So gameplay lag has become a big issue for most of the players in my circle, and it seems to be somehow just accepted and not challenged much. Whether this is because in Japan the effects are not as bad or even noticeable we don't know.
Lag can be caused by a lot of things, but I think it's important here to separate a few major types.
1. Lag caused by your gaming setup, poor performance PC or internet connection.
2. Lag caused by congestion at the SE end, exacerbated by your distance from the servers.
Ever since D-Dyna introduced the ranking system where you had the on-screen counter for your rank items, it seems SE have reached a server side limit where lag is unavoidable even on the fastest internet and PC.
You can just about live with it in d-dyna but it kills the fun of being able to react and play well like we've learned to do in older content areas (stunning a TP moves, re-casting utsusemi, curing someone about to die etc).
Then Odyssey came out and right from the get-go similar lag exists in the Sheol A, B and C areas. A good test of lag is to do an emote to another player and see how long it takes to show in the log. D-Dyna and Sheol seem to be 1-2s extra lag than normal, but sometimes even worse for certain players.
Now we have Gaol and the lag has gone off the charts. We enter with 6 players and some like myself can get lucky and see a 1-2s lag only in the waiting area, while others see 6s lag for any action, and inventory doesn't load fully even after 3 minutes of waiting.
I was most surprised to see it can even be drastically different for 2 chars in the same household. I run my main on an AMD 5950 processor and AMD 6800XT GPU (yes I paid through the teeth for that). My 2nd char is on a 1950x threadripper and Titan X maxwell GPU (no slouch) and yet this char consistently gets the 6s lag in Gaol. Both chars on the same 350Mb fibre internet (Virgin in the UK).
A few in our LS have pretty much done everything we want to do in this game, beaten the master trials, got all the REMAs we need and R15d them, and we've been pinning our hopes on new content to keep our favourite pastime going.
Gaol seems really interesting and challenging, exactly what we need right now, but we can't play it. We go in and attempt to guess when to chuck out a cure or erase, people jump about all over the place due to update lag, it's just not possible to do anything but put your best gear on and luck your way through a win.
I read today the accepted bug report listed here:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/57736-Abnormal-connection-behavior-within-Odyssey-battle-content-Sheol-Gaol
Which brings up the capped network bandwidth size which is getting trounced inside Goal areas. I hadn't even considered SE might be trying to push more data than their own cap allows since I would have expected that to affect JP players the same way, but maybe it doesn't somehow.
Anyway, if SE do not address this and soon (including fixing the extra lag in d-dyna and sheol) then I think it will force me to finally retire from the game, as it has now become a key skill to predict actions ahead of lag (anyone ever run into a d-dyna statue cos it hadn't loaded yet?).
I don't see a lot of talk about this issue outside of the game so wanted to just dump all my moans here about it now and see what others think. Also other than bombard the official forums with new bug reports (since you can't reply to existing ones to support them, only up-vote), how can we get SE to wake up to it?
