Originally Posted by
AarosLunos
Network Engineer here. You're wrong. First off, lets say that there is one who plays from somewhere in the central time zone. They may end up having to pass through 20 routers(hops) to Japan. But this is heavily dependent on the persons ISP and associated peering agreements that that ISP may have.
Lets say that SE sets up a data center in El Segundo, CA (guessing here because they have offices there). On the public internet, there may be 5 hops between the players location in the central time zone and California. Now assuming that SE sets up these data centers as relay points, they would very likely be communicating with the master servers in Japan via a high capacity leased line network, not via the public internet. This could cut down the number of hops between El Segundo to Japan significantly, from maybe 15 routers down to 3-6 maybe. So all in all when a player would connect to their respective relay server it would drop the number of routes required for packets to make it to Japan AND latency.
Typically the more hops you have from two given points, the more latency because every router along the way has to make decisions about which physical route the packet will traverse to reach its proper destination. On the public internet this translates to roughly 250-350ms in transit time from the California to Japan. By using a leased line network that DOES NOT touch the internet in any fashion, this latency could be dropped by 1/4 to 1/2.
The other factor in latency is how much overall bandwidth is being used on a specific link and the overall utilization. If you have a horrible ISP that aggressively over subscribes its network, then that is hardly SE's fault, because your packets have to wait due to over utilization. If there is high utilization during specific peak times for certain overseas routes on the public internet, this can also adversely affect latency for players. However leased lines do not have this issue, even for oceanic backbones due to traffic shaping and QoS.
The fact that you claim its not 'technologically possible' just displays your blatant ignorance on the matter. People shouldn't post about things they do not know.