Oceanic/Australian Servers or realms?

[Wiglan.7935]

TLDR at the bottom if you want to just read that.

So i played this game a few years back, enjoyed it a lot, however had a lot of lag due to Australia's trash internet in general. Now i'm back and i have NBN (The internet is still pretty damn bad). I wanted to know if the game will ever get servers for my region, me and a few mates wanted to get into it but by the time i was ready to play and wanted to get into it they all stopped playing mostly now, and they all agreed it was due to lag issues and really bad ping, and that was on both NA and EU servers i've seen, we all like our games PvP oriented and wanted to play something other than WoW since we are all very much bored of it now. I understand some regions have more Aussies than others on NA but the ping is still so gottdamn bad, i really do want to play again and my mates said they would as well but can't get into a game that's only catered for Americans and Europeans, especially if it's PvP where ping matters massively, i've seen arguments saying otherwise but you won't sway me on that and it's not why i am here. I tried to change my home server(?) to one that was more Australian based but it costs to region change.... I don't know what to really do, and i do want to PvE (if that's what it is called, seen something about WvW a few times) and i also want to PvP, I want to do everything but i'm not sure if it's worth investing time in a game that is going to always be unfavorable. I don't mind subbing or paying for a F2P game at all in fact i most likely would asap but i'm not seeing the how Australians can play this game effectively. Lag is the bane of my existence in all games, especially since we have one of the worst internet connection speeds in the world to begin with, and all i see is people saying it's not worth it here due to that, I just want to know if it is instead actually worth playing, so far my mates say it's not, yet they did say it was fun, and would be fine to play without the above stated MS issues.

Sorry if i came off like a bit of a prick writing this, i just don't see why almost every game in the world these days has OCE servers, hell even damn runescape does, yet this game is huge and doesn't at all, most online games in the past were always excluding OCE servers, i just don't see why that continues to happen almost 20 years into the future when we already have pretty terrible net on top of that.

TLDR:(1) Will this game EVER get Oceanic Servers?(2) Is PvP just not worth it for Australians on NA servers(3) Does PvE require precise timing for maximum damage output at higher tiers? (maybe lower to)(4) Can i change my region to a more "Australian based" server for free or do i have to pay for that?

[mercury ranique.2170]

@Wiglan.7935 said:

(1) Will this game EVER get Oceanic Servers?

The answer is nope

The issue isn't with the connection speed and bad pings (well, it is but it is somewhat more complicated). Sorry if I have to get a bit technical and need to talk on an average base.

The sea lines for Australia are actually pretty decent and are not the true issue for the bad internet. The true reason is the population density. Australia has a density of 3 people per square km. While e.g. the US is on 33 people per square km and some countries in europe like the Netherlands are on 416 people per square km.

This means it is not economical atractive to have good internet. Obviously, it makes a big difference if you are in a big city or a small town, but as the average is low, so will be the acceptance of bad internet.

Having an Australian datacenter will not change these bad pings and lag.It would further split the population and make the oceanic population more isolated from the rest.

[Steve The Cynic.3217]

@mercury ranique.2170 said:Having an Australian datacenter will not change these bad pings and lag.It would further split the population and make the oceanic population more isolated from the rest.

It would (for people in Australia) reduce the ping time because the packets wouldn't have to travel all the way across the Pacific and back. Every thousand miles in the round trip takes a little over 8 milliseconds.(1) Among the shorter trips from Australia to the US is Brisbane/Los Angeles, and Google says that this is 7182 miles each way, or a shade over 14000 miles total, and that takes 117 milliseconds that the packets spend in cables at the bottom of the ocean. Minimum. (In reality, the path followed by the cables isn't the shortest possible, and it quite possibly doesn't go via either Brisbane or LA, but the key point to take away is that if the player is in Brisbane connected directly to the machine that puts packets onto the undersea cable, and the server is similarly connected in LA, even then there will be a minimum of 117ms round trip, probably more.)

If they opened a data centre in Australia, the Australian players would no longer experience that delay.

Your point about the population (both in absolute figures and density) is the key part.

