[Suggestion] Oceania Server

[MrMunkeyButtler.4986]

I want to start by saying I'm an Australian player, I've played this game a long time now and it's one of my favourite games. However, as great as this game is, I've found it difficult to stick around and continue to play. This can be derived from its lack of any servers in Asia and Oceania. Constantly I have a ping ranging from 300-500 on average, making it an effort to even do simple or mundane tasks not only in PvP, or a WvW environment, but also in PvE situations such as Dungeons, Fractals and Raids. This has really ruined the experience for me, and I'm sure many others can say the same.

I suggest if you want to continue to captive your Australian/Asian audiences, make a server where they don't have to constantly tolerate a minimum ping of 200. Would you continue to play a game under these conditions?

[Talindra.4958]

me too... I am from queensland :) average ping is 400-600 in EU .. I will still stay in eu server if there is an oceanic server... :p that's because all my friends here.. I switched to NA a few times lasted me 1 week .. 2 weeks max (switch it there to do some raid CM)

[VanWilder.6923]

I am all for it. High ping is really killing the joyment. Good days, 300 ping. Bad days, 4000 ping.Doing adventures in HoT which the time limited, Races are absolutely nightmare.But I will doubt that will ever happen, the population from SEA is too small.

[Westenev.5289]

I'd actually be interested to see how many SEA players are in the game - are we simply a vocal minority, or are we just making up excuses? Problem is, I have no clue how to pull such numbers. :#

[Loosmaster.8263]

You do know that if they did this you would be playing by yourselves and isolated from the other two regions?

[Ayrilana.1396]

This has been brought up many times. Essentially it comes down to there not being enough oceanic players in order to justify the costs of setting up servers and WvW would be fairly dull.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

tl;dr it's naive to think that ANet hasn't considered a new region based in Indonesia, Australia, Japan, Korea, or India. There are huge populations of potential gamers. However, it's relatively easy to see that the costs are significant and the benefits are modest at best.

On the whole, here are the issues:

Costs

• It's not cheap to setup a new database center.
• Adding a third region siphons off existing players, diluting the activity levels of NA & EU.
• Related: it complicates population balance for PvE and especially PvP and WvW
• Related: unless the numbers are comparable to NA & EU, activity levels in a third region will be depressing for all three game modes.

Benefits

• An Aus-based server would still be far away from other players with high NA/EU ping. Sydney to Tokyo is 7800 km, whereas Frankfurt to Virginia (EU datacenter to NA) is 6741km, i.e. Australia datacenter isn't "close" to southeast Asia. It might be much better than the currrent 15000 km for Aus & 9-11k for Japan, but it wouldn't be 'good'.
• From ANet's perspective, this only pays for itself if the game will get enough new players to pay for the costs above. The evidence suggests that there aren't that many people who would play GW2, beyond those who already play. (Obviously, the total number is going to be a lot of people; it's just not that many in terms of overall new income.)

---

Some dev comments indirectly related. These are more about why NA and EU can't play together, which helps explain some of the issues involved, including costs.

From the World Restructuring thread 31 Jan 2018

Q

: will it be possible to TEMPORARILY guest for free cross-region, to allow us at least a temporary way to play at least PVE with friends cross-region?

A

: No that won't be possible - guesting allowed your "current world" to change but didn't do anything with the location of your data - Europe or North America. We have talked about what it would take to play in Europe and have your data in NA (for example) but the cables under the Atlantic are just not robust enough to have reliable database saves across continents.

Q

: I remember changing servers instantly in GW1, how that was possible then? Different system all together?

A

: In Guild Wars 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 Guild Wars 2 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.

Q

: curious, just how large is an average players character data?

A

: I'm not sure that's something we've ever told anyone. Also ... it's a bit hard to say, since it goes through a lot of bit twiddling and compression before it gets to the database. It's super-optimized because the database servers are a very significant cost and we don't (and haven't ever) charged a monthly fee.

[Celldrax.2849]

Before they do that though, might want to do something about servers they're already using...

Last 5 or 6 days have been nothing but constant rubberbanding, ping spikes and latency (even just roaming open world).

In Australia by the way.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Celldrax.2849 said:Last 5 or 6 days have been nothing but constant rubberbanding, ping spikes and latency (even just roaming open world).There's a lot of internet between you and ANet. What makes you so sure it's them and not something in between?One way to tell is to use a program like PingPlotter to find out where your packets are lost.

Regardless of the results, send details to ANet via support ticket. If it's on their end, this is the sort of data they need to track it down. If it's not, they can advise on whether it's something they can discuss with their ISP or something to bring up with yours.

[Celldrax.2849]

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Celldrax.2849 said:Last 5 or 6 days have been nothing but constant rubberbanding, ping spikes and latency (even just roaming open world).There's a lot of internet between you and ANet. What makes you so sure it's them and not something in between?One way to tell is to use a program like PingPlotter to find out where your packets are lost.

Regardless of the results, send details to ANet via support ticket. If it's on their end, this is the sort of data they need to track it down. If it's not, they can advise on whether it's something they can discuss with their ISP or something to bring up with yours.Often when I've had performance issues like this, I've learned to associate it with something happening on server end.

Anyway, I do believe my isp may have had recent maintenance, so had the crazy idea to do a router reset. Seems to have worked.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Celldrax.2849 said:Anyway, I do believe my isp may have had recent maintenance, so had the crazy idea to do a router reset. Seems to have worked.Awesome, glad it was a simple fix for you.

