Why are SEA servers not a thing yet? [Merged]

[KSUT.3129]

I also would love to see the addition of server somewhere in Asia (Singapore or Aus).

I really love playing Guild Wars 2, but i am unable to compete in PvP / WvW due to high pings and delays.

Currently playing from Indonesia, THE BEST ping around 250 (US server). Just about few days ago I was so desperate that I move my account to EU, yes the ping is around 20-30 lower, but the issue still persist.

So i turn my interest to the PVE mode, and i've been loving meta trains and stuff...

But for the past year, the connection has been crazy and there's nothing I can do about it.

In croweded maps, like chak or octo, not only the ping spiked, but i couldnt register any inputs, it was such a nightmare...

And I know there problem is not with my internet, cos i have no connection problem in any other games.

So Please!! Fix this ongoing problem!! I know many of asian/oce players are suffering right now, but we really do enjoy the game.

There are times when I have spared my time to join on a scheduled meta train with my guildmates, but the connection problem really hinders me from joining the fun. And it was a mood breaking for me...

Yes I understand that they need to keep on working on new content, but if the connection issue makes us unable to play the game, then whats the point of new content?

I hope the devs are listening to us. We really want to continue enjoying the game.. Thank you!

[ReveVersant.6804]

Honestly tapping into the market with an SEA server would be smart.  OCE and SEA players have always been starved for MMO's.  Albion Online just launched a SEA server, and it was wildly successful, It feels more populated than their NA server.

 

 

[Astralporing.1957]

On 2/14/2023 at 2:35 AM, zefleas.7051 said:

Just curious, issit possible to have an Asian server but still be connected to U.S server.

I'm afraid not. The issue is not the map servers. The issue is the character data server, which needs to be the same for the whole zone. The data replication you speak of is just not fast enough (in fact, it suffers the same latency as the normal GW2 connections, you just don't see it due to the media used - noone cares or notices if youtube video shows up in OCX few seconds later after all).  Notice, that if the tech existed to make OCX have a separate set of servers but still be part of NA (or EU) zone, it would also have been possible to merge NA and EU into one.

So, yes, currently the only option for OCX servers would be a separate OCX zone with their own, independent set of players and WvW servers.

[Linken.6345]

5 hours ago, ReveVersant.6804 said:

Honestly tapping into the market with an SEA server would be smart.  OCE and SEA players have always been starved for MMO's.  Albion Online just launched a SEA server, and it was wildly successful, It feels more populated than their NA server.

 

 

For how long a week?

Do you really think anyone on SEA will move over after have played years on Na or Eu and made friends?

Please go through the thread and answer how will wvw maps ( you need atleast 3 servers for it to work, wont everyone just stack one server and be on the winning team every week?) or spvp ques will feel with the lack of players.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Linken.6345

[Valnazzar.8304]

4 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

For how long a week?

Do you really think anyone on SEA will move over after have played years on Na or Eu and made friends?

Please go through the thread and answer how will wvw maps ( you need atleast 3 servers for it to work, wont everyone just stack one server and be on the winning team every week?) or spvp ques will feel with the lack of players.

LOL.

You talk like WvW isnt dead content. People from SEA wanting to WvW during our prime time have to play either during EU's mid afternoon, or US's morning, so you either get to play with the unemployed, zombies or students... or the unemployed, zombies and students, most of which have no respect to the limited playtime we have in the evening and are fine with excessively long downtime.

At least LFG for PvE content is still tolerable in EU, but good luck trying to find groups in US, unless you want to set the alarm and wake up on ungodly hours just to raid/strikes/fractals - at which point it stop being a game you play for fun, it becomes a second job.

How many people here can say they have woken up at 3am to pug raids only for it to fail or have ridiculous downtime waiting in LFG, then have to wash up for work at 6am? How many have logged in the afternoon on an off day from work and see 6 other people trying to kill Tequatl, which obviously will fail? How many have went up to do g1/2/3 at Dhuum and have to go through big orb back and forth so many times you end up dying cause you didnt have any more time to collect 4 more?

The only solution is to join a SEA specific guild, and even that is a problem on NA since there are so many that starts off with a decent size, then dies off in a few months due to lack of motivation to continue playing a game with high ping and low pop. While its not so bad in EU since there are only 2 or 3 big SEA guilds still going strong (the one I'm in being one of them), most people from SEA would be playing in NA - you can blame Blizzard and Battle.net for that fiesta from Diablo 2. And if you could move past all that, you STILL cant WvW together unless you transfer servers to where your guild members are.