(1) Justification: signals in wires or in data fibres travel at about two thirds of the speed of light, around 120000 miles per second. 1000 miles / 120000 miles-per-second is 8.33333... milliseconds (0.008333... seconds)

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"Wiglan.7935" said:(1) Will this game EVER get Oceanic Servers?Almost certainly not, unless ANet can figure out a way to have a shared database that works efficiently across the oceans.

Until then, people who play outside NA/EU would be confined to their own region. That means Australians wouldn't be able to play PvE with NA or EU, only with other people in an Australian or SEA or Pacific region. (And FYI: Malaysia or Singapore is a more likely site than Sydney, in terms of potential customers for ANet.)

And that's unlikely because the number of customers isn't likely to be enough to populate nine WvW worlds, which is about the minimum needed for that mode to be interesting. (It would also siphon off folks from NA and/or EU pvp, which wouldn't be good either.)

(2) Is PvP just not worth it for Australians on NA serversAll things equal, someone with 100 ping is going to find it easier to outplay someone with 200 ping.On the other hand, all things aren't equal, so if you're good, you'll still be better than a lot of NA players.(And generally: reliable 200 ping is easier to play than unreliable 50 ping, with spikes)

(3) Does PvE require precise timing for maximum damage output at higher tiers? (maybe lower to)PvE? can easily be played with higher ping. Again, "reliable" is more important than the delay.

(4) Can i change my region to a more "Australian based" server for free or do i have to pay for that?There's no such thing as more "Australian based" for PvE or PvP; all worlds share the same playing field. For WvW, I know there are people who insist that world X or Y is better, but I think it changes too often for that to be a sure thing.

[ShiningSquirrel.3751]

I live on the East Coast of the United States. The guild I play with is located out of Australia, meaning the founders and core population all came from that region. I have been playing with them for years and they do not seem to be having any issues playing all sections of the game, PVE, PVP, WvW, Raids, Fractals, etc. You really can't tell how your experiance is going to be compared to what your mates or anyone else is going to be able to tell you. I would suggest you just reinstall the game if you do not have it and jump in and give it a try. Only you can really judge if the lag is acceptable to you.

[Zavijah.2695]

I am from Sydney. The game is playable and enjoyable in both PVE & PVP.

This is not like ESO where you can see the clear advantage of other players over you, which is where I recently came from.

There’s no real drop off with performance in pvp and it can handle large numbers of plAyers at once. You definitely have the capability to group vs group or 1 v 1 and beat people even with our 200ms.

But if your friends cannot be convinced, then honestly don’t waste your time. Wow has a latency of 20ms for us. Of course this can’t compete. That’s just stupid to think otherwise.

You are only going to get a feel by downloading and seeing for yourself. You can’t ask people from different locations on the planet with different connections to tell you what your home address connection will deliver. Think on that statement .

To answer your Q about server. Yeah, you will have to pay. Our people are on Sea of Sorrows, and they wash the map during our prime time so if you are looking for competitive play - you won’t find it there as you don’t have as much challenge against opposition servers with no one on.

This is why they look like a tier 1/ server, but get wiped during American playtime against black gate.

Tarnished Coast, and Maguuma have other players. What you should look for is higher pop servers with a more 24/7 presence.

In structured pvp and pve server does not matter any more. As not relevant. Only to wvw

[rogermkiihl.1967]

Now I am curious: what is your ping ingame?

I am in Brazil (South) and average is 200~230.

[Ben K.6238]

Unless GW2 somehow becomes a lot more popular in future - which other MMOs have managed but there's no sign of that happening here - servers outside NA/EU are rather unlikely.

I'm based out of NZ with roughly 220 ping to the NA GW2 servers, and wouldn't bother with PvP. There are some classes that are more lenient on a high ping, but gameplay has become more unforgiving over time due to power creep, and for me personally PvP doesn't have any interesting game modes. WvW is better on higher ping so long as you're not playing a squishy class, but again, combat there used to be better than it is now.

