Wait no asia server after steam version released?

[XenMaster.7165]

I was hoping they add new server.

[Dayra.7405]

1 hour ago, XenMaster.7165 said:

I was hoping they add new server.

GW2 runs in AWS cloud, the number of server is very likely dynamic on demand. (I would expect a virtual server per map instance, no clue on how many real server they distribute.)

Maybe you meant to ask for a third realm running in a third (asian) AWS center? If yes, you would pay the better ping with emptier maps. (In fact there is already a 3rd (and 4th?) one, in and exclusively for china).

Edited January 15, 2023 by Dayra.7405

[Zebulous.2934]

As far as I know the Chinese servers run a different version of gw2, with different visual assets. Different player faces, clothing skins, and altered monster models.

[notebene.3190]

It did no occur to them, in the heat of the moment. 😏

[Gehenna.3625]

20 hours ago, XenMaster.7165 said:

I was hoping they add new server.

Why exactly did you hope that? I certainly wasn't expecting that with the Steam release.

[Danikat.8537]

I assume Anet don't think there's enough GW2 players in Asia (outside China) to make it worthwhile. You can only play together with other people in the same region you are. The Trading Post is game-wide and players in NA and EU can whisper each other, send mail etc. but can't ever be in the same location in the game. So there would need to be enough people in the new region to fill maps for meta events, to get parties together for Dungeons and Fractals, to compete in PvP and probably the most difficult - to fill out WvW where you'd need not 1 server but at least 3 (and with 3 you'd be facing the same match up every single week).

Obviously there's more than enough people in Asia for that (and it's likely people in Oceania would join too), but I'm not sure how many of them play GW2, or would start playing just because there's a local server, considering the game is only available in English, French, German and Spanish (and a Chinese language (not sure which), but only in the Chinese version).

They apparently thought it was worth doing in China, which requires seperate servers and a Chinese partner company to run it, but I'm not sure if that's because that partner company takes on a lot of the day-to-day costs of running it and the risk of not making a profit and Anet are effectively just licensing the game to them.

I think Anet can tell where in the world players are, and they could do market research to find out how many more people are likely to play if there were dedicated Asian servers, so I'd be surprised if they hadn't considered it, but as far as I know they've never said they would do it or even that they were exporing the possibility.

[Peter.3901]

I wish there was a server for South America too.

[Astralporing.1957]

And i wish there was no separation between EU and NA, so there would be more players around...

Unfortunately, we have the system we have, in which separate zones might give you a better connection and latency, but at a cost of dividing the playerbase. And while PvE might survive further separation (although with possible issues on some metas), i doubt WvW and SPvP would.

But sure, let's ask to split playerbase into tiny little pieces, so we have only few other players to play with, always the same 3-side WvW matchups and empty SPvP queues. I'm sure that would be good for the game, right? [/sarcasm]

[Izzy.2951]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

And i wish there was no separation between EU and NA, so there would be more players around...

Unfortunately, we have the system we have, in which separate zones might give you a better connection and latency, but at a cost of dividing the playerbase. And while PvE might survive further separation (although with possible issues on some metas), i doubt WvW and SPvP would.

But sure, let's ask to split playerbase into tiny little pieces, so we have only few other players to play with, always the same 3-side WvW matchups and empty SPvP queues. I'm sure that would be good for the game, right? [/sarcasm]

Asia is a big market. In fact, GW1 was translated and distributed in South Korea, Japan, China & Taiwan. While GW2 has only hitted china. A server in Korea could gather all the population from asia china aside. But yeah they should make it like GW1 where you can switch regions at any moment, and play the game.

It wouldnt hurt to at least translate text to korean (thats cheap), i dont know why they havent done that yet.

Edited January 17, 2023 by Izzy.2951

[vares.8457]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

And i wish there was no separation between EU and NA, so there would be more players around...

It’s good that EU and NA are separated. Imagine in WvW a German server fighting against two NA servers. It would be very boring because of the different time zones. We already see this with the Mexicans on Baruch Bay. As far as I’ve heard the community in NA is very different from EU, so I prefer better connection and latency than to play with Americans. 
Merging EU and NA is a terrible idea. 

