Important Information Regarding North American Data Center Relocation

[WarbossGrim]

Choosing the West Coast for players who aren't even in the NA region is retarded, and as I said the ping difference even in a game like League to switch from west coast to Chicago was about 100ms for someone in Maryland. That's pretty significant.

There is plenty of major infrastructure in the middle of the US to end up with a better setup for everyone (that is in the NA region). So cut Europe and Oceania out of it, because they could just as easily put them in Europe and Japan datacenters respectively. There is no logical reason to suddenly punt the servers to one end of the country or the other when there are superior alternatives that would undoubtedly cost less and result in a better experience for the core NA players (the US and Canada). Especially if you're comparing it to something like San Diego where you're dumping them in the extreme corner of the country.

[Aria_Sevenpeaks]

So cut Europe and Oceania out of it, because they could just as easily put them in Europe and Japan datacenters respectively.

Except the Aust-Japan link is frequently cut (that same damn subsea cable seems to get chopped fairly regularly) at which point you're routed via the US to get to Japan, making it even slower.

Secondly, the majority of players on the JP servers DON'T speak English and would rather not socialise with them because of the language difficulty.

Thirdly, those servers where Australians and English speakers are concentrated are already full, so moving there is not easy.

Still, as the US servers are already about as far from us as can be, anywhere will be an improvement.

[Lozza]

Except the Aust-Japan link is frequently cut (that same damn subsea cable seems to get chopped fairly regularly) at which point you're routed via the US to get to Japan, making it even slower.

Our connections to JP are routed through the infrastructure (some of which is not very robust) of four different nations in before they hit Japan, involving multiple sub-sea cables. It's not the same cables going down all the time it's different ones. The result of which is a highly variable connection. Sure on good days Australians can get maybe a 150ms stable connection but most days are not good days.

I have characters on both Tonberry (JP) and on Faerie (NA) and I can guarantee any NA based player that my connection to the NA data centre far more stable. A fast connection to games is not the only thing that counts, a stable connection is extremely important. My connection to NA is 200-250ms most days. My connection to JP bounces between 150 and 900ms most days. It's easy to adjust for latency when the latency is going to be predictable. When it's all over the place it's hell.

As Aria also pointed out the vast majority of JP players don't like to play in English - their English I dare say is about as good as my Japanese limited to basic words and I can only read hiragana and katakana, the only kanji I know are the symbols used for dates. The queue for daily roulette on Tonberry is 30mins + and that's as a healer. If you queue for specific dungeons you have to be prepared to wait for hours.

If SE believes you ideally need a connection of not much more than 200ms to play this game then they absolutely should take Oceania into consideration when placing the NA data centre. Japan may be physically closer to Aust/NZ players but the infrastructure is tenuous making NA a viable choice.

Many MMOs have moved from east or west coast servers to places like Austen and Dallas in the last 5-10 years and in my experience SE moving the servers here would make the game completely unplayable. As I said previously I currently get 200-250 to the NA data centre, in Canada, on the east coast. 200-250 is pretty normal for me connecting to game servers on the east coast. West coast it's around 150ms. Games that have moved to Dallas and Austen in recent years it's 400ms. Why so high, well apparently the infrastructure in the US from coast to internal locations like Texas is pretty terrible. While this can be reduced to about 300ms with ssh tunnelling or a proxy service like battleping and wtfast, this is still higher than what I get to the servers currently without such a service. Nevermind the fact that using such a service can result in a false positive for bans and a wasted few weeks or months trying to get your account back.

People saying NA servers should only be for NA players forget the fact that Aust/NZ players are majority English speakers who are unlikely to have Japanese as a 2nd fluent language (for the record my 2nd language is French and I also speak Spanish so NA servers are a great place for me) and fail to realise that our connection to Japan is not a singular cable straight from here to there - on the other hand our connection to the US is functionally a single cable.

[Pence]

snip.

This is not my experience at all. I played on Sarganatas from 2.0 to 3.1, then transfered to Tonberry until present and have a far more stable and consistent connection. I've had very little trouble here playing from both TAS and Sydney.

I'm guessing your queue time is queueing while only selecting 'English' - which is the first question most mentors ask when people ask about queue time in novice chat. I gt 5-15m queues as a MCH. Off-hours are obviously different, but that's the same on all servers. The 'vast majority' of both English and Japanese players are similar to all languages: Hello at the start. Goodbye at the end. Language plays no role here.

