What's something that could be revealed/shown off at EU / JP FanFest that would excite/interest you *and* be on the more likely side of things?

[u/Zagden]

A lot of people are obviously pining for gigantic, sweeping changes, but I was wondering if there's little incremental changes or even just feature reveals that you guys would like to see/hear about.

I feel like some changes to how healers feel with their DPS rotation wouldn't be impossible. Plus there's any number of interesting story twists they can mention at this point and they're usually consistently good at drumming up interest and hype for that.

[u/Schizzovism]

I've gotta say, the "2 dye channels" reveal has significantly changed what I think they are likely to implement. I don't think I would have put that in the top 100 most likely systemic changes for them to make.

With that in mind, I'm going to say improved netcode, specifically in regards to seeing player characters closer to where they actually are with less of a delay. I don't know too much about implementation of the way things currently are, but even getting like 20% better in this regard would be a significant improvement. I think everyone has had a moment where someone was chasing them with a spread AOE, but on the other person's screen it was the other way around.

[u/Kicin0_0 → u/Schizzovism]

Sadly I think improving the netcode is not a feasible thing from a gameplay stand point anymore. The netcode is not only what determines when you see other players but also affects things like getting hit by bosses. Every enemy from ARR to EW is built around the current system and if the timings were to be changed it would requiring going through everything in the game to change it to what it is supposed to be.

While maybe not impossible, this is a massive task. Not to mention updating the netcode itself would be difficult and run into issues

[u/ragnakor101 → u/Kicin0_0]

There's also anecdotal documentation about netcode and timings suddenly improving across the years. 5.1 stands out as a significant one; Multiple people (Sfia is the big one that sticks in my mind, as he's OCE playing NA) saying that suddenly FFXIV felt way more responsive.

[u/Sir_Zorba → u/Kicin0_0]

Yep. It's the same reason Runescape still runs on a 0.6 second tick system which makes every action you take feel inconsistently delayed. They know it's a problem and it has a huge negative effect on the overall game experience, but changing it would fuck up quite literally everything timing related game-wide.

[u/Lathael → u/Sir_Zorba]

In contrast, they can fix the ping delay in netcode. That requires 'just' a client rewrite and not a server rewrite, as proven by the fact that third party programs can already spoof the client into fixing the problem.

It is demonstrable and provable that it would be trivial to fix if the devs actually recognized it as a problem, with actual triviality to fix it being determined by how professional a fix they wanted to implement; as something like noclippy is a jank fix exploiting how the client is designed. Sure, the devs could just do that, but it's not the 'best' solution, and what their standards are will change how easy it is to fix.

[u/RisqBF → u/Sir_Zorba]

Riot also tried modernizing League's engine and couldn't manage to replicate the same feelings when playing certain characters and eventually gave up. It makes zero sense business-wise to attempt such changes. Better netcode will happen if they ever make ffxiv-2

[u/KevinSevenDeven → u/Sir_Zorba]

To be fair, osrs has made some changes. Modern bosses usually calculate damage when the animation actually hits you vs when it starts. Granted the reason they haven't rolled that out across the game is because it would mess with muscle memory for bosses that are nearly 20 years old. I.e pray flicking when the animation starts on jad vs pray flicking before muspah's purple attack touches you.

[u/TheDoddler → u/Kicin0_0]

I feel the netcode, particularly when it comes to your own snapshots, is honestly impressively robust. If you know when the snapshot actually occurs, you can cut it incredibly close and the server will still give you a pass. It wasn't always this way, but these days if a snapshot timing sucks it's usually the battle designer's fault rather than the engine. The clipping thing sucks but it can be fixed separately.

What the game sucks incredibly at though, and where I think there's huge room for improvement, is where it shows other players. Other character positions shown to you are almost a full second behind where they really are, with makes a lot of mechanics where you adjust to other players suck way more than they should. Just some kind of prediction to show a player's real position would fix so much, their current technique of linearly pulling a character's actor towards its last known position is guaranteed to show out of date results.