Step aside, Elemental. There is a new data center in town for FFXIV players in the Oceania region.
For a long time, there have been a large number of players in parts of the world that don’t have data centers nearby, meaning they play on remote servers (usually in Japan or North America) with relatively high ping. While it is playable, this does not always result in a great user experience. Hopefully the new Materia data center will be a better choice for most of them.
To see which data centers will give you the strongest connection, you can test the ping of each data center. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it.
Step 1 – Find the IP
The current IP of the data center is as follows:
North America
Ethernet: 204.2.229.9
Original: 204.2229.10
Crystal: 204.2.229.11
Europe
Chaos: 195.82.50.9
Light: 195.82.50.10
Japan
Gaia: 124.150.157.157
Energy: 124.150.157.156
Element: 124.150.157.158
Oceania
Material: 153.254.80.103
If these changes in the future, you can use the ARRstatus website to check the IP of any data center that interests you. It looks like this:
The IP of each data center is listed on the bottom left of the dashboard.
Step 2 – Open Command Prompt
Go to the Start menu and search for the Command Prompt app. Just type “cmd” to display it immediately.
Alternatively, you can open the run window (shortcut is Windows key + R) and run the application from there by typing “cmd”.
Step 3 – Ping IP
For example, to ping datacenter Materia, you would type: ping 153.254.80.103
After a few seconds, it will display like this:
You can see your min, max and average ping.
For reference, in Final Fantasy XIV I get about 50 milliseconds of playtime on the EU server. My connection to the NA is 150-200 ms and I can still keep playing, but double knitting causes me to delay the next GCD. Higher than that and I’ll start getting hit by the AoE stat, on my side it looks like I’m moving out, but the game says I’m getting hit. As you can see from my ping to the OC datacenter, if it’s more than 300 milliseconds, I probably won’t have a good time there.
Hope this information helps you in some way! Let me know in the comments if you have any other experiences or information to add about playing high ping games.