Area of Attack and LatencyFollow

Response from the man himself:

â– Area Attacks and Latency Issuesâ– 
Producer and director Yoshi-P here.
Thank you for all of your feedback on latency issues and the evasion of enemy attacks. As we continue working to address these issues in time for phase 4 and release, I'd like to inform you all of the current situation.

This post will focus on area attacks that are difficult to evade, or still connect even if you appear to have avoided it.

Damage taken when Ifrit uses Eruption.

When Ifrit used eruption in phase 3, the animation had a momentary build-up before the explosion. Because of this momentary buildup, there was a slight delay between the server's check and the explosion. This has already been corrected for phase 4 and release.

Damage taken for what looked like a near miss.

1. Registering Player Damage

In phase 3, when judging whether a character was standing in an attack's area of impact, your position was checked using a circle around your character to represent the space your character stands in.

Furthermore, to keep the different races balanced, the radius of this circle was the same for all characters. Because of this, even if you appeared to have barely escaped the area of effect, a portion of the circle was still within range. This created the illusion that you barely evaded attack, with varying results depending on your race.
For phase 4 and release, this circle has been reduced to a single point at the center of where your character is standing to more accurately determine your position.

2. Enemy Progress Bars and Area of Impact

Being an online game, there will always be a minimal delay when input is received from the player and sent back after being processed by the server.
In FFXIV: ARR, your position is checked by the server once every 0.3 seconds. This timing is synced and processed according to the servers to prevent lag between your input and what you see.

During phase 3, however, this syncing did not take place due to stringent server checks that took place, causing lag between what you saw on the enemy progress bar and your character's positioning. As a result, even if you appeared to be outside the area of impact when the progress bar was filled, damage was still taken.

Adjustments are being made to reduce lag as much as possible, and syncing should improve the timing between enemy cast bars, area of effect markers, and the actual attacks.

Rest assured that we're doing what we can to make sure players can safely evade attacks by watching enemy cast bars and markers for area attacks.

Players overseas were also affected by having to access the Japan data center in Version 1.0, as this further delayed the relay of data from the server. With the establishment of a regional data center and the above measures being taken to improve syncing with the servers, we will continue working to ensure an enjoyable gaming experience for all of our players.
(Even with a great connection, I think there's still maybe a 0.1 second margin of error with the cast bar, so make sure to get out of the way when playing with your party. )

Edited, Jul 29th 2013 6:19am by Wint

^ Probably because the game is still in beta...? You being 30ft outside of a circle likely had to do with severe lag. I remember doing a guildleve and being obscenely far from the circle and getting hit. Lag spikes everywhere. It's nice to know that our character won't have a circle anymore, just a set point in the center for the server to check our position.

Now I feel better about not beating Ifrit at the Bowl of Embers mission. I thought there was something going on there... I kept killing the add when it popped, but he kept wiping my group every time regardless.

I hope this fixes the issues that I had. Got so tired of people on the Beta Forums telling me that I needed to learn to play (when I repeatedly mentioned this to draw attention to it) because I got hit from the charged attacks when I would be a good distance away when they went off.

Hmmm, he didn't mention the chat delay (9 seconds for me), but I am hopefull that since they are addressing delays, that will be included.

Cheers!

I was honestly getting so sick of people telling me it was my bad play style; I already accept that! I upgraded my PC because of this problem thinking that I could at least try and do everything from my side to fix it. Well at least now I have a newly upgraded PC and SE are fixing things so it's all good. :)

Edited, Jul 29th 2013 4:12pm by EdyNOTB

Hope they fix the ridiculous lag that Bind has before it actually... Binds an enemy.

It's very noticeable when you came from games with instantaneous reactions to your button pressing. There was definitely a pause, however slight, between when you pressed the button and when the effect went off in FFXIV 1.0.

Wooooohooo! Dancin' in the streets. *Dance* *Dance*

/use item "Brilliant Snow" <me>
/wait 1
/panic motion

Can I ask how long you played 1.0? I never got the chance and was curious if the game was as laggy as people claim in these old threads. I'm liking what I see for ARR though. I think SE has done a great job so far with their new system.

As far as getting hit by Eruption, I think that characters being located by the center of their circle will do more to make it seem like the AoE range is correct than the reduced server latency will.

Now that they have explained the way character locations ranges were equal for all races, and having played both a Lalafell and Roegadyn in Ifrit, I can see why the Lalafell seemed to have far more trouble avoiding AoE.

At any rate, they are addressing the issue from two angles, so it sounds great to me.

The message stated that basically everyone running out of the circle was calculated as though they had a tall male Roegadyn's fat ***, since that is the worst case scenario, so even if it looked like your character made it out, had you been such a Roe, you actually didn't. They were trying to make it fair regardless of race but the theory did not hold up to the practice. So in order to fix this, they will change the reference point so you'll be able to tell if you made it out or not regardless of your size.

Let me ask you a simple question, why are there NA servers?

I don't know your background, but this is my field and I know what I'm talking about here. Maybe the difference isn't a big deal to you, but it is to me and many others. We don't know how ARR will run, it's not running as intended yet. There are bottlenecks with the throughput if that's what you're referring to here, but I'm not going to guess. So please come out and say what exactly you're referring to because there are too many factors to discount anything at this point.