Guild Wars 2

As an African gamer, We often run into the problem with MMO servers only ever being oversea’s, far away from ourselves.

300ms latency is a standered life for us, on a good day. But I feel its time that we ask for a more local server, something much closer than 300ms with the best possible Internet access.

After looking around at support pages I noticed a way to check my connection to the server and according to the support page, when im playing on a good day, my connection is rated fairly poor quality xD.

This request is clearly a large feat to achieve, but one that is absolutely possible.
I’d like to hear from more Africans, and get your opinion on the matter, or the opinion of anyone regarding to the experience of 300ms and up.

One of the big questions, besides the cost to ANet to do this, is your population enough to support it? You do realize you’ll be cut off from both the NA and EU populations. You’ll be off on a server grouping by yourself and you’ll need enough people to fill 3 servers so you can have the 3 sided WvW servers. Unless there are enough people to make 6 servers, then it will be those 3 servers only and the people on them.

The question is; is there a market big enough to support that? I’m guessing not.

Speaking as an Oceanic Player, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to Happen. We just have to accept that the world ends at the American coastline and no-one beyond that actually matters.

Sorry, that will never happen. So few countries in Africa have reliable internet on a constant basis and those that have don’t all have a large gaming community. Even in South Africa where I live, many people have access to the internet and it is quite common to meet a gamer, but very few of the gamers you meet play gw2. So maybe you have many friends that play gw2 but as the other posters have pointed out the market for gw2 is too small here to be able to support a server.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

One of the big questions, besides the cost to ANet to do this, is your population enough to support it? You do realize you’ll be cut off from both the NA and EU populations. You’ll be off on a server grouping by yourself and you’ll need enough people to fill 3 servers so you can have the 3 sided WvW servers. Unless there are enough people to make 6 servers, then it will be those 3 servers only and the people on them.

Mh, I see what you are saying, but what you seem to be overlooking is that when it comes to things like WvW from africa, that is not a playable option anyway. With a 300 ping by the time I’ve see you walk around the corner, im aready dead.
And it can get very tiring trying to hit a mob with your sword in PvE just to be told the visual you saw, of your sword slicing its head off, didnt even register on the server side

Thanks for your feedback though, this is a concern worth thinking about, but maybe another option could be made for things like WvW, just need 1 good idea

Phillip.9318:

Sorry, that will never happen. So few countries in Africa have reliable internet on a constant basis and those that have don’t all have a large gaming community. Even in South Africa where I live, many people have access to the internet and it is quite common to meet a gamer, but very few of the gamers you meet play gw2. So maybe you have many friends that play gw2 but as the other posters have pointed out the market for gw2 is too small here to be able to support a server.

I Dont follow? There are plenty of gamers in Africa, enough to fill a Wold of warcraft server, Dota servers and much more. You have to wonder if the lack of African players in gw2 is due to the latency to the far away server, and not the lack of ‘potential players’?

As a fellow player from Africa I got to say I don’t have the problems your experiencing.
I’m playing on Yaks Bend and have no latency issues at all using 3G. I used to play on Aurora Glade [EU] when I started but found the NA servers much better and more responsive.

Im in oceanic sitting with 250 ping, the only reason why im going back to wow when the legion expac comes out. Guild wars is great but the lag is just too much of a big deal considering the server is in dallas no east/west coast servers, plus the way abilities are in this game (no global cd, which is good but means Lag is a bigger factor). I share your pain friend

Burnout.5417:

I Dont follow? There are plenty of gamers in Africa, enough to fill a Wold of warcraft server, Dota servers and much more. You have to wonder if the lack of African players in gw2 is due to the latency to the far away server, and not the lack of ‘potential players’?

Honestly I think the issues are MUCH larger here in GW2 than you are considering. The games you mentioned are 2 of the largest games in MMO history. Most other MMO’s including GW2 do not have close to the population of them as it tends to be more of a niche market. I highly doubt even with a dedicated server the population would be sufficient to justify the costs.

Again its important to remember that you would not be able to play with any EU or NA players whatsoever so the entire game population for raids, world bosses dungeons, silverwastes ect would be dependant on 1 sever. Its likely the worlds would seem totally dead.

The WvW issue is a major one as unless Anet disable it completely, which would annoy tons of players, there NEEDS to be 3 servers to compete. There is no workaround for this as wvw is hard coded in this way and it would basically require rewriting a huge part of the game to change it. Which Anet just wont do for obvious reasons. Its impossible to change this.

