Guild Wars 2

I cameback just now finding out there is still no servers for SEA. Ping is so high i even purchased wtfast and still have 200 to 230 ping at best. and the skill delay is frustrating.

Why are they not making SEA servers?

Not worth the cost and not a large enough population to justify it perhaps. I also doubt the current SEA players will all up and leave their current servers or at least not in large numbers.

Because the population isn’t big enough to warrant one.

Deli.1302:

Because the population isn’t big enough to warrant one.

…warrant three.

I’d leave NA servers for SEA servers tbh. The population is there, ANet just needs to invest into marketing in the Asian region to actually sell the game there. Could probably adequately use up at least 9 servers based on other popular MMO titles

Thing is they’d need to tap into Japanese, and Korean market to justify the servers (and both those markets are saturated in their own way). I also doubt NCsoft would like the competition GW2 would provide its Korean titles. As for Japan the PC-market is a niche market with so few players that you’d probably not sell more than 100,000 copies (and most of those are probably already sold). You have Singapore and Oceania, but I doubt you’d increase sales there. If you could market in India, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia then you’d have a fair chance of increasing player-base, the issue is that buying-power is still relatively low in those markets, and so I think they’d want to wait a few more years at least for those markets to grow a bit more. India alone could be a market in itself, but I am not sure about the popularity of mmos over there or how a viable business model would look like.

That said, costs and profits aside, the NA/EU population would dwindle by about 10-20% provided most got free server transfers. While on the SEA servers PvP and WvW would not see enough players to have proper mmr for matches (considering mmr is not working very well on NA servers either).

you get 200? lucky. my fastest is 340ish on a vpn.

godofcows.2451:

you get 200? lucky. my fastest is 340ish on a vpn.

My friend is luckier. Same country. same Area. Same speed of net (1mb) but different ISP. He doesnt use any programs like wtfast or vpns. But there is no skill delay when he plays. sad…

My average ping in any mmo is 300. You get used to it after a while. When it goes 500+ that’s when it starts getting….irritating.

Why not just suggest an Oceanic server? NA and EU both have one. As an aussie, one tends to feel left out in these situations.

There’s a huge cost establishing a “server farm” in another country, which is why ANet only contracts for two: one in Texas (for NA) and Germany (for EU). All accounts tied to NA servers use the one in Texas; those tied to EU servers use the German one.

It wouldn’t be cost effective to set up a single server for SEA. I suspect the minimum number to make it worthwhile is 12. Does anyone think the game has ever had an SEA pop big enough to support that many worlds at similar capacity to NA and EU?

In addition, there are at least two other complications:

• SEA would have to be a fourth region for the game, in addition to NA, EU, and CN. Although ANet has solved a lot of technical issues, they so far haven’t figured out how to allow NA players to join up with EUers or vice versa. I don’t see them spending energy to split the community up even more than it is now.
• What country would the servers be housed in? SEA is a huge region and for this game would include Japan, Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Aus:Tokyo is 7,800 km compared to Tokyo:Germany @9400 km or Sydney:Texas @13,800 km. Thus, the benefits would be small for some substantive portion of the SEA community.

Finally, distance alone isn’t a good predictor of latency. It’s a big factor, but it’s not the only one that influences whether the server is slow to react to things you do in the game.

tl;dr adding SEA servers would be a major undertaking and it’s not clear that would provide the benefit some are expecting.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Although ANet has solved a lot of technical issues, they so far haven’t figured out how to allow NA players to join up with EUers or vice versa.

They know how to do it (they had it in GW1). They just aren’t because the maps would still have to be hosted on either an NA or EU server and one region of players would be at a disadvantage connection-wise.

I’m from SEA, I don’t mind having SEA servers. But I would prefer a strong RP community, which SEA servers/games are not known for.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

There’s a huge cost establishing a “server farm” in another country, which is why ANet only contracts for two: one in Texas (for NA) and Germany (for EU). All accounts tied to NA servers use the one in Texas; those tied to EU servers use the German one.

It wouldn’t be cost effective to set up a single server for SEA. I suspect the minimum number to make it worthwhile is 12. Does anyone think the game has ever had an SEA pop big enough to support that many worlds at similar capacity to NA and EU?