[Lozza]

This is not my experience at all. I played on Sarganatas from 2.0 to 3.1, then transfered to Tonberry until present and have a far more stable and consistent connection. I've had very little trouble here playing from both TAS and Sydney.

I'm guessing your queue time is queueing while only selecting 'English' - which is the first question most mentors ask when people ask about queue time in novice chat.

For basic dungeons auto translate works fine, however I would never queue for a dungeon I haven't done before in Japanese, the language barrier is simply too great. As for your connection being more stable I am curious if you are running battleping or wtfast (or similar service) these services can often reduce the variability in connection. I haven't run with them for a few years now, but then my connection to the NA servers is surprisingly good and I'm not willing to risk another ban.

[WarbossGrim]

Stuff about how Australians/NZ players should get some kind of priority in NA server moves

And people in Australia and NZ forget that they are still a minority compared to North America. There is very little reason to give NA players a shittier experience to make up for your infrastructure. If it were truly a priority, they could put a server in Sydney or something and let you guys connect over bailing twine or whatever you have for connections more easily. It's not called the "North America and also the other side of the world" data center. They really shouldn't be moving it to the West Coast to help a small, small minority.

[Paranoir]

And people in Australia and NZ forget that they are still a minority compared to North America. There is very little reason to give NA players a shittier experience to make up for your infrastructure. If it were truly a priority, they could put a server in Sydney or something and let you guys connect over bailing twine or whatever you have for connections more easily. It's not called the "North America and also the other side of the world" data center. They really shouldn't be moving it to the West Coast to help a small, small minority.

No one is saying anything of the sort, just that moving it down form Canada would benefit us as a side effect of that move. The NA data center isn't for NA players first and foremost over anyone else, it was simply chosen as a site due to the the fact it has one of the largest concentration of players there that would benefit.

This may be news to you but the data centers are actually world wide with locations chosen where the majority will benefit, and players are encouraged to join the one that will give them the best experience.

Do you really think the small percentage of Aus/NZ players has anything to do with this if it would as you say make it worse for all the players in NA?

Also, the data center never would have been placed up north in Montreal in the first place if it didn't have to factor in the EU players.

[ReplicaX]

Also, the data center never would have been placed up north in Montreal in the first place if it didn't have to factor in the EU players.

It's a mix of several things. Eidos was acquired by SE Europe back in 2009 and to this day is controlled by that subsidiary. It had a studio & offices in Montreal that had about 350 employees at the time. There was an article before ARR which talked about a new DataCenter dealing with Eidos Montreal, which turned out to be the NA DC for ARR.

While EU players were likely part of the reason the DC was located there, I believe one of the main reasons was they already had an established office there since 2009. Which makes sense considering it was the first time outside of Japan that they established a MMO DataCenter. Which they could have in house employees oversee and manage it.

[Lozza]

And people in Australia and NZ forget that they are still a minority compared to North America. There is very little reason to give NA players a shittier experience to make up for your infrastructure. If it were truly a priority, they could put a server in Sydney or something and let you guys connect over bailing twine or whatever you have for connections more easily. It's not called the "North America and also the other side of the world" data center. They really shouldn't be moving it to the West Coast to help a small, small minority.

Unfortunately you seemed to miss the part where it's not our infrastructure that's the problem. If I can connect to game servers on the US west coast at 120ms, and the east coast at 220ms. Doesn't it make sense that TX servers should be somewhere in between those two? Except that they aren't. Games with servers in TX are 350ms. That's not an Australian infrastructure problem.

I get it we are a minority, we always will be, and our base is split between the JP servers and the US servers, hell there may even been Australians on the EU servers. Currently with the servers on the east coast in Canada my connection just barely make the cutoff for what SE considers playable. My experience with MMOs that have moved to TX is that the game will become unplayable. Someone connecting from west coast to east coast is still going to be well under the limit of what SE considers playable, it won't effect NA players in any way except that hopefully you avoid the packet loss issues that plague the game right now. The long and short of it is that regardless of where they move I can't see NA players being affect much at all - Canada, SA, EU, AUS/NZ yes, and it's not just physical distance that's at play here, internet routing is not a simple matter of straight from one place to another.