Physical/regional servers FINALLY confirmed ??! (Y)

[Dragonheart]

Still, EU players will be forced to have 250~320ms latency, even if the netcode is "perfect". And that's not enjoyable in a modern MMO.

There is no way to lower these 250~320ms besides having a server physically located in EU (or NA at the very least).

Yeah I'd like to hear as well. I suppose all MMO editors are stupid to have EU servers. They should hire you instead. Could it be Blizzard, Trion, EA-Bioware, NCSoft, SEGA, and list goes on...

Why all these company spend money to have localized servers if there is a miracle technique that nullify latency effects on end users?

Holy words. But ppl still not understand this... :/

[Duelle]

Holy words. But ppl still not understand this... :/

Unfortunately, some people understand it but don't care. I'm beginning to think that silly "identity" thing is rearing its head again.

I put game performance over anything else, because my friends in Europe are not going to prevent a wipe at a boss fight caused by latency because the environmental mechanic procced and didn't show up on anyone's screen. Diabolos was pretty nasty with this in CoP, and WoW had its own woes with stuff like Heigan the Unclean and Thaddius.

[Jynx]

I put game performance over anything else, because my friends in Europe are not going to prevent a wipe at a boss fight caused by latency because the environmental mechanic procced and didn't show up on anyone's screen.

I imagine they would just not implement twitch based mechanics, how about when a effect hits the screen it doesn't go off right away?

Even with a 3 second delay our worst friends from the EU would still have well over 2 seconds to GTFO of the way, proper servers and designs could put this delay well near half a second as well not a measurement of time that ruins raids.

[Antipika]

Then you just make the gameplay incredibly easy for JP players and easy for NA... I don't want encounters where I have 3+ seconds to react. Gameplay shouldn't be made easier just because some players have a really bad latency. (and I'm EU :d). What's next after that? Players in South Africa or something will start asking to have encounters tailored for them so they can complete them fine with their latency? No thanks.

Just do like every other company around is doing, have localized servers and have a gameplay that rely on mechanisms that require tight timings.

Rich and Give Shit don't usually go hand in hand, besides there working with what they know works and for Blizzard that's Regional. Relay Servers are a good option For SE however like blizzard there only goal is making money, not spending it making a Relay infrastructure for a few thousand players that may or may not increase.

They're just going for what's logical for any MMO company out there, have servers next to where most of your customers are. Improving pathing, again, will never provide the same results as having localized servers. I really would like you to find me some facts where latency from Western Europe > Tokyo can be reduced below 150ms, at an affordable cost.

Best figures I have found are 170ms from London to Tokyo, and that stuff is mostly dedicated for traders... Not for a video game company having customers that pays £10 a month and want to defeat virtual monsters more efficiently. We're talking money here.

Then you will have to add the latency from [EU customer home] to London. For a Londonian, that could be as low as 10ms. Roughly add 20~50ms for someone in the UK (outside London) to most of Western Europe (Paris, Berlin, etc.).

So at best latency would be reduced roughly by 100ms by using this technique (I currently have ~280ms from London to Tokyo). I don't even see the point, even having servers on US West Coast would yield better results for any EU players (and at least provide low latency to NA players :d).

[Jinko]

I imagine they would just not implement twitch based mechanics, how about when a effect hits the screen it doesn't go off right away?

Even with a 3 second delay our worst friends from the EU would still have well over 2 seconds to GTFO of the way, proper servers and designs could put this delay well near half a second as well not a measurement of time that ruins raids.

Hmm I don't think this would be a very good idea, it would ultimately limit the dev team what they could do with future content as far as boss encounters goes.

People can say what they want about WoW but some of the fights are extremely well done, as Duelle said Hiegen the Unclean and Theduis which are fairly old now are good examples of needing pin sharp reactions and timing, something like that could never work with 300ms latency.

[Duelle]

They're just going for what's logical for any MMO company out there, have servers next to where most of your customers are. Improving pathing, again, will never provide the same results as having localized servers. I really would like to find me some facts where latency from Western Europe > Tokyo can be reduced below 150ms, at an affordable cost.

Best figures I have found are 170ms from London to Tokyo, and that stuff is mostly dedicated for traders... Not for a video game company having customers that pays £10 a month and want to defeat virtual monsters more efficiently. We're talking money here.

Then you will have to add the latency from [EU customer home] to London. For a Londonian, that could be as low as 10ms. Roughly add 20~50ms for someone in the UK (outside London) to most of Western Europe (Paris, Berlin, etc.).

So at best latency would be reduced roughly by 100ms by using this technique (I currently have ~280ms from London to Tokyo). I don't even see the point, even having servers on US West Coast would yield better results for any EU players (and at least provide low latency to NA players :d).

