[Data Center USA] Ping increased. Report your changes here.

[Tahlaera]

Speaking personally, I'm actually voicing concerns because I care about people other than myself - specifically, European players. Players in the US, like me, simply won't see enough of a change in either direction for it to matter.

That said, I'm also faulting SE for making a relatively stupid decision here, barring some explanation on their part. A relocation to the west coast, coupled with (thus far) no free transfer campaign, means they basically flipped off one group of players (Europeans currently on NA data centre worlds) and introduced a potentially community-fracturing decision for others (Oceanic players on Japanese data centre worlds, some of whom will be tempted to pay for a transfer to the NA data centre).

That's just a dumb move on SE's part. As such, it's worth venting about - because SE routinely makes mistakes like this. And if we never get angry over it, if we never voice complaints, or hold their feet to the fire, or occasionally cancel over it, where is the incentive for them to get their goddamned act together?

I am one of those EU players, and have several other EU friends who are currently looking at this decision to move rather warily, considering this might end up being game-breaking if it is indeed somewhere that gives us EU players a horrible base ping, let alone individual players who already made do with less than awesome ping because their country's internet was less awesome. I've usually been lucky throughout most MMO's in that I'm in a very good location overall for high speeds, but others among my friends might not have that freedom of being able to deal with it. I fear I might have some issues too, depending on how badly chosen the location ends up being for us.

Wouldn't be the first time EU got the short end of the stick either with FFXIV - First they had all the EU servers and everything right there with the NA servers. That actually made some people I knew at the time decide to skip on playing at all. And while I was barely active/inactive during it, the maid/butler costume code event for EU players was apparently horrible too, and caused many EU players to not be able to get those.

Right now I have my fingers crossed that things aren't as bad as feared, but... If they are, I can pretty much guess that there will be several of my friends quitting. And a free transfer might be a potentially somewhat soothing option in such a case, but I'd get the short end of the stick there as I'd bought myself a house in-game somewhat recently, and actually had gone to getting some expensive decorations up too. Would suck to lose the expensive pieces I can't retrieve, to say the least. Not to mention that I'd have a huge pile of furniture and no house if I moved.

[Eothas]

...

So true, I don't want to complain about my ping/latency before the servers are live, but if it's true that the servers are in Sacramento, well, that would be extremely stupid. Square basically screwed EC players a bit, EU players playing on NA, SA players (specifically Brazil) playing on NA and some Canadians perhaps? Like... wtf. Square should see how RIOT/Tencent (one of, if not the most, sucessful gaming company) handled their NA servers for League of Legends.

Riot chose Chicago as the new home for their game servers because its solid infrastructure and a more centralized location. They feel the new location will enable them to bring every North American player's ping under 80ms. More than half of the LoL players in the region are currently above that mark.

Source

Yes, LoL ≠ FFXIV but that's not the point. So yeah, why not choose a centralized location? zzzzz. Don't forget that even if some of you are happy with the new location, you will find players in DF/PF that have been negatively affected by it and guess what? You will have to play with them (if they don't unsub), so don't complain about wipes or poor performance, that's on S.E.

[aesteval]

All jokes aside, people are acting like everyone who weighed the decision at SE is probably sitting in a corner eating glue and crayons. I'm sure if it even is on West Coast that there are a number of reasons that went into making that choice, not solely location.

It looks like internet service for the data center is via NTT. Despite my being physically located clear across the country from where the data center is located, my network connection is routing to NTT's network WITHIN state and isn't taking any funky twists and turns. The sooner network traffic connects to the data center's ISP, the more room they have to influence connection quality because that's the point where they are the customer.

[LadyKianna]

I'm so bummed. I was so hoping for central or west coast. I will test and see how bad it is when servers are up. I already played with 160~ and now it'll jump to 200~ ;_;

Um, @MuseTraveller California IS on the west coast...

[PuttyKat]

everyone complaining it's not central seem to have forgotten about their Hawaiian and Alaskan brethren.

[Duelle]

everyone complaining it's not central seem to have forgotten about their Hawaiian and Alaskan brethren.

The ideal thing would really have been east coast and west coast servers.

[Hasrat]

The ideal thing would really have been east coast and west coast servers.

The ideal thing would be to have 50 different data centers on each continent.

But the real world has limitations.

[Saito_S]

The ideal thing would be to have 50 different data centers on each continent.

But the real world has limitations.

It does. But as much as I have been giving east coasters crap for making SUCH a big dramatic deal out of their distance from the data center, which now matches the distance from the DC that myself and many other west coast players have been playing with for 3+ years...

Duelle is right. Regardless of how overdramatic people are or aren't being about the shoe basically being on the other foot, having one east DC and one west DC would make everyone pretty happy. And they wouldn't be the first company running an online game to do so, had they done so. Yes, it's more expense, obviously, but it's not an unreasonable expense. Given their size, is there any doubt that simply doubling the cost of this server move (to set up two new servers, instead of one) is something that SE COULD afford? I'd be dubious of any claim they can't. They just choose not to. Which I think is a shame; I think it would have been a good investment for the game. But eh, SE obviously disagrees, and they have a proven track record of being stingy with how much money and resources they are willing to give to Yoshi and his team.

[DRHaymaker]

everyone complaining it's not central seem to have forgotten about their Hawaiian and Alaskan brethren.

Not everyone will have the best connection, but that shouldn't be the reason that people should be complacent with this.

[Anarnee]

lol Welp... I never felt I had ping trouble from the ones in Canada.

Hopefully CA to TX will not be any different.