PvP? Yeah, I too enjoy having half my life gone by the time I see someone appears around the corner.

I just find it deliciously ironic that a game studio owned by a Korean company doesn't have an Asian server.

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Valnazzar.8304 said:

At least LFG for PvE content is still tolerable in EU, but good luck trying to find groups in US, unless you want to set the alarm and wake up on ungodly hours just to raid/strikes/fractals - at which point it stop being a game you play for fun, it becomes a second job.

Why do you think LFGs in SEAs server would be better? It would still be those same people. And even less of them, because not every OCX player would migrate from NA/EU.

1 hour ago, Valnazzar.8304 said:

PvP? Yeah, I too enjoy having half my life gone by the time I see someone appears around the corner.

Well, after SEA split it would be even worse than that.

1 hour ago, Valnazzar.8304 said:

I just find it deliciously ironic that a game studio owned by a Korean company doesn't have an Asian server.

If even Korean-owned company does not think SEA server is a good idea,  don;t you think it probably means it is not a good idea?

[ReveVersant.6804]

15 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

For how long a week?

Do you really think anyone on SEA will move over after have played years on Na or Eu and made friends?

Please go through the thread and answer how will wvw maps ( you need atleast 3 servers for it to work, wont everyone just stack one server and be on the winning team every week?) or spvp ques will feel with the lack of players.

6 week 🙂 so longer than new world lasted XD

Yes. SEA people are happy to move from 300+ ping to 100 ping.  the fact is, low ping in competitive games is enticing to people 😮 Sure, friendships are important, but so is a fresh start, its not like you "lose" your friends by not playing with them, we have so many ways to keep in touch that don't involve us playing a game at a disadvantage.

 

You make it sound like SEA has no people living in it with your comments about a lack of players... (just so you know, its got the highest population density in the world, and yes, we like video games)

 

 

Edited May 3, 2023 by ReveVersant.6804

[Kal Durak.2830]

On 2/10/2023 at 2:57 PM, Pinkeh.4207 said:

Asia America Gateway and 3 other under sea cables were damaged recently. It might not be Anet's fault that an undersea cable is damaged but they also don't wanna do anything for the SEA playerbase... like spinning up servers on local data centers.

My guild have players spread across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. A lot are experiencing massive lag spikes trying to connect to NA. We decided to just play another mainstream MMOG with Asia Pacific servers, and taking the community there instead. GW2 is unplayable with 800-4000ms. 

We carried 3 of our friends through raids this week as they just stood nearby watching the laggy slideshow. That way they still progressed despite not being able to participate. 

Try exit lag, I get 210ms latency to NA from the Philippines.

Edited May 3, 2023 by Areoh.7495

[LONGA.1652]

Asia(- China) may have over 500 million gamers  but A-net wasn't able to penetrate Japan-Korea-Taiwan.  The Big3 of  Of PC MMO gaming .

Maybe they could try again when GW2 have a a phone client where the rest of Asia can afford installing some games on mobile which still  hard since the market is very saturated with game that more fitting  to people life style.

[Crystal Paladin.3871]

+1 vote to SEA server

Would definitely like to play GW2 with less ping rather than getting annoyed by 300 ping gameplay(pressing skills atleast 3 times to trigger it, collecting dhuum orbs like a snail, blue orbs passing thru in fractals, picking up chak meta ley energy only to realise Ure empty handed after the animation,....) 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Back when megaserver was first introduced, the developers talked about adding a bridge between regions as their next step, but that it required alot more work. This would've merged all players into a single game world in PvE. (It was noted that this bridge would never extend to PvP or WvW, even if implemented.)

 

This bridge was already partially implemented with transfers, but it wasn't fast enough to use in real time. The idea was to use micro-updates to keep multiple copies of the character data in each region instead of transferring it in bulk over a half hour to several hours of time.

 

This was in the first few years of the game, and we never heard of it again. I can only presume that the people working on it left the company long ago, likely before Heart of Thorns even started development.

 

As much as I'd like a SEA server, without a regional bridge it would only be sparsely populated in PvE, and it would be hard to find enough players for WvW to have at least three servers for the one-up-one-down system to be effective. Of these players, the majority would be SEA and not OCX, and English would rarely be spoken so you'd be trading off communication ability for lower latency.

 

I do support the  creation of a SEA/OCX server, but it might need WvW disabled at least, or for the one-up-one-down system to be removed in favor of a single monolithic server, at least until we get Alliances fully implemented in the future.

