A new hope rises for LA Data Center!

[Enla]

Not from SA but I sincerely hope you guys get a data center of your own as well as a fairer price model. The amount of ping you guys have to deal with is insane.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

Even if not localizing the game for Spanish or Purtuguese (which would be a monumental task). A proper Datacenter for LATAM would be great for gameplay reasons.

Is not like SE or MMORPGs don't have fans in South America, there is more than enough MMORPG players in general.
But XIV is a hard sell for many due to latency/laggy gameplay.

[Shibi]

Wish you the best. We see from the OC centre that numbers talk, so keep subscribing and get as many LatAm friends as you can to subscribe!

(I will look forward to changing from 300ms ping Australia->Sacramento to maybe 20ms ping)

[Zalleh]

When Square Enix moved the NA servers from Montreal to California it was the worst thing that has ever happened to me in this game. In Brazil, and in my city (São Paulo which I assume is also the city with most players as it is the largest one) ALL of the ISPs route from Europe to get to California, making it essentially mandatory to subscribe to a VPN service. For me, playing without a VPN means 300ms latency, sometimes more.

It feels really bad. I started playing day one, so I bought the game from Square Enix's website. Most Brazilian (and non-dollar or euro countries) pay the sub through Steam. They have a fixed dollar conversion rate that is basically over half the current dollar price. Since you can't own both PC licenses, I don't have that option. Forever in this state because I decided to support the game early. Not only do I have to pay an arm and a leg to play the game I love the most, ever, I also have to pay a VPN subscription fee (most of them also charge in USD, which is terrible right now).

At the beginning I tried mudfish, but their tunnels from here aren't that great. I settled for one whose pricing is not abusive, but it's really sad to have to go through all these hoops (and absurd extra cost) to play. A server here would be nice, since I could probably cut the VPN sub. With data center travel I don't have to worry much about missing out on the community that I already know in Aether.

The whole having a server here thing would be pretty nice. Hope it happens one day. I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation. Sure, my predicament is a bit worse than the regular Brazilian because of the inability to use the Steam wallet, but if you want to play without tearing your hair out you still need a VPN no matter what. I've heard that people that live far North closer to the Caribbean have it a bit better, but most ISPs use almost the same routing. I know mine (the biggest one) doesn't bother adapting to the geographic location of the client to route. So the large majority is still in the same situation...

Here's for hoping...

[ItMe]

A DC that will probably only last two years, so I wouldn't hold my breath if I were them. Oceanic servers historically for almost every game get built and then shutdown extremely fast.

Interesting.
Why is that?

[Shibi]

Interesting.
Why is that?

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9qlwqq53 is one older thread on it on a popular Aussie forum. Mostly they have big plans, so release with a server - then realise they don't have the numbers in the first few days so merge them back into the USA.

In FFXIV it's not been done that way, so the numbers are there before the servers are created. As long as oceanic people move in to fill them - even with alts - they will remain. DCs cost a hella lot of money. This announcement surprised me, and I hope LatAm can have the same joy one day if their numbers hold up.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

I'd be amazed if there were enough players to justify the huge cost of a DC in LA. 2 million active subs, I am curious how many are in LA and how much revenue they generate via mogstation etc. I understand the desire though given the ping issues. I just don't think it will happen.

[sarehptar]

I think one thing LA should push for is for more live events--if I recall correctly, one thing that likely factored into the decision to create the Oceania data center was the dev team actually going to an event in Australia, trying to play the content there, and seeing with their own eyes just how badly the ping affected the play experience. I feel like if the dev team had a similar experience at events in LA they would consider expanding there as well.

[ItMe]

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/9qlwqq53 is one older thread on it on a popular Aussie forum. Mostly they have big plans, so release with a server - then realise they don't have the numbers in the first few days so merge them back into the USA.

In FFXIV it's not been done that way, so the numbers are there before the servers are created. As long as oceanic people move in to fill them - even with alts - they will remain. DCs cost a hella lot of money. This announcement surprised me, and I hope LatAm can have the same joy one day if their numbers hold up.

Ah, I understand.
Thank you for the info and for the link~

[MilkieTea]

I think it may be an easier sell to ask for them to make a new server on the east coast of NA (which would probably help a lot with ping in SA)

They have to justify the cost versus profit, or ROI (return on investment). Will there be enough players IN these servers for the price of making them to be justified? At the very least, an east coast NA server would make a bit more sense, investment wise.

OCE servers make sense because of the amount of players who would use them.

When making SA servers, there’d be a HUGE undertaking because they probably wouldn’t provide SA servers without at least providing a Spanish dubbing of the voices (it would make no sense to have a game have servers in a continent where the majority of people who WOULD play wouldn’t be able to understand without subs).

Understand I’m not saying this to put your hopes down, but rather to allow you to understand the thought process execs would probably go through when it comes to something like this. As long as you can provide the numbers (in a mega thread, perhaps, as well as petitioning on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit) you can get this done. But if the numbers don’t match up with the investment they’d need to do, then they likely won’t do it because it’d be too much invested for not enough profit.