Move the servers back?

[SaitoHikari]

I feel that the US infrastructure by default is so bad that I think it'd be justified to get new servers on the east coast as well. Aether at this point might as well be the west coast data center, and Primal the east coast. So not only does each side of the US get designated data centers, the current center would get all of its resources allocated to Aether, and Primal gets more resources on the principle of not having to share with Aether.

Or at least that's how I think this would work.

[NessaWyvern]

What you might not realise, is that the west coast data centres make ping quite a bit lower for oceanic players (My ping is lower to the NA servers than the JP ones) I have a more stable connection than with the old servers, where they are now.

[Maeka]

Southeastern PA on the East Coast here, and... well I've given up on trying to play at 9PM+ EST because the lag is unbearable in doing anything that requires timely inputs whatsoever, like, any dungeon content. Or even solo content. Or any kind of battle, really.

I've kinda resigned myself to the fact I have to do all of my FFXIV stuff by early evening at the latest.

I get 34ms to Google and I get 280Mbps+ down, 12 up, so... this should not be happening. I don't think it's any kind of backbone, or level3 or what-not. It's the servers themselves.

Heck, I get 79ms to my two WoW servers during the same time period I'm seeing this crazy lag in XIV.

[MomomiMomi]

Southeastern PA on the East Coast here, and... well I've given up on trying to play at 9PM+ EST because the lag is unbearable in doing anything that requires timely inputs whatsoever, like, any dungeon content. Or even solo content. Or any kind of battle, really.

I've kinda resigned myself to the fact I have to do all of my FFXIV stuff by early evening at the latest.

I get 34ms to Google and I get 280Mbps+ down, 12 up, so... this should not be happening. I don't think it's any kind of backbone, or level3 or what-not. It's the servers themselves.

Heck, I get 79ms to my two WoW servers during the same time period I'm seeing this crazy lag in XIV.

Friend of mine plays from PA and has reported no such problems, and we usually are playing that late and later.

No issues here, either, but I expected that because I'm in CA.

[Kurando]

The thing to consider is that the NA servers are not purely just for NA players, there are other places in the world that actually connect to these centres and that's what SE (and Devs for many other MMOs) have to plan around. Players from parts of Central/Southern America, Oceania and even further afield may all connect to this one so the location has to suit more than just a single region, and California was the best suited location.

I know some players are adamant that it's an SE issue, but personally I don't think it is and is all down to the respective ISPs. Having played from EU on the Aether NA centre (on an alt before and after the move to Cali), I barely had that many issues at all regarding routing. Sure the occasional lag happened which was an ISP issue, but there was never anything that prevented me from playing the game at any time of day. So from what I found that being several thousand more miles away I still had less problems than those in the actual NA region, so who knows perhaps just like Saito just mentioned previously, US infrastructure could be to blame more than anything.

[Leviathan1usa]

Actually, the original servers also had this issue, but even worse. They also stated they had power issues at the location the old servers were.

The game was unplayable for many at 5pm EST because the level3 nodes in Montreal basically just stopped letting traffic through because they were hammered so badly. I haven't DC'd hardly at all since the move, it used to be daily.

And it IS an ISP issue, not a "server routing issue" as the other person said. If it was a server issue, VPN's wouldn't fix the problem. All a VPN does is go around crappy ISP routes. Which means its your ISP or your ISP's ISP (yes this is a thing).

It absolutely is a server routing issue and kinda shows how much you know about it as I work for the said ISP I am using and it is not a small company. If you know anything about ISP's and how a routing table works then you would know the first 4 hops of a traceroute starting from you are your ISP. The issue doesn't occur until after that which makes it the issue of SE's provider to their servers. I have been working for an ISP way too long both for the business side of things as well as residential services. If you are going to call someone out on things know the facts. NTT is the backbone of SE's current server network. The reason the ping server fixes it is the fact that the routing to the server from New York which is where I run it through has a different routing table than where I am. As far as California being the best place for it Kurando, if that many people are having issues, and the tables have turned where the PA and New York just as two examples that I know of were experiencing the same issues as we are now, then California is still not the right location. As you have stated we have to think about everyone here, and I agree with you, but having this issue for over a year and doing nothing about it for people that do pay money for a service, only to have to pay more to get a decent connection by paying an additional service is wrong. That's not a good business practice, and what's even worse is they ignore it when there have been way too many posts about this.

[Darrcyphfeid]

I know some players are adamant that it's an SE issue

I'm taking this out of context, but it's an SE issue insofar that SE doesn't want to invest in multiple server locations.

"Moving back" isn't so much an issue as either putting the servers in a more central location (not ideal) or having them in multiple locations. Keeping the one in CA, for example, as well as getting one back in Montreal and doing the centralized location for good measure.

I don't want to hear that their infrastructure is horrible or that it'd be too hard to accomplish that. We all pay a monthly fee, ostensibly in part to maintain and/or facilitate the expansion of all this backend stuff, and if the game is larger than ever - their claim - then they need to actually loosen the purse strings a bit to ensure it stays that way.

Let's even be a little more crazy and ask that they throw our friends in South America and Australia a bone and find some local servers there, too. I'm sure it'll pay dividends when they launch their next MMO and these problems don't have to crop up again.

[Maeka]

Friend of mine plays from PA and has reported no such problems, and we usually are playing that late and later.

No issues here, either, but I expected that because I'm in CA.

Maybe they just have a better tolerance, but when I push a button and see the results 1-1.5 seconds later, I consider that "unplayable" because really, that's just aggravating and it makes me not want to play at all.

[Sigma-Astra]

I had a better connection and input to the servers where they were at originally. It's not a good thing that as a paying customer, I have to account for lag spikes when I'm playing XIV. And, also try to think ahead of how fast the server ticks are going to read my next action so that I can safely move out of an AoE or worst, make sure Enochain doesn't drop off...which has happened in Savage and its frustrating to see that I have 3 seconds left on the timer but the server says "Lulz, no you don't, fam".

[LauraAdalena]

Here's the thing about moving back, they couldn't upgrade the servers very easily (at least, that's what they said), and it's overall worse for most players such as I who, despite it being a very minimal difference in distance from me, got a nice consistent connection even if it's not faster. The problem with moving them from Cali AT ALL is that there are not that many US cities or states that have as good internet. The problem is that moving from CA would leave them where? The East Coast? Higher up in Washington? The problem is, the best internet is in CA and the east coast. If they moved it to Canada, a lot more people would be screwed over. If they moved it to central US, the internet for them would suffer and connections would be probably worse than they were in Montreal. And then on the east coast they screw over all the players on the west coast. It's a lose-lose situation. Only city I could see them moving them to that would be beneficial is Austin Texas.

As for people complaining it's not an ISP thing but an SE thing, I know someone in Virginia who has amazing internet and next to never disconnects from FFXIV unless his entire internet takes a dump. This is the same with me and I in New Mexico, have a far worse ISP, and yet he has a better connection than I do in terms of lag. If this is NOT an ISP issue, then explain to me how someone in PA and NM have worse connection issues than someone in VA.

Also, I'd like to point out that ISPs are very untrustworthy companies and are notorious for trying to screw the customer over and most notoriously even tried throttling connections of specific apps, and Verizon recently throttled CA firefighters communications while fighting the CA wildfires.