Edited May 10, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[I Know Kung Fu.6495]

+1 for SEA server.

 

I hate playing with 200+ ms ping since my work in Asia. Playing on EU or NA sucks with high latency. I screwed up so many mechanics that I feel bad for my teammates trying to carry me through the checks in Raid or PvP.

[Rix Raw.6537]

+1 for SEA servers

 

Moved to SEA from EU last year and was itching to get back into GW2/pick up EoD so a bit bummed out about this situation.

[quake.9023]

i jus transferd to EUR servers, cause the ping n lag spikes too much on US ...avg 280.... from SEA..... in EUR now getin 190-220. really need SEA server kitten

[xxviirakh.3921]

Yep +1 for SEA servers

[sdren.4193]

The game is 10 years old. It still absolutely holds up and I've had a blast coming back to it. Please follow the success that Albion Online did and make the base game F2P and open SEA servers so that SEA/OCE/Korea can enjoy this game on <100ms.

(I'd also settle for being able to make custom pvp lobbies on AWS regions other than USE)

Respectfully,

-- An oceanic gw2 enthusiast.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Core game is already Play4Free. 

[Danikat.8537]

The base game is free to play, it has been for 8 years. There are some limitations on free accounts, like only having 2 character slots (instead of 5) and not being able to use map chat but they can play the entire of the base game and Season 1.

SEA servers have been requested several times and I'm sure Anet is aware there's a demand for them but I assume they don't think there's enough demand to do it. I suspect the biggest problem is they'd need at least 3 servers for WvW (ideally more so the match ups can change) and they don't think there's enough people who would play in that region to justify it. I can't say whether that's right or wrong but it seems unlikely they just don't want the money and I suspect it would be relatively easy for them to set up servers in the area since they're owned by NCSoft who are based in Korea.

[sdren.4193]

Whether an SEA region is viable or not, who knows? No point speculating. A fantastic compromise would be being able to create custom lobbies in AWS regions would give us a corner of the game we can enjoy. I can deal with high ping in pve.

I'd pay for it in the shop to maintain a lobby hosted in AWS Sydney so I can play competitively with the people in my region.

[Kal Durak.2830]

3 hours ago, sdren.4193 said:

The game is 10 years old. It still absolutely holds up and I've had a blast coming back to it. Please follow the success that Albion Online did and make the base game F2P and open SEA servers so that SEA/OCE/Korea can enjoy this game on <100ms.

(I'd also settle for being able to make custom pvp lobbies on AWS regions other than USE)

Respectfully,

-- An oceanic gw2 enthusiast.

GREAT Idea!

[Sobx.1758]

"It's time to make the base game f2p"? The base game already is f2p, what is this about? 😶

[Freya.9075]

2 hours ago, sdren.4193 said:

Whether an SEA region is viable or not, who knows?

Anet knows. They have the data and know if it’s worth having servers there. So far they have not added a server there. And they haven’t done so for a reason. It’s not enough players there, and I would assume many existing players would keep playing in the server they are now. Due to guilds and friends they have. I know my friend from SEA would stay, as we have talked about this topic before. 

[sdren.4193]

1 minute ago, Freya.9075 said:

Anet knows. They have the data and know if it’s worth having servers there. So far they have not added a server there. And they haven’t done so for a reason. It’s not enough players there, and I would assume many existing players would keep playing in the server they are now. Due to guilds and friends they have. I know my friend from SEA would stay, as we have talked about this topic before. 

I mean, yeah possibly. Tbh I would be surprised if they did. But I'd still like to be able to host custom lobbies on AWS servers in more regions. That would be enough for pvp players to compete all around the world.

[Izzy.2951]

They could definetly open servers in Korea very cheap, translate the text at least to korean and open servers there. Maybe people from australia would have less ping there? 

Otherwise theres just simply not enough population

[Gravitron.7982]

What we can speculate is that it's clearly not an investment Anet thinks will generate them a good return on the investment required to open and constantly maintain a SEA server. Who knows what other licensing and regulation challenges they would have to deal with on top of the cost to rent VMs or a server cluster, cost for bandwidth, the cost of scaling, the cost to pay people to maintain said server when it goes down and needs physical reboots, etc. On top of all of that, you still have to deal with different VATs/tariffs per country per region, so billing becomes a nightmare. 

After all this trouble, all these costs and fees, time sunk, effort, etc, what will the ROI be for this? Are they going to at least 3x? My gut says no.