Asia & Europe map server

[Hans Yulian.6510]

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Hans Yulian.6510 said:should be US.but regardless which region i use, the map server is different instance can be put all over the world.

No that's not how server instances work. If your home is NA (which probably is) you will only be put in NA servers because that's where your data is. Guild Wars 2 has two data centers, one in NA and one in EU, the reason it takes 30 minutes for a region change is because your data physically migrates from one data center to another. Once the migration is complete you will only be put on the new region's instances.

If you want to play on EU IPs, simply change your homeworld to one in the EU and your problem will be solved. Everyone that plays on EU home worlds is playing on EU server instances, not NA.

What you are talking is true if the server instance you are talking about is the account server which holds the data of your characters, items, chat log, etc. But i am talking about the map server where everyone is doing their real gameplay, for example fighting tequatl, doing meta, pvp, fractal group instance, etc. This map server can be anywhere in the world, doesn't have to be in the US, where the account server must be in a single location. Chat server isn't really time critical can be put either single location in US and everyone connect here, or distributed among the region, of course this approach of chat server have pro and cons, but for the account server, definitely have too much cons to be distributed and the map server has more cons to be in a single location especially if the game is international like GW2. If you see how WOW works, you can change your connected server after you logged in. your game data still the same, but you just connected to different map server. if you have problem with one, you can try another one and maybe have better luck.

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Hans Yulian.6510 said:It's mainly cost of a bit development, sysops, and server. They have to develop a user-friendly mechanic to switch map server, sysops have to setup the SEA AWS cluster, and they have to pay additionally for AWS node. But i still wish they want to do this for the player's gaming experience

That's not how MMORPGs work. In order to provide instances in Asia, they'd need to add a completely new data center that is separate from the other two. The NA instances have no access to the EU data center, and the opposite. A new Asia data center would also have no access to the NA or EU data. The question then becomes if the population that will benefit from said data center would be enough to support the game in that region plus a minimum of 3 WVW servers. Then these players would need to abandon playing with their NA/EU friends, unless they pay for transfers in order to do so.

You talk like you have ever host your own private server. Right now the easiest and simplest private server you can try even in your local machine is Ragnarok and get the eAthena server. If you run the server you see you will get 3 different cmd instance and each of them is just like i described above. Try also these if you can get: Seal Online, Luna Online, WoW private server, RF online, and basically every MMORPG. If they put every player in a single map server, the game basically will not be able to be played. The processing power needed to connect more players increase exponentially, but at the same time connecting too few people at the same place also ruin the game satisfaction. In order to reduce the cost of taking the most powerful server available in the world just to connect 100k people at once which not sure if even google server can handle that, better just host 500 nodes of 200 people each that can be reduced automatically when the player volume is only 1000 at the time. So if this server node is basically different server, there is no reason they can't be put in different location to optimize the connectivity and stability.

If you talk about hosting another entire data center, that's also another different story. If you take a look on how the business perspective, this approach must generate revenue also. so they have to make sure that this region will have enough players, and they also have to block any more people from that region to connect to the global server. Usually this approach is done if the country/region have a game company that want to sign contract with the game developer to do this approach. But now that the Asia region is not blocked to connect to global, means nobody want to host new data center for this game in that particular country/region. Then we get connected to the global server instead.

[maddoctor.2738]

@"Hans Yulian.6510" said:What you are talking is true if the server instance you are talking about is the account server which holds the data of your characters, items, chat log, etc. But i am talking about the map server where everyone is doing their real gameplay, for example fighting tequatl, doing meta, pvp, fractal group instance, etc. This map server can be anywhere in the world, doesn't have to be in the US, where the account server must be in a single location.

And this is where you are factually wrong. The data center that holds your data, characters, items etc must be in the same area as the map server, otherwise there would be heavy latency between the two. You cannot play in NA maps, while your data is in the EU, it's why you must pick a home world in the region you want to play in. The developers "played" with this idea, but due to the complexity of the characters in Guild Wars 2 they found the latency to be unacceptable (and/or the game unplayable). To use your definition, the account server is on two different locations (it's called the data center) one is in NA, the other is in the EU. Map instances in the EU have access to information of the EU data center only, and map instances in NA have access to information only of the NA data center.

