Any Suggestions To Deal With The Latency I Have.

It's pretty annoying in Dynamis (D), Sheol, and Sortie. While tanking in Sheol I frequently interrupt myself casting even though I stopped for 2 seconds before casting. The same 2 second delay before a JA/spell going off happens a lot on Sortie bosses. Dynamis (D) with an alliance is a whole other beast. Trying to toss out some BLU aoe get everything on me is a nightmare.

I have all effects off except for my own. Clipping plane and Characters visible are both at the minimum. I have shadows and weather effects off. Armor display is on static. Footstep effects are hidden.

Other people say Sheol/Sortie is relatively smooth for them and I just don't understand why I have such a problem. My PC is nothing special, but it should be more than enough to handle this game. I'm in NS, Canada if location matters. A Speedtest shows I have 330Mbits download and 10.1Mbits upload. I can't imagine it being my internet either.

Does anyone know of any settings in the windower launcher that may help, or maybe a patch? Anything. I'd really like to do Sheol/Sortie without being a detriment to the party.

Konami code on plugins screen -> packetflow

Other than packetflow, nothing.

How over the top are your gearswap sets.

I think it's mainly just time of day honestly, if you do runs at peak time it seems to have more problems.

Will check it out, thanks.

Consider asking your party to use lockstyle as well.

The problem you have is that you are receiving too much information and SE messed up (maybe exactly reversed) information prioritization in instanced zones (Dynamis, Sortie, Odyssey, etc.). You can reduce the amount of information you are sent by doing things like lockstyle of party members or reducing the amount of gear you swap.

Packetflow effectively increases your bandwidth, so it'll help too.

Maybe this will get answered in the next AMA:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/uwcrva/comment/i9qqsxc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

It’s hard to say if SE has the budget allocated for this game to make any meaningful improvements to this. They would need to place FFXI onto the same server distribution as FFXIV (assuming they aren’t already). Other than that, it’s likely going to be tweaks to their net coding (if any can be made) to make things better.

Without such measures, you’re at the mercy of general latency and won’t see any real improvements unless you move significantly closer to Japan or California if they still have a server hub there.

This probably dont work. its more of a hail marry

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/project_mercury.html
cant help on lag if you are multiboxing.

it can also help improve CPU performance on modern cpu in regards to games but FFXI does not have enough threads for it to really matter here

It _would_ take serious dev effort to look at their instance server code and figure out why it messes up packet prioritization, but it's more like a week of work for someone unfamiliar with the codebase than something you spend a quarter of dev time on. However, my strong suspicion is that they would have absolutely no way to test their changes. So, they would be risking temporarily breaking instances in order to probably fix instances.

I would take that bet, if I were them, and revert if it goes wrong, but I can see how they would just stay the course.

The CPU thing won't help.

I thought that 'Static' armor option in the config would basically be me forcing lockstyle from my end. It kind of is, except everyone else has no armor on and just wearing their race specific clothes lol.

On the topic of packetflow, someone I was talking to on discord mentioned it was risky to use? Is that true, and how so?

Just like a lot of other things Windower, it is detectable. That being said I know myself and others have been using it for years without issue. This is the original post announcing it, you can read about the risks there and decide if you feel it's worth it.

Lag is absolutely not better in Japan and things like the lack of performance in Dynamis [D] and Odyssey are exactly the same.

Wait Really? That’s curious because there were specific LS members that, by their account, “literally never” had any sorta of lag in Ouryu or Dynamis D and their parses very much reflected those statements. I never asked them where they lived but their active times placed them much closer to JP than myself (East Coast US) so it only makes internet sense they’d have an easier time.

Or is everyone getting the shaft but some are getting it rougher than others, you’re saying?

The problem imo is really boils down to gearswap (not just for you personally, but others using it too), when autists get carried and make some war and peace looking set of swaps it is cancer for a game that has a 56k connection cap.

