Move the servers back?

[Miziliti]

I'm not sure if moving the location back would help. In fact, I'm in CA and this entire week I have severe rubber-banding and the whole game is a gigantic power point slide show. I rarely dc, but I can get freeze at a place for 30 seconds in a dungeon. Something is very wrong with the US servers.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I'm not sure if moving the location back would help. In fact, I'm in CA and this entire week I have severe rubber-banding and the whole game is a gigantic power point slide show. I rarely dc, but I can get freeze at a place for 30 seconds in a dungeon. Something is very wrong with the US servers.

Its not the servers, for the last time its not the servers. PEOPLE ITS NOT THE SERVERS!

Its the networking equipment outside SE's control. Their datacenter's ISP, or their ISP's ISP. If it was the servers themselves, EVERYONE would be experiencing the same issues. Its NOT everyone.

Its not even fully the ISP, but certain switches/routers in the route. Its not the networking gear at the datacenter, or it would be effecting everyone.

[Darrcyphfeid]

The problem is that moving from CA would leave them where? The East Coast?

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Americas_r..._by_datacenter

There you go, Chicago and Dallas are two locations chosen by the game everyone loves to copy. I'm sure there are several other viable locations used by other games (/MMOs) if you make use of Google.

[Luna-M]

Moving a datacenter cost lot of money. It don't make sense from a business perspective and rest of us in EU and JP don't want another 24-48 hr maintence cause a miniority of NA players have slightly higher ping now, it's unfortunate but SE can't please everyone. At least until they add more datacenters (not ingame datacentre) in a big continent like NA.

[kikix12]

Its the networking equipment outside SE's control. Their datacenter's ISP, or their ISP's ISP. If it was the servers themselves, EVERYONE would be experiencing the same issues. Its NOT everyone.

It's the fault of the road between server and players, yes.

But I'm really fed off with the argument that "servers" means that everyone have problems. It's not. Computers are not something that either works perfectly or dumps completely. Have you ever tried running a program that outright devours your computers resources simply for staying afloat?! If yes, then you would know that it works smoothly, but other programs suffer.

Computers work through priority. There is NO SUCH THING as multitasking for computers! Every piece of the computer works on ONE THING AT A TIME. The time between it switching from one process to another is simply so small, that unless you have tons of programs open, you won't see a difference with any hardware in the past several years.

That means that a computer CAN and WILL work smoothly on whatever have high priority, but will not work smoothly for whatever have low priority. If there are players that are responsive (due to good connection to the servers) and players that are unresponsive (due to bad connection to the servers) when the servers themselves are under stress, the servers are most likely going to increase the priority for maintaining the good connections at the cost of the bad connections. Hence SERVERS make SOME players win and some players lose stable connection.

There are all sorts of ways developers can influence things like priority. For example, in old Windows'es, alt+ctrl+delete had surprisingly low priority and would not work if your CPU was at 100% due to a buggy program. In newer Windows'es, that combination will open the blue screen with options within moments no matter how messed up the computer is.

Increasing the hardware will also allow the servers to maintain more connections with stability. For things like servers, you do not want them to be used at full capacity. They should be upgraded before that. Servers operating at full capacity are servers that work as slowly as possible on the receivers end. They have to "switch" so often from process to process that not only it takes a while before they return to the old one (in comparison to when they are working under lower load), but may opt out to try and lower priority for what it finds lower importance processes altogether. That's how computers work.

[Jojoya]

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Americas_r..._by_datacenter

There you go, Chicago and Dallas are two locations chosen by the game everyone loves to copy. I'm sure there are several other viable locations used by other games (/MMOs) if you make use of Google.

WoW hasn't used a data center in Dallas in years. Everything has been in Chicago or Los Angeles since they did the realm connections in 2013/2014 and they had stopped using the Dallas data center a couple of years before that.

My FFXIV connection has been far superior since the move. When the data centers were in Montreal, it would be 600 ms on a good day and frequently went over 1200. Lag was a constant annoyance. Now it's in the 50-60 range consistently. I rarely notice any lag going on and it's usually gone within a few minutes when it does happen.

If the game servers were the issue then everyone would be reporting the same problems. Outside of a few specific occasions, we're not. There's something else causing the issues the East Coast players are reporting.

SE can't please everyone. FFXIV only has 24 servers in NA (compared to WoW having over 100 since people want to use WoW as a comparison). It doesn't make sense for them to split them between data centers in different locations unless the player base expands greatly. With a large number of players from Pacific Rim countries playing on the NA servers, I don't see them moving the data center to the East Coast to please the players that are now experiencing what other players had been experiencing before the move. Someone is going to end up unhappy one way or another.

[Sigma-Astra]

To be fair, it didn't make sense for them to move the servers in the first place either and piss off the people that had a good connection with suddenly a lackluster one. Surely, with how much the move costs them they could have just opened another server location for the West Coast.

[Darrcyphfeid]

WoW hasn't used a data center in Dallas in years. Everything has been in Chicago or Los Angeles since they did the realm connections in 2013/2014 and they had stopped using the Dallas data center a couple of years before that.

Chosen =/= currently in use. If Dallas was good enough for WoW before, I should think it's good enough for XIV now. And if not, hey, there's Chicago. Neither one is on a coast.

If the game servers were the issue then everyone would be reporting the same problems. Outside of a few specific occasions, we're not. There's something else causing the issues the East Coast players are reporting.

Level-3 was messing with you before, and now NTT is messing with... everyone, really. But especially Comcast subscribers on the eastern half of the continent from the sounds of it. Got a guy in my friend circle from southern CA whose ping is lower now, but can't play any more reliably than I can because Square wanted to save a few pennies or something. Another guy in Vegas was screwed when the servers were in Montreal and, last I heard, wasn't fairing much better with NTT in Cali. Yet another guy, in Arizona, has had some rough patches the last few nights our group has gotten together; unsure what his situation was like prior to move.

Either way alternating between one side of the country or the other being unable to reliably play your online-only, subscription-based game is pretty damn sad. If that's truly the best Square can manage, they should reconsider this whole online gaming thing.

[Luna-M]

To be fair, it didn't make sense for them to move the servers in the first place either and piss off the people that had a good connection with suddenly a lackluster one. Surely, with how much the move costs them they could have just opened another server location for the West Coast.

Didn't they say they couldn't improve their data centre at the old location? I'm sure i read something like that.

[MomomiMomi]

Didn't they say they couldn't improve their data centre at the old location? I'm sure i read something like that.

They did say something like that.