For the past two days, every time I've logged onto FFXI, I've had to deal with some major lagging. This isn't in spurts; it's constant. People don't seem to move, then they're suddenly halfway across the screen. The same with monsters. However, I continue to seem to move just fine, and any sort of text/talking still seems to work just fine, too.
The real problem comes into play when inputting any sort of command. After pressing Ctrl+A, auto-attack doesn't kick in until 30 seconds to 1 minute later. Any menu functions have the same lag time, as well as interacting with NPCs.
Now, here's the twist. During my free month of play (from about Feb. 13 - March 12 or so), the game worked perfectly. Beautifully, in fact. Here are the specs I was using in my FFXI Config box:
Overlay Graphics Resolution: 1024 x 768
Background Resolution: 1024 x 768
Texture Compression: Low
On-Screen Maps: Compressed
Environmental Animation: Normal
Everything else was left set the way the game originally had it. Weather effects were on in the game and all in-game settings were also left as they'd originally been set. Now, after my free month runs out, I cancel my account for awhile, seeing as I'm about to start my Spring Break from college, and my computer would be staying at school. When I got back, I decided to wait until the start of April to reactivate my account, so that I wouldn't have to pay for all the time I didn't play. And that's when the game started to get all laggy.
There's just too many variables for me to figure out what went wrong. Are the game's servers under too much strain from all the new players? Is my school's internet connection being a pain? Did something in the last game update disagree with my computer? Or is something wrong with my computer that I don't know about? If anyone could please help me, or at least point me in the right direction, I'd very much appreciate it!
Here's my computer information:
Processor type/speed: AMD Athlon XP 2200+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.8 GHZ
Total/free hard drive space: 111GB total, 92GB free
Amount of ram: 512 MB
Video card type: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Pro (5.1, Build 2600)
Frequency of problem: constant since reactivation on 4/1/04
(Side Note: I apologize for the length of this message. I'm a Journalism major who tends to be a little verbose when writing. Can't be helped. ^_^)