Edited January 17, 2023 by vares.8457

[Izzy.2951]

1 minute ago, vares.8457 said:

It’s good that EU and NA are separated. Imagine in WvW a German server fighting against two NA servers. It would be very boring because of the different time zones. We already see this with the Mexicans on Baruch Bay. As far as I’ve heard the community in NA is very different from EU. I prefer better connection and latency than to play with Americans. 
Merging EU and NA is a terrible idea. 

It is good they are separated, in fact they were separated in GW1 too. The thing is that in GW1 you can instantly teleport to the NA or EU region and play there for free.

Imagine your on EU at 2 am and you wanna go NA to do some metas or instances, you just teleport to NA region, for free..

[Astralporing.1957]

59 minutes ago, vares.8457 said:

It’s good that EU and NA are separated. Imagine in WvW a German server fighting against two NA servers.

"NA servers" are something that exists specifically because of the separation. Without it, the coverage would be far more even. You'd have EU playing at one time, NA at another, with asia/Ocx filling in the gaps. On the same servers. In WvW, that is, because outside of WvW servers do not matter anyway.

[Sobx.1758]

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

"NA servers" are something that exists specifically because of the separation. Without it, the coverage would be far more even. You'd have EU playing at one time, NA at another, with asia/Ocx filling in the gaps. On the same servers. In WvW, that is, because outside of WvW servers do not matter anyway.

Who cares about 24/7 ""coverage"" when half of the population would be at disadvantage due to added latency issues. That's another idea that looks on an issue only from one side (more players, woo!) while ignoring issues it subsequently creates.

Edited January 17, 2023 by Sobx.1758

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

It would probably only work if it was a combined Asia-Oceania server, since you'd need Australians and New Zealanders to fill in and reach a decent population for normal gameplay.

Edited January 17, 2023 by Mariyuuna.6508

[godfat.2604]

Latency is a real thing, hard limited by the speed of light. This is not sci-fi. The longest distance on Earth is on the other side of the globe, which takes 67ms for the light to travel. We measure ping by round trip, so the minimal ping in theory for the furthest region from the server is 134ms. That's only counting for the speed of light, without counting everything else to convert and transmit and correct the signals.

My ping to NA servers in PvE is about 200ms ~ 250ms, and in WvW about 250ms ~ 350ms (not sure why there's such big difference when there are a lot of players). I seemed to recall that to EU it's 300+ms in PvE, so I disregarded that quickly. That's 10 years ago, might be different now but I didn't bother to check.

It makes much less difference in PvE, but in competitive mode with this ping I have huge disadvantage against a low ping player. Watching videos can clearly see that. There's no way I can chain skills like that, and it does show looking at the DPS meter. I can't really measure what is equal skills, but I will guess with equal skills, in large scale WvW fights, a low ping player can do about 1.2x ~ 1.5x DPS comparing to a high ping player, based on my experience. I envy people who can break stun while being pulled in half way. That's impossible for me. At the time I see I am pulled, I am already pulled, and probably also dead. Too often I cast Distortion, which is an instant skill, it did not trigger and then I was dead. I was reading the fights in the past 300ms after all. I didn't know I was dead.

I am not trying to complain, don't get me wrong. That's life living here, and a lot of other places sharing high ping, connecting to a server further away from us. If there will be an Asia or Oceania server, and my ping connecting there is under 100ms, I will happily transfer over there. Of course, I don't know if the cost hosting those servers can be justified, for old and new players, that's not a question we can answer, probably not even Anet. However, to be inclusive to people who live further away from the servers, the answer is certainly yes.

[Astralporing.1957]

5 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Who cares about 24/7 ""coverage"" when half of the population would be at disadvantage due to added latency issues. That's another idea that looks on an issue only from one side (more players, woo!) while ignoring issues it subsequently creates.

The way game is designed, you are unfortunately right. And while technology advanced during the 10 years since the game was designed, and it's likely a very much solvable issue, the whole game server net architecture Anet uses is not something that can be easily changed, so there's no real hope for significant improvements here. Still, fragmenting the community even further will hardly help.