There really aren't a whole lot of hurdles to PvE; that's easy enough on higher pings as well. There have been some movement skills that are buggy but they're relatively rare these days.

All the servers are in the same place and mostly share the same instances, so the only place the choice matters is WvW. Sea of Sorrows has always had a reasonable number of Australian players but other servers might be more organised at the moment; I'm not sure what the current state of affairs is there.

[Healix.5819]

When ArenaNet was first transitioning the servers from NCSoft (Texas) to Amazon (Northern Virginia), they showed that it was possible to have one act as the primary while the other was only hosting map instances. It's theoretically possible for ArenaNet to do this wherever Amazon is located, but it's unlikely to ever happen.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

Here's what @"Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802" wrote on Reddit:

...I moved the GW1 servers to the US and then started paying attention to this subreddit to see if anyone noticed, because for me (even over VPN to Europe and back), the game worked fine.

Well, people noticed!

And also:

The difference is that your connection is to the entire datacenter in NA; the proposal is to have your data in one datacenter and the map server in a different datacenter. We can make those connections but we would want it to be more reliable than we currently find it to be.

And further:

It's not about the delay - it's about the connection between EU and NA getting randomly dropped (or more likely, and we see this in our graphs) getting massively rate-throttled.

And lastly

In GW1 character data /is/ actually transferred across the Atlantic and it was a huge source of downtime and disconnects for EU players. It wasn't fair at all and so for GW2 we decided it was a better trade-off to have reliable service on the same continent even if that limited the ability to play together somewhat.

Editing note: I've replaced "Guild Wars" with "GW1" to clarify the context: some of his remarks are specific to the older game.

[Mia.6043]

@"Zavijah.2695" said:I am from Sydney. The game is playable and enjoyable in both PVE & PVP.

This is not like ESO where you can see the clear advantage of other players over you, which is where I recently came from.

There’s no real drop off with performance in pvp and it can handle large numbers of plAyers at once. You definitely have the capability to group vs group or 1 v 1 and beat people even with our 200ms.

But if your friends cannot be convinced, then honestly don’t waste your time. Wow has a latency of 20ms for us. Of course this can’t compete. That’s just stupid to think otherwise.

You are only going to get a feel by downloading and seeing for yourself. You can’t ask people from different locations on the planet with different connections to tell you what your home address connection will deliver. Think on that statement .

To answer your Q about server. Yeah, you will have to pay. Our people are on Sea of Sorrows, and they wash the map during our prime time so if you are looking for competitive play - you won’t find it there as you don’t have as much challenge against opposition servers with no one on.

This is why they look like a tier 1/ server, but get wiped during American playtime against black gate.

Tarnished Coast, and Maguuma have other players. What you should look for is higher pop servers with a more 24/7 presence.

In structured pvp and pve server does not matter any more. As not relevant. Only to wvw

Agreed. I am in Melbourne, and have no issues at all in game play. My whole family/extended family have been playing for years with no issues. Sure we might get a "laggy" day, but nothing that wouldn't allow decent game play. Bearing in mind no ISP is perfect, and every one, no matter where you are located would have issues from time to time, with their ISP's and server stability/connection. My good friend in California has constant server issues. Sometimes game play for her is impossible, but she agrees, it's mostly due to a relatively isolated place she lives in.We never even had any issues here before the introduction of NBN.I know it's frustrating when you want to play something really badly, and the connection just isn't up to par :( I'm only giving my experience, and just trying to say, that I believe Australians can most definitely enjoy this game.

Sorry for your experience

[Mia.6043]

Edit sorry. I mean even before the Introduction of NBN, we still never had game play issues

[Artarvis.2975]

I'm from Brisbane. Currently on NBN. I would love to play this game more. For general play up to 350ms doesn't really hamper me. Nor does WvW really suffer - I learned to make Boon/Cleanse spammers and just run around in the middle of the zerg. Actually kind of fun. I don't mind support play in all kinds of games.

But when I try to do harder end game stuff where you need to time your actions and react to telegraphed attacks and so forth it just becomes unplayable - I constantly fall victim to such things even when I have You Tubed the fight, am on Discord with other players and know exactly what is going on.

