Australian Servers - Heavensward

[Avraym]

More and more games stepped up to the plate in 2014 and made Australian servers to accommodate for standard ping.

Does the FFXIV team plan to do the same and make a server to reduce ping from a constant 300+ to a playable 30-40?

Sure, for those of us who play PC (I do), there are ways of bringing it down to around the 200 mark, but some fights, that extra delay at 200 ping, is make or a break. But even to have resort to additional services that have an ongoing cost seem unreasonable, especially when the PS4/PS3 doesn't have the same lowerping options.

This game is fantastic, but some fights in this game seem only playable (barely) if my character is constantly on the move or I know exactly when a skill is coming before it does, robbing the game completely of its spontaneity. (Looking back at you Titan Extreme and Coil). I've recommended this game to many of my friends and they all agree it is a fantastic game. But none of them have any interest in playing long term if the game has such delay which is fair enough.

I genuinely believe that Australian servers would see a high amount of returning players aswell as new ones.

Now I have no idea what the costs are for a server for a game this size, so perhaps what i'm suggesting is presumptuous, but in April, we had reports of well more than 2 million subscribers and an expectation over 3 million to come.

With subscriptions looking only on the rise and with an upcoming an expansion, perhaps its time to consider implementing an Australian server. After all, WoW currently has 12 true Oceanic servers and FFXIV is almost at the point where it is at 40% of wow's current subscribers. I realise that Australians only make up for a small chunk of the FFXIV subscription base, but I seem to see a lot of us on.

To me, 300+ ping which is what a lot of Australians experience depending on where they are based, seems unplayable. And it seems somewhat convoluted to release the upcoming expansion for purchase to a country which has to endure such a hindrance to gameplay. I assume the only way for the dev's to determine whether or not it would be fee-sable is to see how many Australians are currently subscribing and make the costs.
Yoshi-P seems to pride himself of a rich game experience and seems like the type of person that would agree that the ping we experience is hardly optimal.

So to me, going ahead the way things are doesn't make a great deal of sense.

Perhaps there has been an official response and forgive me if so, but I couldn't find one.

[Kyroc]

Move to Tonberry with the rest of us Aussies, problem solved. I get 120 ms ping without Battleping, WTFast etc

[Everdark]

We cant even buy the Merch (art book, 2 OSTs) ... there is no way servers are going to happen. Don't me wrong it'd be fantastic to get them, but Square has Zero interest in providing anything for us. [sarcasm]Should probably be grateful they let us play the game at all.[/sarcasm]

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

You may not want to hear it, but there most likely isn't enough interest to open a whole datacenter. The way they have queue's set up, and the server clusters, is that each server only queues with other servers in the same data center. You would be on mostly empty servers with extremely long dungeon queue times, and we know how much people love long queue times.

Theres already been some mention of a few servers lacking players, and aussie servers would be just like those.

[Mayoyama]

We cant even buy the Merch (art book, 2 OSTs) ... there is no way servers are going to happen. Don't me wrong it'd be fantastic to get them, but Square has Zero interest in providing anything for us.

This one REALLY upsets me... To get the merch, I'd either have to use a mail forwarding sevice that costs me an extra $50 on top of the product's price... or deal with dodgy eBay (and yes... I've already been stung TWICE from people selling merch on ebay, and I still ended up out of pocket after paypal reinbursed me because you have to post the item back to the seller at your own expense, and postage from AUS to overseas for a CD is like $18....)

[FyrmurlFloerasksyn]

An aussie server would be AMAZING. Please at least consider this, Yoshi. It's annoying that we have to play with the JP people to get somewhat decent ping.

[Avraym]

See the problem with going to a JP server is several things:
1. - The obvious language barrier.
2. - Depending on where you are based, you can actually experience higher ping on a JP server than the US one.
3. - For australians, the "best case scenario" seens to be 120-160 ping with the aid of 3rd party software

All I really want is a response, even if its ambiguous - "SE currently has no plans to implement an Australian server at this time but will look into it".

[Rekujin]

Australian servers wouldn't work for FFXIV unfortunately, there aren't enough Oceanic players.

[XiXiQ]

Australian servers wouldn't work for FFXIV unfortunately, there aren't enough Oceanic players.

Or are there not many because of the abysmal gameplay experience they are expected to endure?

[Crimsonforce]

The last we heard talk about it was back in May 2014.

Q. Lag is a quite a big issue for us down in this end of the world. Do you think an Australian server would ever be a possibility?

A.In fact, I was playing the game until 4 o’clock this morning in my hotel room, and I did see there was a lag issue. I was fighting Titan, and the lag does impact the game experience. I definitely realise what Australia [and New Zealand] people are suffering from, and with over 2,000 players, I feel we do need to look into it.

Australian players also might have difficulty in choosing which data centre to go to, because location-wise, it’s in between the US and Japan server farms. But that being said, having an Australian data centre probably would not make sense yet due to the cost of performance. But when we make a new server, we will seriously consider where to put to make Australian and New Zealand players happy.

From Yoshi P.

Taken from Taken from http://nzgamer.com/features/1334/restoring-the-realm-an-interview-with-square-enixs-naoki-yoshida.html