[Izzy.2951]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

The way game is designed, you are unfortunately right. And while technology advanced during the 10 years since the game was designed, and it's likely a very much solvable issue, the whole game server net architecture Anet uses is not something that can be easily changed, so there's no real hope for significant improvements here. Still, fragmenting the community even further will hardly help.

Idk hows the architecture of the servers or mega servers. However in GW1 they made it so you could change region at any time you want instantly. And it was with older technology...

[Astralporing.1957]

3 minutes ago, Izzy.2951 said:

Idk hows the architecture of the servers or mega servers. However in GW1 they made it so you could change region at any time you want instantly. And it was with older technology...

That's because all the "regions" in reality were in the same physical place, in US. For GW2 they changed the whole underlying architecture in order for EU to have good connection too - it's not being done the gw1 way. And while nowadays it just might be possible to do it without splitting the zones, it would require rewriting whole underlying architecture stuff. Something that is not to be done unless you absolutely have no other choice.

Hint: FF XIV is actually running on even older server architecture model, because when they started they didn't want to experiment and went with a very conservative design. They have been commenting about how they want to change it to a better design for years and how they dislike how the multiple server/cluster system splits their community. And they have a lot more resources to do it than Anet. And yet, in all those years the best they have managed to do was guesting system between servers on the same cluster, with intra-cluster guesting being a very recent thing and still very much a work in progress. With both guesting systems being very incomplete, and still lacking a ton of functionalities (basically, they are now somewhere around the same level GW2 was when it launched, way before multiservers). Messing with the server/network infrastructure is just that hard, if you have to do it without interrupting game services for extended amounts of time (and by "extended amounts of time" i do not mean hours, or days, but more like months).

[Khisanth.2948]

The only time I've see a dev comment on the issue was from years ago. The issues mentioned was the amount of data that had to be moved around and the reliability of trans-Atlantic network connections. The other thing is that ANet has data from GW1 on how frequently the feature was actually used while we do not.

13 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

That's because all the "regions" in reality were in the same physical place, in US. For GW2 they changed the whole underlying architecture in order for EU to have good connection too - it's not being done the gw1 way. And while nowadays it just might be possible to do it without splitting the zones, it would require rewriting whole underlying architecture stuff. Something that is not to be done unless you absolutely have no other choice.

Was it always like that? It matches with my results back when I checked but that was only a few months before GW2's launch I wasn't sure if they simply consolidated the servers at that point.

If it was always like that then it is just the same as the guesting we have now ...

[Izzy.2951]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

That's because all the "regions" in reality were in the same physical place, in US. For GW2 they changed the whole underlying architecture in order for EU to have good connection too - it's not being done the gw1 way. And while nowadays it just might be possible to do it without splitting the zones, it would require rewriting whole underlying architecture stuff. Something that is not to be done unless you absolutely have no other choice.

Hint: FF XIV is actually running on even older server architecture model, because when they started they didn't want to experiment and went with a very conservative design. They have been commenting about how they want to change it to a better design for years and how they dislike how the multiple server/cluster system splits their community. And they have a lot more resources to do it than Anet. And yet, in all those years the best they have managed to do was guesting system between servers on the same cluster, with intra-cluster guesting being a very recent thing and still very much a work in progress. With both guesting systems being very incomplete, and still lacking a ton of functionalities (basically, they are now somewhere around the same level GW2 was when it launched, way before multiservers). Messing with the server/network infrastructure is just that hard, if you have to do it without interrupting game services for extended amounts of time (and by "extended amounts of time" i do not mean hours, or days, but more like months).

No? GW1 has dedicated servers for Europe in Germany and in Asia again too. And if your from europe and go into europe districts ur ping is significantly lower than in NA. So all ur arguments are completly wrong. The only thing that is shared is the login in US.

It would be nice for people to actually get information before making these statments.

