As Final Fantasy 14 is prepared to release Patch 6.4 next week, some players reported connection and latency issues that caused the game to be unplayable for them. Suffice it to say, affected players were upset that their Final Fantasy 14 patch preparations were ruined by circumstances out of their control, and took their grievances to the game's official forums and to social media.

Last month, Final Fantasy 14's North American datacenter underwent some overdue upgrades to the server hardware. During the maintenance period that coincided with the release of Patch 6.38, players on the Aether, Crystal, Dynamis, and Primal datacenters were unable to play the game for a full day. With Patch 6.4 right around the corner, Final Fantasy 14 players began preparing for the update by taking part in various activities such as crafting, gathering, and ensuring they have enough of the game's various currencies to take advantage of new gear that will be available when the patch arrives. However, some technical issues have thrown a wrench into the preparation plans of several North American players.

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On Reddit, several players are reporting packet loss and unplayable latency that causes rubber-banding in different forms of instanced content such as Island Sanctuary. According to some player-submitted reports, the issues stemmed from a faulty node that certain Internet service providers (ISPs) such as AT&T used to direct user traffic to Final Fantasy 14's California-based servers. The node in question was located in Sacramento, California, and was owned and operated by Japanese telecommunications giant NTT, in partnership with Square Enix. Players continued to share their traceroutes to see what could be done to raise the attention of Square Enix and NTT on the matter.

However, a Redditor named RoombaRaces provided some answers. In a reply to one of the Reddit threads about the game's latency issues, RoombaRaces stated that they have been in contact with an NTT representative. According to the representative, in short, NTT is aware of the problem and working with ISPs such as AT&T to fix the issues at the time of writing. In the meantime, some players resorted to using a VPN to reroute their path to the Final Fantasy 14 servers, which has eliminated their latency issues. Square Enix has yet to officially comment on the issue at the time of writing.

While any comments from NTT and Square Enix may not do much to ease the concerns of some Final Fantasy 14 players, the fact that all parties involved are working to get things sorted out before the release of Patch 6.4 is a good sign. Only time will tell when Final Fantasy 14's latency issues will be fully addressed.

Final Fantasy 14 is available for PC, PS4, and PS5.

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Source: Final Fantasy 14 Forums