Guild Wars 2

so a thought popped into my head, would it not be possible for Anet to let us create one home server on EU and one on NA?, if i remember correctly the reason we had a home server was because of WvW and keeping it fair,

So what would be the problem with allowing people to have one Home server on both regions?,

i started thinking about this because one of my buddies from twitter just went and bought GW2 cause i convinced him, and he is going to try it out on an EU server, There is two problems to that 1 is ping, and second is their not being enough players for him to do stuff with (instances etc ) at his playing time.

but if we was able to create two home servers then when i am not playing he could play on his NA home server being around people etc and when i am on he could come to his EU home server.

This would sort out issues with people from different regions playing together and not have any effect on WvW and both regions do not play together.

Has Anet said anything on this or why it can’t happen?, cause i really don’t see how WvW would be an issue here.

P.S i know if my friend likes it he can delete his characters on the EU side and roll on the Na server but that still brings the Issue of us not being able to play together

So far as I can see this wouldn’t work simply because it is much the same as having two accounts. In essence, because your account and character data is being stored in two places, you are thereby taking up the bandwidth of two players. Arena Net has pretty good servers, at least after a lot of work (just after release they were god awful), but if everyone was suddenly going to start having a multi-region account it would put a lot of unnecessary stress on their servers and cause problems. Honestly while I sympathize with you are your friend, this idea just isn’t justifiable.

I think the best thing to do would be to chip in with your buddy (since it seems that the EU account is just so he can play with you) and buy him a second account. More of a pain I agree, but in the end it is the quickest and best solution to your problem.

Arkham Creed.7358:

So far as I can see this wouldn’t work simply because it is much the same as having two accounts. In essence, because your account and character data is being stored in two places, you are thereby taking up the bandwidth of two players. Arena Net has pretty good servers, at least after a lot of work (just after release they were god awful), but if everyone was suddenly going to start having a multi-region account it would put a lot of unnecessary stress on their servers and cause problems. Honestly while I sympathize with you are your friend, this idea just isn’t justifiable.

I think the best thing to do would be to chip in with your buddy (since it seems that the EU account is just so he can play with you) and buy him a second account. More of a pain I agree, but in the end it is the quickest and best solution to your problem.

it would be no more stress on the servers than buying him a second account, every other MMO let’s you choose what server to play on, but after that you can change whenever GW2 restricts you, but they are 2 different data centers, it’s still silly not allowing you to either Guest to the other region or having two home servers

ahh well, it is not my problem really

I see this might happen at some point on the basis why when you select each character dose it tell you there home server, that is all.

Rather than having a second home server, I think it would make more sense to have guesting between NA and EU (I could be wrong, but this isn’t currently available right?).

Edit for reply: So guesting isn’t available? Now that surprises me, and I definitely think that should be implemented. +1

lookitsandrea.8531:

Rather than having a second home server, I think it would make more sense to have guesting between NA and EU (I could be wrong, but this isn’t currently available right?).

yeah when they originally talked about guesting a lot of us Believed it would include cross regions as we’ll but somewhere down the line that changed, i really think they would be helping their player base either allowing us to guest cross region or have a Home server on both

Neoryudo.2914:

lookitsandrea.8531:

Rather than having a second home server, I think it would make more sense to have guesting between NA and EU (I could be wrong, but this isn’t currently available right?).

yeah when they originally talked about guesting a lot of us Believed it would include cross regions as we’ll but somewhere down the line that changed, i really think they would be helping their player base either allowing us to guest cross region or have a Home server on both

Guesting is for the most part useless to many players in it’s current state… cross region guesting would certainly increase the usefulness of the feature

Neoryudo.2914:

lookitsandrea.8531:

Rather than having a second home server, I think it would make more sense to have guesting between NA and EU (I could be wrong, but this isn’t currently available right?).

yeah when they originally talked about guesting a lot of us Believed it would include cross regions as we’ll but somewhere down the line that changed, i really think they would be helping their player base either allowing us to guest cross region or have a Home server on both

I’m not even sure why this would be difficult. I’m not that knowledgeable about how servers work, but is anybody able to provide insight as to why this hasn’t been added when guesting was? Or perhaps it’s not difficult at all.

lookitsandrea.8531:

I’m not even sure why this would be difficult. I’m not that knowledgeable about how servers work, but is anybody able to provide insight as to why this hasn’t been added when guesting was? Or perhaps it’s not difficult at all.

Please note that I do not work for ArenaNet so I do not know the details of their network, account structure, and servers systems. I can make some educated guesses based on my work which involves networking and database programming.

One of the biggest problem I see is data transmission lag. There are two data centers for GW2. One for the US and one for the EU. The account information for the US accounts is stored in the US data center. The EU account information is stored in the EU data center. The account information is local to its data center. This reduces the data transmission lag considerably.

Your account information can only be in one data center at a time. Mainly because keeping two very large and very active databases identical is not easy or cheap. You can transfer your account back and forth between the two data centers but your account information is only stored on one at a time. Your data must be in the data center (EU or US) for you to play on or guest on the servers that are located at that data center.

To allow guesting across data centers, there are a few options I can think of.
1) Have the two account databases be kept absolutely identical. While theoretically possible, this is very expensive in hardware, software and data transmission costs. And data transmission time will also be an issue in keeping the two databases identical.
2) Have only one account database and have the two data centers use it. The problem with this is the greatly increased data transmission lag that will hit the players on the data center that does not have the account information locally. This is also expensive in data transmission costs.
3) Have the data center you want to play on use your data from your home data center. This is a hybrid of number 2. It is just YOUR data (and game play) that will suffer the transmission lag of reading and writing your account information across the data centers.

Number 3 might be possible but the transmission lag for getting data and writing the constant updates to your account would probably make the game almost unplayable. There might be other ways to setup the account/data center/game servers that could overcome the data transmission issue but that would be a question for a Network Engineer.

Wow. Thank you for the information, LyricDawnhagen, that was quite informative.

I do hope they are able to somehow to do it.