Ah, so you're from London. I have a good idea of how latency can get from the US to a European server, and I can only imagine what it would be like from London to Tokyo. There's a reason other companies establish regional servers, even if you can technically still roll characters on them.

PS: You put me to shame with that Imperishable Night clear. >.>;;;

I imagine they would just not implement twitch based mechanics, how about when a effect hits the screen it doesn't go off right away?

Diabolos' only twitch mechanic was having your finger on a Stun macro to stop Nightmare. And even then the cast time didn't make it possible to stun him every time he tried to use it. In WoW, Heigan's problem was the fact that the poison walls during the safety dance were timed and would one-shot you back when it was relevant content, which screwed over EU and Oceania players. Thaddius' problem was slightly worse, because his static charge mechanic affected the whole raid and if badly timed could easily lead to a wipe due to how a player of the opposite charge could inadvertently damage everyone around them.

[Antipika]

Ah, so you're from London. I have a good idea of how latency can get from the US to a European server, and I can only imagine what it would be like from London to Tokyo. There's a reason other companies establish regional servers, even if you can technically still roll characters on them.

Yeah what's bad is the route taken is often London > USA (East and West or just West) > Tokyo. So EU players just enjoy EU to NA latency + NA to JP latency. (at least with my ISP, that's the route my line is taking to reach SQEX servers).

PS: You put me to shame with that Imperishable Night clear. >.>;;;

Touhou with 280ms, true nightmare-lunatic-hardcore mode :]

[Valmonte]

Then you just make the gameplay incredibly easy for JP players and easy for NA... I don't want encounters where I have 3+ seconds to react. Gameplay shouldn't be made easier just because some players have a really bad latency. (and I'm EU :d). What's next after that? Players in South Africa or something will start asking to have encounters tailored for them so they can complete them fine with their latency? No thanks.

Just do like every other company around is doing, have localized servers and have a gameplay that rely on mechanisms that require tight timings.



They're just going for what's logical for any MMO company out there, have servers next to where most of your customers are. Improving pathing, again, will never provide the same results as having localized servers. I really would like you to find me some facts where latency from Western Europe > Tokyo can be reduced below 150ms, at an affordable cost.

Best figures I have found are 170ms from London to Tokyo, and that stuff is mostly dedicated for traders... Not for a video game company having customers that pays £10 a month and want to defeat virtual monsters more efficiently. We're talking money here.

Then you will have to add the latency from [EU customer home] to London. For a Londonian, that could be as low as 10ms. Roughly add 20~50ms for someone in the UK (outside London) to most of Western Europe (Paris, Berlin, etc.).

So at best latency would be reduced roughly by 100ms by using this technique (I currently have ~280ms from London to Tokyo). I don't even see the point, even having servers on US West Coast would yield better results for any EU players (and at least provide low latency to NA players :d).

Plus whatever improvements come with the new servers and clients, that could very easily push you below a latency of 150.

[Antipika]

Plus whatever improvements come with the new servers and clients, that could very easily push you below a latency of 150.

You just have no idea of what you are talking about really, get real for a minute.

Those 170ms are already achieved with systems that are perfectly optimized (again I'm talking about traders, where 1/1,000,000th second can worth billions). The latency we are talking about here have nothing to do with the client. I'm just using a command prompt to measure it.

Pinging SE's servers or any random Japanese website hosted in Japan yield more or less the same results. (Actually I got a better ping on SE's servers than yahoo.co.jp).

Improving the client/server relationship will never remove the latency due to the geographical location of servers. Reducing latency due to distance is purely physics. Having shorter lines, higher quality lines and less nodes. Because doing EU > Japan through Russia or North Pole is way faster than going through USA or the Middle East.

Off course having a crappy server, heavily loaded, will increase the latency even more (i.e. Blizzard's Diablo 3 servers, located in Europe, but yielding a 200~300ms to EU customers during EU prime time because of heavy load). But we are talking about best possible conditions, so when servers aren't heavily loaded. And the best achievable today is 170ms London to Tokyo.

[whoopeeragon]

As far as I know, Australia has an even more long-winded route from Japan to over here; apparently the course goes through NA, EU, before branching off across Asia to Australia. (memory of a picture a fellow Aussie also put up). Judging by that observation, our latency should be even higher than that of EU, yet...

I've been pinging the Durandal server for the past 20 minutes or so, while having the game running, photoshop open, and around a dozen or so other programs up. Yet my ping has never gone past 210ms....

I'm not denying that there is latency issues. However, I'm very curious as to how EU people get above 200ms, and even reaching into the 300ms, when by my personal observations, they should be less than 200ms. I know there are plenty of other factors, but I'm not necessarily running my programs in my own network on high-speed internet; metropolitan area, shared network, blah blah.