Important Information Regarding North American Data Center Relocation

[Kyouki]

Australians have had to live with 200+ pings all along. At my end, at the WESTERN end of Australia, it's almost 400ms to Siren. With Battleping, I can get it down to about ~330 on a good day. Most end-game instances are virtually unplayable with that lag.

That sucks, i can feel your (game)pain :/ I cant imagine playing like this... I am used to have average pings between 30 and 60 to most game servers, FFXIV is the highest ping for me right now with lots of connection issues atm. My upload goes down to 0.0-0.2Mbits these days because of what ever reason... Waiting for my ISP technician to fix it. I hope you'll have a better game experience with that move even though i am really concered about my connection lol

[Doki]

[Kosmos992k]

Thank you to Yoshida-san and the entire team behind FFXIV. I look forward to playing on the shiny new world servers with additional features as mentioned, especially larger inventory and cross world friend lists and relate features.

This kind of continued investment both of money, but also the huge personal investments of time and effort by the development and infrastructure management team, continue to impress upon me why FFXIV, SE and the team behind the game deserve continued loyalty and support.

[Kosmos992k]

Middle of the U.S. or west coast please. XD

Well, the slight word to the wise warning about ping times for players in europe suggests West Coast US or Canada. If so, that will improve matters for Oceania but might affect Europe, although with the major Internet trunks between Europe and the US West Coast, it may turn out to be less of a problem than anticipated. Though., it's entirely understandable why Yoshida would try to manage expectations in this informative post.

So funny if it was Mexico!!!

Given the assertions about advanced Internet infrastructure, I think not. Also, Mexico while being a wonderful nation and people, has several internal issues that would make it unlikely that SE (or any game service provider) would choose Mexico to house a data center.

West Europe!

More seriously, the point is that if that's a problem for west coast players, then the obvious solution is to move the data center somewhere in the middle, not just flip which coast gets screwed. Then at least east coast and west coast are roughly equal, and the people who live in the middle get an overall ping time reduction. Other games figured out years ago that it's probably in their best interests to try and provide as even an experience to their playerbase as possible rather than heavily slanting to one area geographically.

That's what makes the "we can't tell you anything but that it's somewhere on the north american continent" so infuriating. It just leads to EVERYONE feeling like they're going to get screwed instead of only the people who are actually getting screwed.

It kind of depends on the Internet backbone structure and topology. For example there are single hop links from the west coast US to Europe, ping times would not be hurt too badly if traffic was routed over such long haul hops. Also, EU has a data center, so the only worry would be East coast US and Canada. Given the backbone of the internet, it should not create ping issues within the US to have west coast servers, even with multi-hops. The big beneficiaries of a West Coast NA server location is Oceania. Our in places like Australia and New Zealand may see some benefit from this. Choosing West Coast NA for a data center makes sense geographically once you have an EU data center, without the EU data center central or eastern NA is a better location to serve the regions - which is what we started with. So having an EU data center allows the possibility of a western move for the NA data center - as we are seeing.

[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.

[Erudito]

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this announcement. I just hope they move the servers into a strategic location withing the north american continent and not an area of the west coast where earthquakes are a possibility.

[LunaFaye]

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw this announcement. I just hope they move the servers into a strategic location withing the north american continent and not an area of the west coast where earthquakes are a possibility.

I don't agree with moving the NA data centers to the west coast, something like Texas would have been much better, but when did we have the last major earth quake over here? Right it been some years, it's happening right after the servers are moving is most likely not happening. On the east coast you would have other disasters to deal with, either way I think the best solution would be the middle instead of limiting ourselves to black and white (east and west coast) only.

[Raikki]

Since everyone is speculating anyway: Square-Enix is already a big customer of MyInternetServices in the US. MYIS has datacenters in Los Angeles CA, Reston VA, and Dallas TX. Europeans would not see much of a ping increase moving to Virginia, so there would have been no reason for them to mention that, but there's at least cause to be optimistic that they decided to continue their business relationship with MYIS and go with Texas as a central-ish location.

[HatsoonMike]

Don't ever expect it. The game just doesn't have the player base to support it - even WoW doesn't truely have a large enough player base for an Aussie server. Their AU and NA servers are connected, if the party leader is in NA you will be on a NA server, and vice versa. I'd argue latency is more important here due to how the game works. Seeing NA players dragged into 220ms+ after having played at half of that? Would not go well.

The player base doesn't exist because there's no suitable servers.

Obviously there wouldn't be cross-play with NA players, that would be silly. Just give us our own contained server.

[ReplicaX]

AU has one of the worst internet infrastructures in the developed world and I honestly feel bad as its not AU players fault.

The reality is Datacenters are by no means cheap. If the demand isn't there, its a huge financial loss. Many companies do not want to take that big of a risk.

There is also the other side to weigh in. You do not want to degrade the majority playerbase inside the footprint of your DC aka North America as they are your primary source of revenue.

I just hope SE really did learn from their 1st outside of JP experience. Did the research not only Geographically, but also a modern backbone hub location with multiple branches suitable for demand, within the latency window for the majority, and future expansion. All I can ask for.