It makes me sad. I would love to play this game more. So much to enjoy and like about it. But I just can't knowing that as soon as I feel like pushing the upper envelope, I can't.When Blizzard brought us local servers my Diablo and World of Warcraft ping went from 350+ to currently hovering around 20ms.You'll find ME paying for and playing games who support Aussies and Kiwis.I understand the issue/s.I'm just sad - Would LOVE to play Guild Wars 2 more.

[ZXCV.4296]

Just wanted to add to this as well being an aussie player its kinda hard at times with the ping. I do wonder if there be any chance now with the idea of listening to player feedback and patching the game to dx11 altho I know that its more or less an issues with cost and player count and I mean I be happy just to have anything around us doesnt have to be in Australia. As well seeing other older mmos get oceania servers (FFXIV is planning one soonish) now makes me wonder even more if this could be done. Eitherway its not like I am gonna stop playing or be like gw2 bad game no oceania server its just a hope that it gets added one day if its nowish or the future its ok.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

You do realize that if there were to be an Oceanic server, that you would not be able to play with anyone from the NA or EU servers.

That the population would need to be large enough to support 6 Worlds, or you would have to play against the same 2 Worlds in WvW.

Even with Alliances coming some day, you need a large enough population to make WvW exciting, rather than stale (always against the same small crowd). 

And, not only WvW, but any events that require a good-sized amount of players. 

(You may, or may not, remember when players had to guest to other servers because their Worlds were not populated enough to complete events.) 

[Uuni.3561]

On 6/8/2019 at 12:39 PM, Zavijah.2695 said:

This is not like ESO where you can see the clear advantage of other players over you

As someone who went from 30ms ping to 250ms after moving to Australia I have to say this is complete and utter BS. There is a massive advantage for many classes when you play with low vs high ping. Not only are you delayed by 1/4s for all non-cast time actions and swapped skills that are normally instant, some skills like Thief SB5 lose about 30% range when your ping is high and you cast it in the direction you are moving. Sure you can work around this by using classes and skills that are less affected but to say you can't see a clear advantage is just blatantly incorrect.

 

Maybe people who have never played the game with low ping just don't know how the game is supposed to play? I have to believe. Anyway I don't think OCE servers would help much, the game is already empty enough at OCE hours no need to cut the NA fellas doing an all-nighter out.

[Badger.4725]

Please make OCE or SEA server but connected to EU/NA players.  I'm sick playing at constant 300ms 😞

[ThrilaKila.5860]

I think an OCE or SEA server would be great. I just played the Open Beta for New World, where they have a SEA region and I had 15ms ping. It. Was. So. Good. to have such a low ping.

 

I really think it would be worthwhile for GW2 to invest in a OCE/ SEA region and would bring more players to GW2!

[Linken.6345]

On 7/12/2021 at 2:07 PM, Badger.4725 said:

Please make OCE or SEA server but connected to EU/NA players.  I'm sick playing at constant 300ms 😞

How do you expect that to be possible?

[Ulgrim.1732]

They could spin up some servers in Oceanic AWS for the PVE portion of the game

For WvW the population of the Oceanic servers could just piggy back onto some  low population servers that get decided upon in the US.

For PvP it should match up with Oceanic servers first, and then broaden out to US. If the US is so sensitive to high latency (that they never get to experience usually) any matches involving them can be hosted on their side.

Couple of added if/then/else statements in the code and done.

 

Solved :).

[dinkleton.5193]

I agree with the above, surely there is a way ANet can build some logic around this to make it work for everyone. One OCE/SEA server would probably suffice, but once it's announced I'd expect a fairly large influx of players so you may need 2-3 initially.

PVE would be much more palatable than it is now for us OCE players.

For the PVP portion of the game it should, as stated above, match with other OCE players then open to US if queues are too long. This could help people get queues in the middle of the day in OCE. When a game is found, it is hosted on the US side so that US players are not hit with 280 ping.

Edited November 11, 2021 by dinkleton.5193