I really sympathize with you and it must be so frustrating to play with that ping. Id be totally for African and oceanic servers if I thought there was potential for them to be successful but the issues are just too great currently for there to be any chance.

Jump in line mate

If anyone’s getting servers it needs to be OCX/SEA. We only need 3, but jesus do we ever need ’em.

Among Australia, New Zealand, Philippines and the various other SEA countries I’m sure it’s more than justified. I love playing with my American buddies but god kitten if the lag doesn’t get annoying… and I’m sitting on 200 – 270 average.

Burnout, from what country are you? I’m from South Africa and play with a 200ping perfectly fine, though I wont mind an Africa server. But doubt that’ll ever happen

See the discussion at https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Will-there-ever-be-an-Oceanic-Server/5254720.

The conclusions are the same (even if the details differ somewhat): the cost is too high for the benefit. If you really want to see a new data center located closer to [insert location here], you’ll have to find some way to help ANet generate hundreds of thousands of new players for the game just by adding that data center.

• The cost of setting up and maintaining a data center can be high for a game with 24/7 connectivity & security requirements.
• Players at any new data center would still be isolated from NA & EU players, which has major implications for WvW and even for open world, sPvP, and instanced gameplay.
• A smaller issue would be the loss of players from NA & EU data centers, which would have some impact on the experience for those communities.

300 ping? I play on Telkom Mobile (3G USB dongle) and max 200 ping. My dongle is not even connected to an antenna. I mostly do WVW/EOTM and have no issues (Running Ultra graphics and maximum character display).

You may want to consider a new ISP.

Thatkitten Rat.1236:

Speaking as an Oceanic Player, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to Happen. We just have to accept that the world ends at the American coastline and no-one beyond that actually matters.

That is an unfair statement. Europeans get their own servers for the same reason the NA gets their own servers. There is a large enough population for it to matter. There are not enough Oceanic or African players to warrant the cost of running servers. Especially since I would be willing to bet that a large chunk of people would still play in the EU or NA servers because of the larger population.

Ok, lets say they do this. You are now on the African server with better ping but hardly anyone else playing.

How many, would you assume, people play this game from the African continent? Enough to support a 3 server set up?

Plus theres always issues like what Brazil deals with, basically their government is so unfriendly to foreign business that its too expensive to host a server there in most cases, and you cant just drop a server next door because their infrastructure is so awful their connection has to route through the USA to get to say…Chile, which is a location that is very business friendly and cheap to set a server up.

I know there are a couple of African countries that have a hard wire connection to Europe (I think its Ghana and the UK) and they get super good connection and pings to the EU because of this.

Guess it all depends on what country your from.

I would have to assume there isn’t much, if any, African gamer community, Theres plenty of countries I see in big guilds running around ive never seen a sizable “South African” or Botswana" guild (oh man the word play you could do on a Botswana guild XD"

Basically, things need to be profitable to be possible. There needs to be enough players in your region vs the cost of hosting a server there vs how much they are spending.

I think an SEA server would make more sense, as they could cover some huge gaming markets. maybe a Middle Eastern server but then they have to redo artwork or people will lose their heads.

Burnout.5417:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

One of the big questions, besides the cost to ANet to do this, is your population enough to support it? You do realize you’ll be cut off from both the NA and EU populations. You’ll be off on a server grouping by yourself and you’ll need enough people to fill 3 servers so you can have the 3 sided WvW servers. Unless there are enough people to make 6 servers, then it will be those 3 servers only and the people on them.

Mh, I see what you are saying, but what you seem to be overlooking is that when it comes to things like WvW from africa, that is not a playable option anyway. With a 300 ping by the time I’ve see you walk around the corner, im aready dead.
And it can get very tiring trying to hit a mob with your sword in PvE just to be told the visual you saw, of your sword slicing its head off, didnt even register on the server side

Thanks for your feedback though, this is a concern worth thinking about, but maybe another option could be made for things like WvW, just need 1 good idea

I do feel your pain. I live out in the country and use a WiFi (cable doesn’t go out in the country, it’s only in populated areas) and for the first year and a half of playing before they upgraded the Internet in my area, there were days when harvesting a node was challenging content for me (literally. I couldn’t harvest because lag was so bad that the game would think I was in one spot and I saw my char at another. I had to stop every few minutes and let the game catch up and log in and out to find out where my char actually was. And I live about 150 miles from the NA data center).

