Guild Wars 2

As the title says, why are they?
I don’t think it’s because of latency issues, since GW1 managed to merge them just fine. If it’s because of lag, why not let you choose whether you want to be in NA or EU server freely, again like in GW1, and only keep servers for WvW?

Because of original technical limitations and Data Centers.

That said, there’s always the possibility that it is removed one day…..
I’m sure its just a matter of money and resources like many things.

Habib Loew.6239:

The North American and European data centers are different in one important respect: they are located on different continents. North American players connecting to the NA data center (and European Union players connecting to the EU data center) will generally experience lower latency and a higher likelihood of playing with larger groups of other players, as those in the same data center tend to operate during similar times of the day. So there are real distinctions between the data centers which their EU/NA affiliations make clear and for that reason we will not be removing their continent designations.

We don’t match up worlds from multiple data centers for similar reasons. Ultimately, the server that runs a WvW map must live somewhere in the world and the players who connect from that same continent will have a distinct advantage over those connecting from another continent due to lower latency. In order to keep things as fair as possible to all involved we keep the matchups within each data center.

Of course it is always possible for an EU player to choose to play on an NA server, or vice-versa, but in doing so that player is choosing to take on the burden of additional latency. That situation is vastly different from our matching system placing an entire team at a latency disadvantage without their knowledge or consent.

tl;dr: data centers are on different continents, latency is an issue with inter-continental connections, data center distinctions are here to stay.

GW1 was fine because everything was in instances.
GW2 is open world.

Well, I know for sure that the lag is hardly noticable. I played on NA server for a long time before moving to EU since most of my friends were on NA servers. in GW1 you could choose yourself if you wanted to play on NA or EU for the time being, this means that if you’re lagging you can just switch back to the server on your own continent.

And while the explorable zones were instances in the first game, cities weren’t. And you could also create a party on either EU or NA server and merge them into one party that shared an instance, and I never had any lag problems.

TexZero.7910:

Because of original technical limitations and Data Centers.

That said, there’s always the possibility that it is removed one day…..
I’m sure its just a matter of money and resources like many things.

There is a more major issue that can not be avoided with any hardware in the Earth. Speed of light limit.

GW1 only have eight people in every instance. GW2 can have max at 200 at each map. The traffic lag among the players across the continents could be the problem.