Guild Wars 2

Hello all!

I am not sure if this is in the right forum, but I had a look around and figured this would be a good place to start.

Hoping to get an Arena Net employee response, but general discussion anyway!!

Just wondering, if servers for the Oceania region/Australia region are ANYWHERE in the pipeline? Whether it’s only been discussed around the proverbial water cooler or if it’s a discussion happening more intensely. I would just love to know what it feels like to play with less than ~300 ping

I am sure there are others of us that would like to have some information! There are a fair few people in the Oceanic region!

Thanks everyone!

To lay it out straight…

I probably wouldn’t transfer to an Oceanic server unless I could freely transfer back to NA. The people I know are on NA, and while some are Oceanic, they’re not all. The EU/NA split fractured the playerbase enough as it was. (If I could freely transfer back and forth, now, that would be very tempting, so I could get a good ping when running solo or with other Oceanic players.)

Even putting that aside, though, the Oceanic region probably just isn’t a big enough market for them to justify having a server out here. While I don’t know the exact economics involved, it’s likely that the first server is going to be by far the most expensive – you need to have space to put it, staff on-site to deal with any problems, backups, and so on so forth, the cost from which probably isn’t going to scale up much from additional servers. A couple of servers, or even half a dozen, just might not be cost-efficient… especially if half of the players from that region are going to choose to continue playing in NA or EU anyway because they know people there.

Potentially they might need 3 servers as well to fill, for wvw purposes.

It’s not happening. It’s never been mentioned or discussed. There simply aren’t enough players in this region to justify the costs. Servers in this game would mean you only play with people in that region.

But the game requires a lot of people for a lot of different things. If you split us out of say the US server, which is where most Austrlians go, we simply wouldn’t have enough people to do everything. Now, on the US servers, we do, because you get late night/early morning US people and Oceanics.

The game is 4.5 years old. If it was going to have an Aussie server, it’d have had one already.

Randulf.7614:

Potentially they might need 3 servers as well to fill, for wvw purposes.

Yep. They would need at least 3 and it’s unlikely they’ll have enough to make 6 in order to do any switching so it will be those 3 maps forever playing against each other. Same stale situation for sPvP. It’s unlikely Australia/Oceanic will have enough people to make sPvP active and lively. Even PvE will be smaller with the same people showing up on the maps.

Vayne.8563:

There simply aren’t enough players in this region to justify the costs.

There aren’t enough potential new players in the affected areas to justify the costs.
(Fixed that for you )

Adding a new data center is a huge undertaking. You need to vet the options, set up long term contracts, and pay for additional staff. Adding more capacity to NA or EU is cheaper.

Yeah, screw the people with the worst ping, they can live with it. As long as most of your player base is under 100ms ping you’ll get no complaints from anyone.

This subject has been raised time after time, and no one wants to even weigh in from an Anet stance. It’s quite simple really, we’re just not important enough. Defeatist as it may seem, that’s the hard fact of it. We’re just in the wrong country.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

Yeah, screw the people with the worst ping, they can live with it. As long as most of your player base is under 100ms ping you’ll get no complaints from anyone.

This subject has been raised time after time, and no one wants to even weigh in from an Anet stance. It’s quite simple really, we’re just not important enough. Defeatist as it may seem, that’s the hard fact of it. We’re just in the wrong country.

It’s both not as bad and far worse than the way you’ve phrased it:

• Those with bad ping aren’t important at all financially — you’ve already paid up.
• Those who are important, financially, are those who have yet to buy the game.

If you can figure out a way to pay for a new data center, its security & maintenance, and to find a way to make WvW happen with so few players, then sure, ANet will be willing to change their stance.

They just need Local server for PVP, Raiding. But then there need to be server technology that transfer character data in real time.

LONGA.1652:

They just need Local server for PVP, Raiding. But then there need to be server technology that transfer character data in real time.

They tried to do that for the NA|EU data centers, so that players from both region could adventure together. They weren’t able to get it working well enough at the level of performance they think is required.

And though your modification of the proposal would be less expensive, it’s not free. It’s still not going to bring in enough new revenues to pay for the changes.

http://oceanicgamer.com/2013/03/oceanic-players-lose-local-swtor-servers/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/warhammer-online-closing-63-servers

Last 2 games that i can remember that have local oceanic server.
24.6 millions population, a country associated with subpar broadband/internet and pathetic implementation of NBN.
Bottom line, not worth investing in. There aren’t many oceanic players around anymore these days to warrant a local dedicated server.
And any future mmorpg should not ever consider to open a dedicated server here too. It’s not worth while given the history and the size of the market.

For instances, it is actually possible to swap hosting location. The question is how do you determine to swap or not?