You talk like you have ever host your own private server.

What you are talking about here is completely irrelevant. They do have multiple servers (hardware) to host players, which can be seen easily if you use the ip command. They just have to be in the same region as the data center. Imagine a map server in NA trying to get your information when you open your inventory from the EU data center. That would cause heavy latency and they don't want that latency in the game, which is why they only allow map instances of a region to access the data center of that particular region only. To repeat what I explained above, EU map instances have access to EU data centers, NA map instances have access to NA data centers.

If you talk about hosting another entire data center, that's also another different story. If you take a look on how the business perspective, this approach must generate revenue also. so they have to make sure that this region will have enough players, and they also have to block any more people from that region to connect to the global server. Usually this approach is done if the country/region have a game company that want to sign contract with the game developer to do this approach. But now that the Asia region is not blocked to connect to global, means nobody want to host new data center for this game in that particular country/region. Then we get connected to the global server instead.

There is no "global" server. To repeat once more: there are two data centers, one in NA and one in EU, those are separate and host the data of completely different players. The data center used for your data is based on your selection of home server when you first log in the game. If you pick a home world in EU, your data will be in the EU data center, if you pick a home world in NA, your data will be in the NA data center. If you want to play in EU, simply change your home world.

Players in EU cannot play with players in NA, because their data isn't available on each other's data center. This means if they added an Asian server, those old players that pick that option won't be able to play with their friends from EU/NA again, which is another limiting factor of adding a new data center.

[Vancho.8750]

@Hans Yulian.6510 said:

@Pacificterror.7805 said:I'm in Australia and play just fine on the NA/US servers....and Australia is basically due south of SE Asia. I'd imagine SE Asia would have an enjoyable experience on the EU servers thus having no need for ones specifically located in Asia?

hi neighbor! unfortunately if i test using speedtest connection and connect to the near EU AWS, latency is still around 250, which doesn't much different from US (if you see map, they just almost the same distance to the left and the right

@"firedragon.8953" said:I play from Japan with about 250 ping if things are good. I really do wish this could be under 100, but thankfully it doesn't really affect most aspects of the game, except maybe sPvP. I do like the idea of making map instances that are hosted in Asia though. No need to make a whole new region, just have an overflow map that connects Asia IP addresses within the NA server mega server to a map hosted on physical servers in like Singapore or something. Sure it won't result in consistently lower ping, but it would be nice once and a while when the megaserver system is able to calculate such a move. Also adding an option for a selectable Asia PvP region may make some people happier.

But I think it is mainly a cost thing. I'm just glad ArenaNet allows Asian IPs to connect to their servers.

Finally someone who understand what i am talking about. And yes my ping is also around there (300ish 200ish at best). It's kinda fine for PVE content which the mechanics are kinda predictable. By the way it definitely will be much lower ping, from our location to singapore we can expect 50ish. Just expect some experience like if we play overwatch and CSGO, the 300ms latency is definitely unplayable for latency sensitive game.

For less latency sensitive game such as MMORPG, the impact isn't too much, but still kinda punishing. For example if there is a PVE mechanics that have 3 seconds casting time, US and SEA wont bother too much, but if the mechanic is at 500ms casting time, you know that everyone have to react instantly no matter what. Consider that the player response time 100ms, we can calculate that for US player they have spare time of:500ms (casting time) - 50ms (from server to client) - 100ms (player's reaction time) - 50ms (from client to server) = 300mswhich is still plenty of time. Now try to put your latency into equation:500ms (casting time) - 250ms (from server to client) - 100ms (player's reaction time) - 250ms (from client to server) = - 100mswhich means no matter what you will get hit by the mechanic.

At least so far i never see any mechanics with less than 1 second warning, but still that is the difference of US have spare 800ms and you have spare 400ms, we can still see a kinda big number here.

PVP really doesn't work for me, just imagine you play CSGO from asia, the server you take is the one in US region, everyone will just blinking and you die out of nowhere.

