Last Grinding Sessions On Phaenna And DDoS Attacks

Over the weekend I had two main goals in Final Fantasy XIV. The first was grinding my class points in Cosmic Exploration to reach 20% of the way to obtaining the High Mobility Vacuum Suit. I need 500,000 points in each of the 11 crafting and gathering classes. The other was to try to avoid getting kicked off the servers while I did so.

What 20% looks like

I had to work on my weakest class, Fisher. I think the amount of RNG involved in Cosmic Exploration fishing missions really slows me down. But over the last week I started getting a lot better and found a handful of missions where the RNG didn't really affect me. The good news was that a couple of those missions have big payoffs. The bad news was that those missions relied on weather conditions. I never enjoyed rain so much, though cloudy skies were even better.

But one of the most frustrating things I encountered was getting knocked out of the game while reeling in a 3 exclamation point fish to complete a mission that would have given me 1100 class points. At that point I broke down and tried out ExitLag. I learned that routing through ExitLag's New York servers to go to servers located in California was up to 50ms faster than connecting through the company's Sacramento location? Did I mention the FFXIV North American data center is located in Sacramento?

I actually had a way to check if lag improved in the game. I was using a fishing macro that counted from 10 to 20 seconds I used to help determine which fish were biting. Before I could see the lag when the numbers didn't appear smoothly in my chat window. With the software turned on the macro functioned much better.

I know DDoS attacks occurred over the weekend because the Square Enix posted a status update on the Lodestone stating an attack took place lasting from Friday at 10:25am PST to Saturday at 10:10pm PST. I didn't get kicked out of the game on Saturday, The only time I was kicked occurred on Friday because I forgot to turn ExitLag on.

I have to admit I'm not entirely convinced ExitLag is causing that much of an improvement. I need to run a couple of dungeons and see if the lag is gone. I really hate when lag makes me appear worse than I am. If I feel comfortable I might even try to run through Hell on Rails next weekend.