Latency reducing software?

[Rostum]

As an Aussie player connecting to Canadian servers, and I'm sure some European players are experiencing this, end-game content seems a lot harder or almost impossible (like Chimera) due to even a 200 ping latency. Before you even have a chance to react to area-specific enemy attacks it's already executed on the server!

I first started noticing this on storymode-Titan where I'd run out of his directional attacks with at least 5 seconds to spare and I still always got hit.

So is it worth it to pay for software like Pingzapper in order to reduce latency and combat this issue?

[Mirage]

Pretty sure you can't install software on your PC that makes electronic signals break the laws of physics.

[Aulayna]

As someone who works on another MMO this is really something you do at your own risk. Whilst it will give you a potential performance benefit a lot of these services are also used by gold sellers and exploiters to cover their tracks so it can very easily lead to red flags being wrongly raised on your own account. Of course I don't really know how Square Enix's RiskOps work so it may not cause any problems at all.

[Rostum]

Pretty sure you can't install software on your PC that makes electronic signals break the laws of physics.

Pingzapper — Lower ping in games
"evading ISP throttling and optimising the rate of packets being sent."

As someone who works on another MMO this is really something you do at your own risk.

Cool, what area of development do you work in? Surely things like Pingzapper are quite safe, since I've seen quite a number of people use these tools previously.

[Aulayna]

Pretty sure you can't install software on your PC that makes electronic signals break the laws of physics.

Pingzapper — Lower ping in games
"evading ISP throttling and optimising the rate of packets being sent."

As someone who works on another MMO this is really something you do at your own risk.

Cool, what area of development do you work in? Surely things like Pingzapper are quite safe, since I've seen quite a number of people use these tools previously.

I work in the Account Admin team so "on" was probably a bad choice of words. But we often get a lot of cases with people playing from Arab countries etc who use these sorts of programs and many of them will do it without any issues but at the same time VPNs and whatnot are used to try and cover up exploitative or detrimental activity fairly frequently. The programs themselves are perfectly safe, it's just that you might have the misfortune of using a routing that's been associated with exploitative activity in the past by the game provider which might cause it to trigger false positives on any anti-exploitation scripts.

Although it may be worth checking the ToU etc as I know a couple of MMOs that specifically have clauses stating they don't support the use of proxying, vpns etc.

[Rostum]

Ah I see... Well I hope SE do support it, or they could refine that element of gameplay since I don't think I even had this kind of issue with Tera (major action-based MMO).

[Gamblet]

Ah I see... Well I hope SE do support it, or they could refine that element of gameplay since I don't think I even had this kind of issue with Tera (major action-based MMO).

Neither have I with Aion at 300ms ping (bosses AoE a lot).

[Dr Unne]

PingZapper looks dodgy to me. Routing all of your network traffic through a stranger's proxy usually isn't a great idea. They might be encrypting it, or they might be harvesting your account details, you probably won't be able to tell.

[Mirage]

SE most likely encrypts their connections between the client and servers, so that's probably not an issue. Actually, I would be surprised if FFXIV logins weren't encrypted by default.

[Dr Unne]

I don't know if SE encrypts login or not. Regardless, Pingzapper could be logging keystrokes client-side for all I know. Does it route all of your network activity through their proxy or just the games' traffic? An anonymous closed-source program that fiddles with your internet connectivity seems like a bad idea.

It's apparently run by these guys in Hong Kong: Fyrolabs Their website is pretty, but sparse on details. It doesn't leap out at me as being the most trustworthy kind of thing to be sending money to. Who knows though.

[Rostum]

Good find, I'll just put up with the latency for now. Thanks guys.