In addition, there are at least two other complications:

• SEA would have to be a fourth region for the game, in addition to NA, EU, and CN. Although ANet has solved a lot of technical issues, they so far haven’t figured out how to allow NA players to join up with EUers or vice versa. I don’t see them spending energy to split the community up even more than it is now.
• What country would the servers be housed in? SEA is a huge region and for this game would include Japan, Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Aus:Tokyo is 7,800 km compared to Tokyo:Germany @9400 km or Sydney:Texas @13,800 km. Thus, the benefits would be small for some substantive portion of the SEA community.

Finally, distance alone isn’t a good predictor of latency. It’s a big factor, but it’s not the only one that influences whether the server is slow to react to things you do in the game.

tl;dr adding SEA servers would be a major undertaking and it’s not clear that would provide the benefit some are expecting.

There’s quite a few asian MMOs that have far bigger followings in SEA than in NA. Western MMOs rarely market successfully to these populations because they rarely understand the culture and what it takes to make advertising work in these regions. MMOs like Maplestory and Lineage are far more popular there than they are in either EU or NA.

It’s definitely viable to create servers for South East Asia. There’s already a HUGE Korean, Filipino and Australian following in the game. There’s a decent sized Thai and Singaporean following too. I also know many Indonesians that play, as well as a few Vietnamese. It’s viable. It just needs good marketing strategy and investment into creating the servers.

Deli.1302:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Although ANet has solved a lot of technical issues, they so far haven’t figured out how to allow NA players to join up with EUers or vice versa.

They know how to do it (they had it in GW1). They just aren’t because the maps would still have to be hosted on either an NA or EU server and one region of players would be at a disadvantage connection-wise.

GW1 was a completely different technology; it doesn’t require anything close to the level of resources as GW2. Heck, you can play GW1 via dial-up. ANet devs have talked about this before and they’ve never suggested that “disadvantage” was the issue — I know people in the EU who play on NA servers (and vice versa) for various reasons; few of them have any trouble being competitive in sPvP or WvW.

Instead, ANet has said there’s something fundamental about the way the servers work that prevents NA accounts from sharing maps with EU accounts.

Reverence.6915:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

There’s a huge cost establishing a “server farm” in another country, which is why ANet only contracts for two: one in Texas (for NA) and Germany (for EU). All accounts tied to NA servers use the one in Texas; those tied to EU servers use the German one.

It wouldn’t be cost effective to set up a single server for SEA. I suspect the minimum number to make it worthwhile is 12. Does anyone think the game has ever had an SEA pop big enough to support that many worlds at similar capacity to NA and EU?

In addition, there are at least two other complications:

• SEA would have to be a fourth region for the game, in addition to NA, EU, and CN. Although ANet has solved a lot of technical issues, they so far haven’t figured out how to allow NA players to join up with EUers or vice versa. I don’t see them spending energy to split the community up even more than it is now.
• What country would the servers be housed in? SEA is a huge region and for this game would include Japan, Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Aus:Tokyo is 7,800 km compared to Tokyo:Germany @9400 km or Sydney:Texas @13,800 km. Thus, the benefits would be small for some substantive portion of the SEA community.

Finally, distance alone isn’t a good predictor of latency. It’s a big factor, but it’s not the only one that influences whether the server is slow to react to things you do in the game.

tl;dr adding SEA servers would be a major undertaking and it’s not clear that would provide the benefit some are expecting.

There’s quite a few asian MMOs that have far bigger followings in SEA than in NA. Western MMOs rarely market successfully to these populations because they rarely understand the culture and what it takes to make advertising work in these regions. MMOs like Maplestory and Lineage are far more popular there than they are in either EU or NA.

It’s definitely viable to create servers for South East Asia. There’s already a HUGE Korean, Filipino and Australian following in the game. There’s a decent sized Thai and Singaporean following too. I also know many Indonesians that play, as well as a few Vietnamese. It’s viable. It just needs good marketing strategy and investment into creating the servers.

Of course there are popular games based in SEA, but only a handful of those games have server farms in NA or EU. For the same reason: there are just aren’t the numbers to justify the additional costs and effort.

I agree that there’s a chicken vs egg issue here: GW2 doesn’t have the numbers to consider another region, although maybe it would have the numbers if it invested in another region first. The problem is: it’s a lot more difficult to ramp up as you get farther away from existing resources and teams. Some companies (and games) are better situated to spread out globally and some, like ANet/GW2 aren’t.

Put another way, given that ANet is owned by Korean-based NCSOFT, I’m sure they would be the first to encourage ANet to aggressively enter the Korean market. The fact that they haven’t suggests to me even NCSOFT doesn’t see this as “viable” — at least, not yet.