Every year I check back to see whether or not you have AU servers. 300 ping is not playable, this is literally the only reason my friends won’t buy the game and I won’t buy the expansion. They don’t even need to be in Australia just give me an option that’s sub 150 and I’d buy the expansion that day.

Muffuzzler.5472:

Every year I check back to see whether or not you have AU servers. 300 ping is not playable, this is literally the only reason my friends won’t buy the game and I won’t buy the expansion. They don’t even need to be in Australia just give me an option that’s sub 150 and I’d buy the expansion that day.

We just have to find a way to pay for ANet to add a new data center, and sell enough new copies of the game to have six distinct WvW worlds. ANet’s done a lot with their server tech, but they haven’t figured out a way for accounts in different data centers to play together (due to the same latency issues that frustrate your gameplay).

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

ANet’s done a lot with their server tech, but they haven’t figured out a way for accounts in different data centers to play together (due to the same latency issues that frustrate your gameplay).

Some instances of the HoT maps in NA appear to be running out of Amazon’s cloud. If you use /ip on these maps, you’ll see a private class internal IP starting with a 10, whereas normally you’d likely see a 64. If these instances are actually running on Amazon’s servers, it opens the potential for separate instances in various locations, wherever Amazon has their servers. However, they’d still need to justify the renting cost.

Why ask for Oceanic server, when you could get away with Asian one. I play on EU servers (witch are most likely somewhere in Holland) and still get average ping of 50 in Moscow (2500 km distance) and at northern Caucausus with less that 100 ms ping (3000+ km distance)

Yes in terms of Asian servers we would talk about twice the distance, but still better that NA ping I suppose. Anyone with experience of playing from Oceania on Asian servers?

And as you understand there is no problem with potential market. And Anet already have “closed” Chinese servers with steady WvW populations. So adding one Oceanic server to compete in WvW is not an gameplay issue.

Healix.5819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

ANet’s done a lot with their server tech, but they haven’t figured out a way for accounts in different data centers to play together (due to the same latency issues that frustrate your gameplay).

Some instances of the HoT maps in NA appear to be running out of Amazon’s cloud. If you use /ip on these maps, you’ll see a private class internal IP starting with a 10, whereas normally you’d likely see a 64. If these instances are actually running on Amazon’s servers, it opens the potential for separate instances in various locations, wherever Amazon has their servers. However, they’d still need to justify the renting cost.

Amazon cloud or not, the account data will have a primary location for its storage. There is latency between the primary locations (currently limited to one in Germany for EU and one in Texas for NA) and ANet hasn’t figured out how to sync the data quickly enough to allow people from different regions to play with each other.

So if there were an Oceania/Australia or Asia ‘server’, the only people playing in those instances (Amazon cloud or otherwise) would be from the same region. Without enough people to generate 6+ worlds, there wouldn’t be any WvW. That’s also probably not enough for PvP and it might not be enough for Raiding. Given the number of maps in Tyria, it might also cause problems for meta events in PvE.

In short, it’s not as simple as people would like it to be.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Muffuzzler.5472:

Every year I check back to see whether or not you have AU servers. 300 ping is not playable, this is literally the only reason my friends won’t buy the game and I won’t buy the expansion. They don’t even need to be in Australia just give me an option that’s sub 150 and I’d buy the expansion that day.

We just have to find a way to pay for ANet to add a new data center, and sell enough new copies of the game to have six distinct WvW worlds. ANet’s done a lot with their server tech, but they haven’t figured out a way for accounts in different data centers to play together (due to the same latency issues that frustrate your gameplay).

They can just ignore WvW … but the timing of this is interesting.

ANet has started to run game instances on Amazon EC2 and one of the regions available for EC2 is located in Sydney. At least as far as “hardware” is concern that is dealt with.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Amazon cloud or not, the account data will have a primary location for its storage. There is latency between the primary locations (currently limited to one in Germany for EU and one in Texas for NA) and ANet hasn’t figured out how to sync the data quickly enough to allow people from different regions to play with each other.

Updates to your account data is stored in the map instance, which is why when the map crashes, you lose the last few minutes. If the HoT maps are actually running on Amazon, it shows they’re already taking the risk of running remote instances, which has the potential for data loss when the connection between them is lost. Cross region play was always possible with the same risk and is something they’ve already done in GW1.

There certainly won’t be something like WvW or even single map instances for Australia, but the potential is there now more than ever. The goal of this experiment is likely only to gauge its power, which could potentially reduce server lag under stress and open up more complex possibilities, including higher caps.