You (and everyone else in your group) is flooding the server with a mass of information constantly for your party, every single time a piece of gear is swapped it is sent to the server and then to every other play in the group to update the hp/mp changes in their UI. That's flooding the connection of everyone in the group with lots of little bits of data constantly.

Normally this isn't a problem but with a 56k data cap it surely will be.

We used to be able to do alliance content fine 15 years ago, why is it so bad now with far less people? If you use gearswap, you should really considering making minimal sets and getting rid of the bloat. Do you really need to equip mov speed constantly (if it has hp/mp stats on it) etc

As I said, when you change a piece of gear and it has hp or mp on it, the UI of every single person in the group needs to be sent that information and it's highest priority data. Cause HP values are the most important thing that needs to be transmitted to every players UI (especially the healer).

Doesn't anyone find it weird this is mainly appears to be a western player problem?

Close the porn tabs while playing.

I played FFXI from the East coast of the US for a very very long time, including "back in the day" and for years in current content (dyna [d]. ody, sortie, vagary, etc.).

Moved to Japan and have plenty of experience, it's still laggy as hell, packets drop, macros don't fire off. In dynamis, characters de-sync and freeze, sometimes characters outside of your party are totally untargetable. In Ody, there are lag spikes and mobs teleporting all over the place. R goes up to several thousand at times.

It's essentially, from all I can tell, the same experience.

Everyone has lag in instances.

What will make the most difference is minimising the amount of gear swapped by your character in each action.

Meaning how much gear you're swapping to go from idle to precast, from precast to midcast and from midcast back to idle.

If you swap all possible gear options for each step, you are adding a lot more lag onto yourself.

Multiply that by the number of people also doing this at the same time around you.. you get Dyna-D with a full alliance.

I haven't had an opportunity to play without any gearswap users because *gestures at everything* but FWIW my dynamis group NEVER has a full alliance of characters playing. At most we have...12? Sometimes as few as 9? And 3-4 of those aren't using any addons.

The problem with XI is the 56k data cap, it's been asked over and over to fix it and they keep saying the original programmer hacked solutions by using that 56k cap (same with 30fps) as a crutch for various timing stuff but that's honestly not a good enough answer.

They need to hire a programmer on / or take one from XIV for a while and get them to remove the 56k data cap (just as they have done before, and did with the character race change).

This is a game that makes millions a year, and will still be around 10 years from now. It's not acceptable to just leave it as it is when it's making the game worse.

They spend unlimited money on crap that closes in a month, yet they can't invest in something that has a loyal audience.

There is a problem with people using 3rd party stuff, making the issue worse but that's a reality of the game and so they need to fix the game up to take it into account. Get rid of the 56k data cap.

Honestly the instance lag is not the first thing they should spend resources on.

The completely broken in today's game auto-targeting should be the first thing to be reworked. Which they said they would but haven't.

I disagree. Wings of War, Sortie, Odyssey, Dynamis-D, Ambuscade are all instanced. For most levels of progression, the hardest content you're doing will be instanced. This game isn't particularly forgiving to beginners to start with; adding severe latency on top of it leads to people losing because of it. It also presents the game as poorly managed and falling apart (because it is). It should be a top priority.

Fixing auto-targeting would be nice, but it's a design flaw rather than something just not working. It doesn't present the same sort of image issue.

You have to go through both Square Enix management portal and POL to play XI and you want to talk about image issues?

Meaning what?

Prioritization is just not amazing, I don't think there's a universal agreement on *how* it should be fixed, just that it could be better.

If you mean to target non-engaged mobs (e.g. Sheol C) then I dunno, why would they want to make it even easier for us? I wish they would just let us cleave that ***now it is so old and mundane.

Just Auto target the mob right in front of your face, not the one twenty yalms away behind a tree. It's the most clunky feature of this game still. Most can agree on that

Now I understand why Mireu is exponentially worse than even Dynamis.

So you want it to be based on closest first?

It would be amazing if there was a filter lol. Like don't auto target pets. Don't auto target enemies outside of 10 yalms. Dont auto target statues. Yada yada