It's mainly cost of a bit development, sysops, and server. They have to develop a user-friendly mechanic to switch map server, sysops have to setup the SEA AWS cluster, and they have to pay additionally for AWS node. But i still wish they want to do this for the player's gaming experienceI believe it is not about the server and the costs of it, I think it is more of a NCSOFT thing. NCSOFT "produces" MMOs, most of their games are marketed towards Easternaudiences and they probably decided that GW2 would cannibalize some part of their other games, since it does some things better ( Blade and soul launched about the same time as GW2, guess which IP NCSOFT likes more, one of them has anime).I don't think it matters anymore since they get most of their cash from mobile and their games are not the spry chicken they once were (this could also be the reason on why they won't do it ). They could just pop a datacenter for Asia but it would have to come with big marketing push so it is worth keeping it up. If there isn't one new Datacenter when the new Expansion comes there wouldn't be any.

[DemonSeed.3528]

They should give a choice to tunnel through a localised aws server acting as a middle man to the main servers (option to select sea/ocx/aus/sa/etc servers to be tunneled to the NA/EU server) - it will help with a lot of routing and latency issues (not all but a great deal, and of course not counting problems with the server load itself). The overhead is negligible and in some cases can even lower latency for some.

[maddoctor.2738]

@DemonSeed.3528 said:They should give a choice to tunnel through a localised aws server acting as a middle man to the main servers (option to select sea/ocx/aus/sa/etc servers to be tunneled to the NA/EU server) - it will help with a lot of routing and latency issues (not all but a great deal, and of course not counting problems with the server load itself). The overhead is negligible and in some cases can even lower latency for some.

They already do that with Cloudflare. Media files can be anywhere in the world and your client acquires them from the closest possible location, when your client streams anything, it acquires it from the server(s) closest to your location, not the location the game servers are located on. So for example the EU data center is in Germany, but when your client requires data, it can get it from any country that also has an AWS server. This can be very easily seen when you open the Trading Post, when it streams the icons and TP data and if you check your TCP connections, they won't be from the same IP as the actual GW2 server (not even on the same country)

What they cannot do is allow players on different instances to play together, and they cannot create map instances away of where the data center is. In the EU example, all actual server instances are in Germany, together with the data center, so it's closer and eliminates latency. Having no latency between data center and map server is much more important (and impactful) than reduced latency between a player and the map server.

Edit: It's worth noting that Guild Wars 1 allows a player to change their data center of choice by using the district selection feature. However when you do so, your data does indeed migrate. Guild Wars 1 data was minimal, which is why Anet allowed it, while each account and each character contains much much more data in Guild Wars 2 making an automatic migration impossible. It's why changing region in GW1 is instant, while it can take 30 minutes in GW2.

[Hans Yulian.6510]

@maddoctor.2738 said:let me get clear to you: i dont care what the data center i am connecting to, which is likely the US, i dont even care if they create new data center in Asia, i wouldn't even play it, i wouldn't want to restart my years of gaming here from 0 again. And i clearly not asking for new data center in asia, i just asking for map server in asia.

What you are talking about here is completely irrelevant.This is relevant because this is how every world-wide game server works. You just try to play the steam CS:GO, DOTA 2, where do you think the data is? most likely US, but nobody in the Asia, EU, will suffer from latency because they host multiple map server in different region. This map server is connected to single account server. The map server is the server where the instance of the gameplay itself being hosted, not the data. The data in this map server are mostly volatile, and the user's data changes are getting reported back to the account server by the map server. Whether they stream it all the time or periodically (should be this btw) it's up to the developer's optimization strategy, but the connection of server-server is much more reliable than home connections, they also so reliable that they can guarantee 5-6 9s (if you understand what is this) so that the user data in map server will definitely get delivered back to the account server. Map server is really meant to be distributed not centralized.

ok ill leave this discussion and just send mail to through the support channel. This topic is a way too technical and not many people understand this matter anyway.

[Henry.5713]

Anyone who has played the game for more than an hour or two should know that there have been EU servers from the very beginning. They are located in Frankfurt. This was obviously done fix latency issues for EU players. They should also know the game well enough to understand why content such as WvW requires multiple well populated servers and for them to be located at the same data center.