Healix.5819:

There certainly won’t be something like WvW or even single map instances for Australia, but the potential is there now more than ever. The goal of this experiment is likely only to gauge its power, which could potentially reduce server lag under stress and open up more complex possibilities, including higher caps.

Not sure how experimental it is meant to be. It is being used for at least one of the WvW borderlands right now and it seems to be getting used for more and more zones.

We’re kinda in the same boat though I’m in the SEA region. But it’s the same old reasoning as to why servers in our regions wouldn’t happen not just in this MMO but in others as well: The number of potential players does not justify the effort and cost needed to implement the servers.

Kinda sad really but I’ve gotten used to it. In fact, I don’t even expect many future MMOs to have servers in either or both regions.

Healix.5819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Amazon cloud or not, the account data will have a primary location for its storage. There is latency between the primary locations (currently limited to one in Germany for EU and one in Texas for NA) and ANet hasn’t figured out how to sync the data quickly enough to allow people from different regions to play with each other.

Updates to your account data is stored in the map instance, which is why when the map crashes, you lose the last few minutes. If the HoT maps are actually running on Amazon, it shows they’re already taking the risk of running remote instances, which has the potential for data loss when the connection between them is lost. Cross region play was always possible with the same risk and is something they’ve already done in GW1.

There certainly won’t be something like WvW or even single map instances for Australia, but the potential is there now more than ever. The goal of this experiment is likely only to gauge its power, which could potentially reduce server lag under stress and open up more complex possibilities, including higher caps.

But GW1 also didn’t require low latency the way this game does. The game has an effective tolerance of 250ms, if only for the fact that it uses tab targeting to cover up the some of the physics short falls. Thats surprisingly reliable for any game that uses a physics style of combat system, as most start having disruptive errors at 130 or higher.

Oceanic servers have always been a catch 22 due to the size of its gamer population, and heavily spread out they are between games. Every MMO I’ve ever known to try it, eventually closes them down due to sustained populations only reaching the mid-upper 100s at peak hours….. at best. On average, the population is closer to a 400-600, and eventually falls off as people migrate to NA servers due to bigger communities there to interact with. Aus in particular doesn’t have enough focus in any single game to warrant an MMO server farm; and seems to be more suited to instanced based games like Battlefield….. which they eventually migrate to NA servers; AGAIN, because of weaker off-peak, or even near peak hours.

Pino.5209:

http://oceanicgamer.com/2013/03/oceanic-players-lose-local-swtor-servers/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/warhammer-online-closing-63-servers

Last 2 games that i can remember that have local oceanic server.
24.6 millions population, a country associated with subpar broadband/internet and pathetic implementation of NBN.
Bottom line, not worth investing in. There aren’t many oceanic players around anymore these days to warrant a local dedicated server.
And any future mmorpg should not ever consider to open a dedicated server here too. It’s not worth while given the history and the size of the market.

Blizzard found it lucrative enough to set up servers in Sydney for WoW and Overwatch; I get 21ms from Brisbane. I agree our internet is extremely bad, even Mexico has better net than us.

If companies invested in setting up servers in Australia I believe they would see an influx of OCX/SEA coming to their games simply because the titles that were previously unplayable due to latency would be playable.

necromancin.2396:

Pino.5209:

http://oceanicgamer.com/2013/03/oceanic-players-lose-local-swtor-servers/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/warhammer-online-closing-63-servers

Last 2 games that i can remember that have local oceanic server.
24.6 millions population, a country associated with subpar broadband/internet and pathetic implementation of NBN.
Bottom line, not worth investing in. There aren’t many oceanic players around anymore these days to warrant a local dedicated server.
And any future mmorpg should not ever consider to open a dedicated server here too. It’s not worth while given the history and the size of the market.

Blizzard found it lucrative enough to set up servers in Sydney for WoW and Overwatch; I get 21ms from Brisbane. I agree our internet is extremely bad, even Mexico has better net than us.

If companies invested in setting up servers in Australia I believe they would see an influx of OCX/SEA coming to their games simply because the titles that were previously unplayable due to latency would be playable.

Blizzard set up servers like that when it had 12.4 million subscribers. This game never had more than 4 million players at one time and presumably it has a lot less than that now.

This game isn’t unplayable due to latency. Source: I’m playing the game since launch from Australia. Most days I’m down around 220ish ping now (it used to be worse).

Vayne.8563:

necromancin.2396:

Pino.5209:

http://oceanicgamer.com/2013/03/oceanic-players-lose-local-swtor-servers/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/warhammer-online-closing-63-servers

Last 2 games that i can remember that have local oceanic server.
24.6 millions population, a country associated with subpar broadband/internet and pathetic implementation of NBN.
Bottom line, not worth investing in. There aren’t many oceanic players around anymore these days to warrant a local dedicated server.
And any future mmorpg should not ever consider to open a dedicated server here too. It’s not worth while given the history and the size of the market.

