Are FFXI servers clustered at different locations around...

[Kitsumi]

...the world like WoW servers? An example would be the "Illidan" server which is a US-Midwest server for WoW. Or are all the FFXI/POL servers clustered together in one place?

example: http://www.warcraftrealms.com/realmstat ... =UTCOffset

thanks

[Phla]

pretty sure they're all in japan but someone that knows better feel free to correct me

[Zarath]

There is no regional kind of servers that I know of. I believe they all ping as Japan IPs.

[Kitsumi]

In that case, would it mean that Japanese players would ping, and have a better connection overall compared to NA/EU/etc. players? (Not a HNM related question, just general.)

[Darus Grey]

Yes

[Vigilia]

The difference in pings is barely noticeable though and in NM scene it was "fixed" when they implemented the forced delay between a monster spawning and actually becoming claimable couple of years ago. It was a combined result of fighting bots and massive complaints from NA/EU community of never seeing HNMs spawn anything but purple from what I remember. In practice, if you're on a bog standard PC half the world away from Japan like myself, you'll never experience the delay and just continue to claim mobs as soon as you see them. If you're on a super fast PC and connection up the road from Squeenix you're basically "blocked" from getting a monster claim for a few milliseconds and whatever action you tried to perform on the said monster will fail. Thinking back on it, even my boyfriend in his old apartment in London that had phat cable connection noticed it and it used to piss him off when trying to outclaim gilsellers on NMs because if you're too fast and get the failed action it puts you into a further delay before you can re-use that same action (aka Provoke). Now we live in the sticks and like said, don't know anything about it.