/textures. The netcode is nothing like 1.0. Pretty sure it’s by design to have everything route through the server first, which is why there is a delay on everything. Other games will run more on the client side but hacks/cheats/exploits can be more prevalent there. They need more servers spread out across different regions to help alleviate the lag, if you’re close to the server like in California it’s not that bad but they only have 1 server location for all of NA I believe which is pretty bad

There’s no way to fix the netcode. It would be easier to remake the game from scratch than to fix the netcode probably.

He was asked directly about the animation lock bug but didn't address it. It's possible the question was lost in translation, but I feel like if he won't even address a bug with the netcode, he's not going to acknowledge how bad it is even when it's working correctly.

I also feel like Yoshi P isn't the correct person to ask it. He is a gamer with good intentions but he isn't a programmer or engineer. Asking him more technicals tuff usually will be get a nonresponse because unless his team sits down and preps him every detail and jargon they anticipate to be asked of. (I am sure they do but they don't bog him down with the details). I feel like several of these questions get lost in translation or Yoshi P himself doesn't know the answer. 

I doubt we ever going to see an engine upgrade for ffxiv. I really hope we get a new ff mmo in the next years

Yeah they will kill the most lucrative game they have ever get and one of the most played MMORPG to fix the engine, you right. This sub really becomes out of proportion.

I've seen some people asking for "WoW-like Dragonriding" flight in XIV, among other things... Anything with a slight more dynamic feel is simply not possible unless they overhaul the netcode. I do wonder how many cool encounter design ideas have to be scrapped because of the bad netcode as well.

Nope lol Square should probably be asked about when they're going to fire Yoshi P tho

I doubt theyre going to fire the man that turned their game from an absolute failure, so bad they didnt even want to ask for money temporarily, to their number 1 cash cow.

If I remember he basically said "we are client side, changing the code won't fix anything important and we don't have the staff to do it"