What is the advantage of separate nation servers?

[Muylaetrix]

Not if you live in a country where Internet access is deemed important,

as opposed to countries where internet access is deemed unimportant ?

and people run off fiber mostly,

copper or fibre make no noticeable difference when it comes to speed with which electricity or light travel. electricity travels at about 97 % of the speed of light in unshielded copper, but is slowed down to about 66 % of the speed of light in a vacuum when it travels through something like coaxial cable. light going through fiber 'also' travels at 66 % of the speed of light in a vacuum.

it's that speed which relates to ping. +-5 ms for every 1000 km. adding 8000 km from server to client would add 40 ms + some more overhead. i like playing with a ping of around 25, not one of 75. no amount of technology will change that.

 

[Raven]

I didn't think it was too bad on the US server, though that was after putting up with GOA and their terrible servers/connections. I think you could tell the difference between a proper server in Europe (as opposed to a GOA server) vs US.

Having said that, if it was east coast America then it may end up being quicker if the Euro server was in the arse end of nowhere and had to go through umteen different exchanges/hubs or whatever.

As for populations, you just end up with people on at different times of the day, two prime times, EU evening and US evening, essentially from about 6pm UK to 6am UK - which isn't a bad thing really.

There is the matter of the cultural differences too so the ignore list can get quite full playing on American servers but other than that, not many problems.

 

[Tanos]

I can't remember a single fight that i lost or won just because of ping. It might be valid for shooters but i don't see the real impact of 50ms in any MMORPG i played so far.
I know this sense of "everything must be perfect", starting with equipment and ranging to the server ping, but i had a lot of success and fun without it and statistically it will always be outnumbered by things like the rng in terms of impact.

 

[Jairon Kalach]

as opposed to countries where internet access is deemed unimportant ?



copper or fibre make no noticeable difference when it comes to speed with which electricity or light travel. electricity travels at about 97 % of the speed of light in unshielded copper, but is slowed down to about 66 % of the speed of light in a vacuum when it travels through something like coaxial cable. light going through fiber 'also' travels at 66 % of the speed of light in a vacuum.

it's that speed which relates to ping. +-5 ms for every 1000 km. adding 8000 km from server to client would add 40 ms + some more overhead. i like playing with a ping of around 25, not one of 75. no amount of technology will change that.

Just thought it was worth noting that I don't play with a ping even at 75 on US servers and I'm playing in the US... So you can come kill me.

 

[Muylaetrix]

Just thought it was worth noting that I don't play with a ping even at 75 on US servers and I'm playing in the US... So you can come kill me.

you are playing from a place in the US on a server in the US, right ? the US is a big place, depending upon your location and the location of the servers your ping might be subject to large variations. i can imagine that someone in Honolulu would rather have the servers on the west than on the east coast I live in belgium and the mmo's i've played were ghosted on servers in one of the neighboring countries invariably with pings in the 20-30 ms range. trying to play the game on US servers always has a ping of 75+ ms sometimes even double of that, depending upon where in the US the server(s) are ghosted. such high pings tend to have a big influence upon perception and appreciation of the game experience as far as i am concerned.

and that's before we even start on

... the matter of the cultural differences

 

[old.Osy]

Subjective to location, but what the hell. I invite DSL users to post their 8.8.8.8 tracert:

Tracing route to google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms 21 ms 89.34.76.254
2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms backbone.20ge.adnettelecom.ro [46.108.6.21]
3 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms cr2-cr.40gbps.adnettelecom.ro [46.108.4.222]
4 31 ms 31 ms 31 ms 72.14.213.18
5 31 ms 54 ms 33 ms 72.14.238.46
6 33 ms 32 ms 33 ms 72.14.239.62
7 33 ms 32 ms 33 ms 209.85.254.118
8 * * * Request timed out.
9 33 ms 32 ms 32 ms google-public-dns-a.google.com [8.8.8.8]

 

[Oban]

Sincerely hoping they put up EU servers - Some people live outside EU, but the EU is a lot closer to them than the US. a ping of 200 is a lot better than a ping of 350...

 

[fettoken]

I am all for mixed nationality on our servers. Americans are always easy cannonfodder.

 

[Delavega86]

the problem is the latency.
i too would love to play with people from all around the world, but having a dissadvantage due to ping... no thanks.

except for russians.. those guys always bot and hack (no offense).

I HAVE THE SOLUTION! servers should be based in... say.... Korea. that way, everybody gets the same lousy ping and its all fair

(on a serious note though, what i dont really get is why have separate language servers. every mmo has made a habit to have separate german and french servers.
and its not like germans or french are a big part of the whole population. it's just that they're spoiled, lol.)

 

[Muylaetrix]

on a serious note though, what i dont really get is why have separate language servers. every mmo has made a habit to have separate german and french servers.
and its not like germans or french are a big part of the whole population. it's just that they're spoiled, lol.)

Well, german and french are the number one and two language in the EU when counted in number of speakers who have it as their main language. english only comes in third in the EU. the germanophone and francophone market are just too big to ignore. the speakers of these two languages represent a lot of €.

 

[Raven]

Yep but English is pretty much the universal language of Europe. I rarely meet a Euro who doesn't speak English well. Sadly second languages are not taught properly in the UK, you do it for a couple of years at secondary school and then bin it.

That's not to say that French/Germans shouldn't have their own servers, I guess it all depends how many people end up playing...I would rather see a couple of server with a good population than lots of different language servers with smaller populations.

 

[fettoken]

I still think what they did with DaoC servers originally, and how it developed, was acceptable. Bring back GoA.

 

[Muylaetrix]

Yep but English is pretty much the universal language of Europe. I rarely meet a Euro who doesn't speak English well. Sadly second languages are not taught properly in the UK, you do it for a couple of years at secondary school and then bin it.

funny how brits always think how their language is the most important. i found that only in Scandinavia and THE netherlandS i can assume that most people speak adequate english. for the dutch speaking people 'the netherlands' (de nederlanden) and 'netherland' (nederland) are two different things. the singular netherland we use for what the english call 'the netherlands'. we use 'the netherlands' for the area/region that constitutes of 'the netherlands' + 'flanders' (the north / dutch speaking part of belgium).. i found that while traveling in the EU, there are a lot of countries where knowledge of french and german have served me better than knowledge of english.

That's not to say that French/Germans shouldn't have their own servers, I guess it all depends how many people end up playing...I would rather see a couple of server with a good population than lots of different language servers with smaller populations.

it's all down to economics and size i guess. i don't know what numbers of sales a publisher takes into consideration when considering localized versions of a game. how much extra boxes/subscriptions must a localized version yield to pay back it's cost ? CU is targeted at a niche market and relatively small user base. this could make extra languages not a cost effective thing. on the other hand, the absence of pve and apparently a lot of spoken dialogues would make it far easier and less work (cost) to do translations than in most games that have big story lines and lots of voice acting.

for me the existence or absence of localized versions of games makes no difference whatsoever. out of habit i use english software, even when dutch versions exist. when i played daoc on french or german servers, that didn't really affect me all that much, i am fluent enough in those languages. for most people however, language is not a "doesn't mater" issue. there are good reasons why players from south european nations often stick together in guilds almost exclusively made of players who speak the same language. but the amount of german and french speaking people in most mmo's in the western world absolutely dwarfs the amount of players of any other language (when taking english as defacto number one language ofc).

when the english DAoC server(s) died, i went to play on first french for a while and then german servers and not US servers. let's call it a 'cultural' thing.