Unfortunately with cost and population numbers as they are don’t think they’ll do this but good luck to you in getting what you want.

Well firstly, our country has only heard rumours of this strange thing called “fibre cables” , that and unless people actually know what happens in Africa and not just what CNN says, then do think twice before commenting on our situation here and populations playing the game. Also what would be best is if there were an Europeun server hosted in Africa, for us to play with European people and have a good connection O:

After a lot of reading, of everything people have said and related posts. I see 1 thing emerging.

That is that no matter where you live in the world (excluding America/Europe) you are forced to play with high latency, and It seems we all feel each “others pain”.
I see a lot of “your country doesn’t have the player base to support…” this makes me laugh every time. (and its not just Africa they are saying this to).. I feel if they did give out more servers the Americans and European people would get lonely xD, Half of their population on their servers would just up and leave (and yet this is an overlooked issue?). But its easy to tell someone that their country can not support a player base with out ever doing any census.

Now please don’t get me wrong I’m not saying lets give every place in the whole world its own server (that wouldn’t make sense) lets just distribute the servers a little smarter. There are so many places playing with high latency. add 1 server to the mix, re-distribute, all of a sudden every1 has 150 and below <-In an idealized world

Thank you all for your feedback (realistically speaking we wont see anything happen with gw2, but I’m hoping for future games to learn from the struggles of past games, this topic being the most heated it seems).

The thing is even if Anet is to add new server. The next in line is most likely Oceanic.

And even if they add a server in australia. I’m not sure you’ll have a good connection in Africa.

Even the continent of Africa probably have large latency discrepancy. Another guy says he have 200 and you say you have 300.

And one of the mystery to me is do latency even matter. I think someone mentioned that because of hardware limitation(for example mouse click signal to reach computer), fps(refresh rate), the latency difference probably dont’ matter that much.

I play in oceanic so my ping is always 200ms. I never play at 50ms before, so I dont’ know if it actually make a difference. Probably need someone who actually play in different zone before to share their experience if it actually matters.

Does WoW even have African servers? Last time I played that there wasn’t. If WoW with a much larger player base can’t support African servers I don’t see how GW would.

Burnout.5417:

After a lot of reading, of everything people have said and related posts. I see 1 thing emerging.

That is that no matter where you live in the world (excluding America/Europe) you are forced to play with high latency, and It seems we all feel each “others pain”.
I see a lot of “your country doesn’t have the player base to support…” this makes me laugh every time. (and its not just Africa they are saying this to).. I feel if they did give out more servers the Americans and European people would get lonely xD, Half of their population on their servers would just up and leave (and yet this is an overlooked issue?). But its easy to tell someone that their country can not support a player base with out ever doing any census.

Now please don’t get me wrong I’m not saying lets give every place in the whole world its own server (that wouldn’t make sense) lets just distribute the servers a little smarter. There are so many places playing with high latency. add 1 server to the mix, re-distribute, all of a sudden every1 has 150 and below <-In an idealized world

Thank you all for your feedback (realistically speaking we wont see anything happen with gw2, but I’m hoping for future games to learn from the struggles of past games, this topic being the most heated it seems).

The conclusion you have come to isn’t incorrect. Most countries in the west have spent considerable money on their internet infrastructure and are directly linked to eachother, which is why maybe its 100-150ms ping for most people between usa and eu but maybe a closer country to Europe might see 300+….

You have to remember that if there isn’t direct linkage between two nations its going to be slow. You really have to think like normal highways in this regard. If there is a multi lane highway connecting countries its going to be relatively easy to get there. If you need to take a side street and go around to another country, taking detours, its going to be slow.

The complaint your having has more to do with politics unfortunately.

Like I said in my other post, there is no way that the African continent has enough gw2 gamers to support 3 servers both with quality gameplay (enough players) as well as being financially profitable (its a business mind you)

The only other work around would be if there was a direct cable linkage to say, Amsterdam which I believe is a major internet hub in EU, which would provide you with a much better ping to EU servers.

Have you checked the traceroute to the GW2 server you play on? That would let you know just how many ping increasing router stops your signal is going through before it hits the server. It would also tell you which stop along the way was taking the longest.

But yeah, until most of the world decides to spend big money on global fiber optic connectivity….the side effect is that you deal with high latency. Just ask any Australian how they cope. Not sure a solid fiber optic line from Queensland to California is even feasible but that would certainly solve some of the issue…other than Australia having a couple million more gamers with money in hand to support servers.