SE servers would end up being quite underpopulated compared to the other regions. This would completely kill any group content. WvW in particular would either be impossible or be limited to three quite dead servers and an eternal boring matchup. And even if they made it possible (for the sake of an argument) for SE servers to freely connect to EU or NA servers when playing such content, you'd then be facing these very latency issues that made you ask for SE servers in the first place.Plus, most of the veteran SE players wouldn't even be willing to move there if it meant running into low population issues and more importantly no longer being able to play with their friends and or guilds. These new servers would only really work for those few remaining SE players who are mostly or entirely into solo PvE content. Hardly worth the investment on ArenaNet's part.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Hans Yulian.6510 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:let me get clear to you: i dont care what the data center i am connecting to, which is likely the US, i dont even care if they create new data center in Asia, i wouldn't even play it, i wouldn't want to restart my years of gaming here from 0 again. And i clearly not asking for new data center in asia, i just asking for map server in asia.

Already explained why that's impossible, for technical reasons. Map servers need to be on the same region as the data center as already explained, but I understand the topic is probably too technical and hard to understand.

This is relevant because this is how every world-wide game server works.

Not MMORPGs, they don't work that way.

You just try to play the steam CS:GO, DOTA 2, where do you think the data is? most likely US, but nobody in the Asia, EU, will suffer from latency because they host multiple map server in different region.

So let's get technical. There is very little, if any, data involved in those games during a match, unlike in an mmorpg where the map server needs to query the data center constantly. What you do during a CS:GO match has no effect on your data, same as DOTA 2. The map server access your data before the match begins, and after the match ends, that's it. During the match, there is no need to access your personal data anymore. On the other hand, in an MMORPG like Guild Wars 2 the map server needs constant access to your account data, your inventory, your guilds, your everything. Even in a sPVP match (Which could potentially work like a CS:GO or DOTA match) you still have access to your inventory, your achievements, your PVE character information and so on. Which is why, as given by the developers themselves, map servers and data center must be on the same area (possibly the same room too)

[Astralporing.1957]

@Hans Yulian.6510 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:let me get clear to you: i dont care what the data center i am connecting to, which is likely the US, i dont even care if they create new data center in Asia, i wouldn't even play it, i wouldn't want to restart my years of gaming here from 0 again. And i clearly not asking for new data center in asia, i just asking for map server in asia.

What you are talking about here is completely irrelevant.This is relevant because this is how every world-wide game server works.And that's where the problem lies - GW2

does not

have a worldwide game server. It has

two

- one for EU zone, one for US zone. And it is designed in a way that makes map instances very dependant on continued connection to said data centers.

They tried experimenting with single server during game development, but the delay it caused for EU players was big enough they deemed it unacceptable. That's why we ended up with two distinct (and separate) zones that cannot mix together. It is indeed possible that since that time the quality of internet connections worldwide has improved to make that original idea no longer as unreasonable. Or not - i don't really know about that. It doesn't matter anyway - when they made the decision then, it impacted the way the game was designed, and we're now left with the consequences.

What you are asking for is not just a case of adding some map instances in Asia region. You are talking about something that would require a complete redesign of the whole server architecture. And the best part is that we don't even know whether it would help at all, because it is also entirely possible that the original problems they ran into with datacenter connection latency being important might actually be still as relevant as they were then.

By the way: this approach is very common for MMORPGs. Just look at how it is done in FF XIV, for example.

[Noc Rubu.5804]

On 1/22/2021 at 2:09 PM, Dawdler.8521 said:

Europe already have servers and Asia has an entirerly different version of GW2.

China does, not Asia. I play on NA servers from SEA.  

On 1/23/2021 at 12:46 PM, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Here's a bit of information on how Guild Wars 2 uses AWS Cloud Services:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/arenanet-guild-wars-mmorpg-migration/

I'm guessing the Engineering Team knows what works best for the studio. /shrug

"They strive for 100% uptime which they achieved for three and a half  years starting in August 2017 until March 2020 when they had a 14-minute outage due to a configuration error."

From the above article.  This fact is a like listening to a politician.  I remember DCing repeatedly ... that is not UPtime for me. That is downtime.    Still it is a Lag fest when 70+ x 3 battle in WvW, even the highest end computers with good connections have to turn their graphics down to low low low mode.  Still needs to be fixed YEARs later. 

Balance that. 

[Danikat.8537]

Server uptime is different to your connection. It means the server itself stays online so it is possible to connect to it. They can't guarantee all the wires and routers and other steps between your PC and the server will also stay up constantly without even a moment's loss of connection, because none of that network is within their control.