How to Check Your Ping on FFXIV Data Centers

Step aside, Elemental. There’s a new Data Center in town for FFXIV players in the Oceanic region.

For a long time there has been a significant playerbase in parts of the world without a nearby Data Center, meaning they were playing with relatively high ping on a distant server, usually in JP or NA. While playable, that doesn’t always make for a terrific user experience. Hopefully the new Materia Data Center will be a better option for most of them.

To see which Data Center will give you the strongest connection you can check your ping on each of them. Here’s a very quick guide on how to do that.

Step 1 – Find the IP

The current IPs of the Data Centers are below:

North America

Aether: 204.2.229.9

Primal: 204.2.229.10

Crystal: 204.2.229.11

Europe

Chaos: 195.82.50.9

Light: 195.82.50.10

Japan

Gaia: 124.150.157.157

Mana: 124.150.157.156

Elemental: 124.150.157.158

Oceania

Materia: 153.254.80.103

If these change in the future, you can use the ARRstatus website to check the IP of whichever Data Centers you’re interested in. It looks like this:

The IP of each Data Center is listed at the bottom left of its panel.

 

Step 2 – Open the Command Prompt

Go to the start menu and search for the Command Prompt app. Simply typing ‘cmd’ should bring it up right away.

Alternatively, you can bring up the run window (shortcut is Windows key + R)  and run the app from there by typing ‘cmd’.

Step 3 – Ping the IP

To ping the Materia Data Center for example you would type: ping 153.254.80.103

After a few seconds it will display something like this:

You can see your minimum, maximum, and average ping.

For reference, in FFXIV I play on an EU server at around 50ms. My connection to NA is 150-200ms, which I can still play on but double weaving will cause me to delay my next GCD. Higher than that and I would expect to start being hit by AoE indicators that on my end it looks like I moved out of, but the game says I got hit. As you can see from my pinging the OC Data Center I would probably not have a good time there at >300ms.

Hopefully that information helps you in some way! If you have any other experiences or information to add about playing at high ping, let me know in the comments.