Australian Latency at Endgame

[Kasern]

We Aussies, along with the rest of our Oceanic brothers and sisters, have long had to suck it up and deal with what much of the rest of the world would consider to be horrendous and unplayable latency to our favourite game servers. On older games, such as World of Warcraft for example, this latency could often be adapted to as the game was quite well executed and designed for a well wide range of hardware and connections, and Oceanics managed to thrive.

However, with many new MMOs the trend is towards real-time, action-based combat and movement, requiring reflexes and reactions previously reserved for console platfomers or local region FPS games. This is very much the case for Final Fantasy. From levels 1 through 50, I had my share of the familiar "Aussie lag" but passed it off as the usual price of my preferred hobby, but now that I have reach the current endgame content of our new game I find myself at something of a brickwall.

I attempted to do Chimera tonight, a fight that many, many people have beaten without issue, yet found myself completely incapable of avoiding the damage I was taking despite my screen showing my character escaping the clearly marked red zones. Annoyed and frustrated, I left and queued up for Ifirit - yet, no surprise, same deal.

A quick Google search found the NA and JP datacenter IPs and I ran a ping test. From Sydney, Australia to the NA data center I have an average of 250ms (my norm for World of Warcraft and never an issue) while I have 113ms to the JP data center. A guild mate of mine, living in Brisbane, pings the NA datacenter for 321ms. That is nuts.

Obviously the simplest solution would be to move to the Japanese servers. But my guild and I discussed this before launch and came to the decision that an NA server provided the better long term option, as a Japanese server (even Tonberry, the server dubbed the Unofficial Oceanic server) would likely see a massive decrease in English speaking players once the initial free period is over and players decide they don't like the game. Finding ourselves alone, or surrounded by other, much larger Oceanic guilds and no pool of new players from which to recruit, is not a particularly appealing prospect.

Yet, clearly this game has been designed around the concept of Japan: a small island nation where the majority of players are no more than a few hours drive from the data centers - not in another hemisphere.

So what are we to do? There is no hope of an Oceanic server (either located in Australia or Singapore) ever being created, even Blizzard merely labels servers in North America as Oceanic rather than creating true Oceanic servers. We could move, either through the promised transfers or by rerolling. Or we could simply give up, accept the fact that this game is one we will not be able to experience to the fullest.

For now, I will be riding out the rest of this week to see what comes of server transfers: how much they will cost and if it is possible to transfer from the NA servers to the JP servers. Though asking your guild members, many of whom have only been members since Final Fantasy launched, to pay money to continue being part of your community or forcing them to reroll is never a good way to keep your guild alive and strong.

If you have managed to get to the end of this wall of text, perhaps you have some thoughts to share on the matter.