Edited January 18, 2023 by Izzy.2951

[Astralporing.1957]

6 hours ago, Izzy.2951 said:

No? GW1 has dedicated servers for Europe in Germany and in Asia again too. And if your from europe and go into europe districts ur ping is significantly lower than in NA. So all ur arguments are completly wrong. The only thing that is shared is the login in US.

Okay. I should probably be more specific. All character data in gw1 is in US. In GW2 it's split between US and Germany. The difference is that GW1 was designed to pull character data only on opening and closing of the map instance, but GW2's design requires pretty much constant access to it (while it's not instant, working instead as some sort of buffer syncing between map server and character server, which is why there can be some data loss of map crashes, it's still quite frequent). It's exactly this part of the design that in GW2 requires separate zones for region-specific maps (and separation between players playing in different zones). From what we've heard around launch, they've tried to "bridge" the character centers in both zones originally, but data transfers of characters between those centers took a lot of time then, and so there was no option for safely syncing the databases. That's why there was no inter-zone guesting, and why world change between zones could have taken then anywhere from several minutes to upward of half an hour.

Now, the state of connections between US and EU is way, way better nowadays, which can be seen in massive decrease of times required for transfering to a world in a different zone, but the architecture was designed then, not today. And is not easily changed.

 

Edited January 18, 2023 by Astralporing.1957

[Izzy.2951]

4 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Okay. I should probably be more specific. All character data in gw1 is in US. In GW2 it's split between US and Germany. The difference is that GW1 was designed to pull character data only on opening and closing of the map instance, but GW2's design requires pretty much constant access to it (while it's not instant, working instead as some sort of buffer syncing between map server and character server, which is why there can be some data loss of map crashes, it's still quite frequent). It's exactly this part of the design that in GW2 requires separate zones for region-specific maps (and separation between players playing in different zones). From what we've heard around launch, they've tried to "bridge" the character centers in both zones originally, but data transfers of characters between those centers took a lot of time then, and so there was no option for safely syncing the databases. That's why there was no inter-zone guesting, and why world change between zones could have taken then anywhere from several minutes to upward of half an hour.

Now, the state of connections between US and EU is way, way better nowadays, which can be seen in massive decrease of times required for transfering to a world in a different zone, but the architecture was designed then, not today. And is not easily changed.

 

 

So you have given yourself the answer already. They could add free transfer to play in any region, if your on EU at 3 am and want to do open world stuff or instances, you just transfer (takes what? 1 minute?) and play there, and transfer back again when you wanna keep playing in EU.

But nowadays its just an option for partners, omegalul. And im pretty sure that they could do it nowadays without needing to go to the server selection and transfer, but by clicking a NA/EU icon on the game.

Edited January 18, 2023 by Izzy.2951

[Astralporing.1957]

3 hours ago, Izzy.2951 said:

 

So you have given yourself the answer already. They could add free transfer to play in any region, if your on EU at 3 am and want to do open world stuff or instances, you just transfer (takes what? 1 minute?) and play there, and transfer back again when you wanna keep playing in EU.

But nowadays its just an option for partners, omegalul. And im pretty sure that they could do it nowadays without needing to go to the server selection and transfer, but by clicking a NA/EU icon on the game.

Sure they could. You are significantly underestimating the cost and difficulty of doing so, however. If it was as trivial as you think it is, it would have been done long ago. Meanwhile, we still don't even have inter-zone guesting.

[Khisanth.2948]

They did give free transfers in the very beginning of the game as a temporary measure to deal with a issue(I forgot the issue). Then people promptly demonstrated why we can't have nice things by abusing the heck out of it for WvW and then that got reduced to ... once a week? Fuzzy 10 year old memories.

[Izzy.2951]

5 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Sure they could. You are significantly underestimating the cost and difficulty of doing so, however. If it was as trivial as you think it is, it would have been done long ago. Meanwhile, we still don't even have inter-zone guesting.

Imagine how easy it is, that anet devs or partners can transfer in 1 minute or less from one region to other (already). It is already implemented. 

And also to change that to an icon in the screen instead of the server panel, is not hard at all.

Edited January 18, 2023 by Izzy.2951