[Menzo.2185]

There are a huge number of players in Oceania / Asia and South America. And we all play and enjoy the game just like the other players.However, we are cursed by many and disregarded by Anet when we have to play with 180 ping or above.

It's almost impossible to face North Americans or Europeans as equals when, in a PvP or especially in WvW, we have a 5x theirs ping.I would like to know if there's any Anet project to bring a one physical server to South America (Brazil, Argentina or Chile) to reduce ping and improve our performance in game. Same for Oceania/Asia.

I see the main PvP streamers playing with 30 to 80 ping so smooth and fast movements and I with freezing, lagging... I block attacks by chance, interrupt by lucky and some players call us noobs or shitty players.

[Gehenna.3625]

And how huge is that number of players? Or are you just saying that to make your plight sound more important?

I'm not saying it doesn't suck, but I really think you're overestimating how many players your represent.

[VanWilder.6923]

My average ping is 298 on the good days, bad days is 4000 and I only run GW2, no background apps.I would love to see action to improve the ping from SEA region but I am not sure there are huge amount of SEA players or not. Only Arenanet knows the specific number.

But I am all for the ping improvement

[Linken.6345]

How fun will it be to only play on pve maps with people from your region, only pvp and wvw against said players too thats the reailty of having a server down by your region, you wont be able to play with na or eu players anymore.

Is there enough people to fill 3 servers so you can have wvw matches against eachother?Everyone will transfer to the winning server untill its full and you will have a constant war were 1 server is always nr1 and the second and third is most likely set in stone week after week.You dont seem to understand that it dont help you at all since you would be shut off in a small pond instead of the big waters you are now.

If you have a server in brazil for example it will be good connection bettwen you and said server but if you wvw against eu or na the connection bettwen those two servers will be the same as for you and the server is now.

[SkyShroud.2865]

Not a lot of sea, don't think too much

Most sea not interested to face others in equal, for example wvw, i know some sea guilds made up more of na than actual sea.

Don't drag sea in your topic for your convenience.

[Rognik.2579]

While a SA and SEA server might be nice for that group of players, ANet has expressed no interest in adding new server regions at this time. It's not that I don't sympathize - my ping can be pretty bad, and I'm actually in NA - but there's little chance it will actually change.

[Eddbopkins.2630]

What can anet even do on there end to improve cross continent ping. I mean your player base from South america to north america is thousands of thousands miles away and something like that i feel is more on your ISP then on anet and there servers.If your fighting someone in onterio canada and you your self is in brazil or another south american country i would expect you to have a ping of at least 200

[Menzo.2185]

People from the forums, this is just a unreal question from my Dream World... where the big/small companies want more market to sell there product. I know it's not viable or even cheap but, World of Warcraft have a SA server, a lot of others great games have too. Why not GW2? Let me dream without toxicty on forum.

[Emberheart.8426]

This is never going to happen. I am from Australia myself, but you have to just learn to deal with it, for now. It's not worth it for Anet to make an Oceanic server, because the number of players from this region would probably end up being at least ten times less than the European and American regions. What makes it even worse is that many Oceanic players would still choose to play on the American servers, because of the higher population, making Oceanic even more of a ghost town. I know that I wouldn't play in these servers, even with the smooth ping.

I get around 340-380 ping when there are no issues. However my ping can skyrocket to the 1000s. This seems to usually happen when the connection to Anet gets disrupted somehow. Sadly, because of the enormous distance, there are lots of places where such a disruption could happen, so it's more common than I would like. Ultimately, the only way that I can see this getting better is when a good satellite internet network becomes available, like the one that SpaceX is planning. In theory, this sort of network should be way better than what we have now for long distances.

[ShadowDove.8329]

I'm from SEA/Australia, and I know a handful of others who are as well. The population of us doesn't seem to be very much in comparison to NA/EU, but that could also be because they don't talk much on the forums.

I agree with Ganathar - even if they made an Oceania server, more people would still play on the existing ones bc of the higher population. If there was a way to help reduce ping for those of us that live further from the data centre, I would greatly appreciate it. I know people who have stopped playing gw2 because their ping was too high compared to other games. For reference, my ping is 300-400 on a good day, up to 2000+ when there's a storm and internet connection decreases dramatically.

[torakun.9638]

I kinda agree but at the same time dont know how the best solution to this.

I am averaging 350 ping.. I avoid PvP. In WvW, things often killed me without my knowledge. PvE world bosses just a mess with 100x presses on the skills that I want to rotate before it triggers. Fractal, I always get left behind due to lag spike or just dying suddenly due to boss's cleave when on my screen clearly I've avoided the AoE cone.. I guess when I dodge it havent registered? :s

Its frustrating btw.. In GW1, I avoid playing interrupt ranger/mesmer/heal monk because of this reason. I guess I will be until GW 7 comes out.. or not sticking to GW in the future? hmm... o well, hope there's a solution one day.

[Linken.6345]

Would be nice if person merging thread added that to the title aswell.

[dceptaconroy.7928]

I'm from Western Aus I get between 350 to 450 N/A since launch. We''ve got buckley's chance of an Oceanic anything. Ranking 55th in the world at internetz speed's also a kicinthenads.

[Reusterr.6982]

@Talindra.4958 said:me too... I am from queensland :) average ping is 400-600 in EU .. I will still stay in eu server if there is an oceanic server... :p that's because all my friends here.. I switched to NA a few times lasted me 1 week .. 2 weeks max (switch it there to do some raid CM)

Yea tried both EU and NA Eu 400-600 NA 200-400