Blizzard found it lucrative enough to set up servers in Sydney for WoW and Overwatch; I get 21ms from Brisbane. I agree our internet is extremely bad, even Mexico has better net than us.

If companies invested in setting up servers in Australia I believe they would see an influx of OCX/SEA coming to their games simply because the titles that were previously unplayable due to latency would be playable.

Blizzard set up servers like that when it had 12.4 million subscribers. This game never had more than 4 million players at one time and presumably it has a lot less than that now.

This game isn’t unplayable due to latency. Source: I’m playing the game since launch from Australia. Most days I’m down around 220ish ping now (it used to be worse).

Diablo too.

Not expecting it though. Can’t see it worthwhile for Areanet.

Jinn Galen.2468:

We’re kinda in the same boat though I’m in the SEA region. But it’s the same old reasoning as to why servers in our regions wouldn’t happen not just in this MMO but in others as well: The number of potential players does not justify the effort and cost needed to implement the servers.

Kinda sad really but I’ve gotten used to it. In fact, I don’t even expect many future MMOs to have servers in either or both regions.

Replying to an old post, but since the thread is still going -

SEA is a slightly different situation, in that the number of potential players in the region is huge. Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines together would have nearly a billion people, and the number who play online games is steadily growing.

It absolutely would make sense to factor them into plans for future expansion for any company, but that also has to be weighed against whether or not the game is growing in that region. The company I work with is doing well in that region. GW2 may not be.

Unfortunately, despite the geography, the connection between Australia and Singapore is … not great. It’s actually not uncommon to get a better ping to Houston even if it’s three times as far away.

What’s with all the people saying that Oceanic doesn’t have enough players? How the hell do you know? Oceania has 25 countries in it with a combined population of 39,771,060. I’m sure there is enough players in that group to justify it. Server tech is also not expensive anymore.

I mean kitten , PoE has Aus servers…

Just came back to the game and I am sitting on 225 (NZ). Used to play ranged and it wasn’t so bad, but I wanted to start fresh this time around so i made a Thief and boosted it up to 50. Now the latency is incredibly noticeable. Been playing fora few days on the new character now and it sucks. It really really sucks. I am hoping I will get used to it but it’s gonna be a long road.

I can see why people sitting around 300+ just wont play the game.

Saraneth.6021:

What’s with all the people saying that Oceanic doesn’t have enough players? How the hell do you know? Oceania has 25 countries in it with a combined population of 39,771,060. I’m sure there is enough players in that group to justify it. Server tech is also not expensive anymore.

I mean kitten , PoE has Aus servers…

Just came back to the game and I am sitting on 225 (NZ). Used to play ranged and it wasn’t so bad, but I wanted to start fresh this time around so i made a Thief and boosted it up to 50. Now the latency is incredibly noticeable. Been playing fora few days on the new character now and it sucks. It really really sucks. I am hoping I will get used to it but it’s gonna be a long road.

I can see why people sitting around 300+ just wont play the game.

Top 3 oceanic countries by populations are Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand.

The 2nd biggest population country Papua New Guinea is ranked 139 per population when it comes to internet uptake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users
That list is including mobile internet users.
Australia and NZ are 33 and 88, respectively. They combined for roughly 25 millions internet users (including mobile users). Those with good and stable internet to play GW2 is really far smaller than that rough 25 millions figure, not to mention the actual amount of ppl acutally playing GW2 from those 2 countries.
Seriously, what do you think Oceanic countries are? http://ontheworldmap.com/oceania/map-of-oceania-with-countries-and-capitals.jpg
Most of those 25 countries are tiny islands. Point being, 25 countries and 39.7 millions total populations are nothing to brag about.

Beside Australia and New Zealand, internet on the rest of Oceanic countries are literally bleh.

Putting a server somewhere at SEA (South East Asia), for instance Singapore, makes more sense than putting one in Oceania/Australia.

No one was bragging. That’s just your own insecurities. Not sure why you would want to fight Oceanic servers though. If they helped you then good… they help you. If they don’t help you… don’t kittening play on them.

Saraneth.6021:

No one was bragging. That’s just your own insecurities. Not sure why you would want to fight Oceanic servers though. If they helped you then good… they help you. If they don’t help you… don’t kittening play on them.

Not insecurites. We don’t have a good track record when it comes to having local dedicated server for mmorpg games GW2 alike … SWTOR and Warhammer Online local servers did close down.
POE, Overwatch etc are different animals/games.
It’s not going to happen with GW2. That ship has sailed long ago.

Pino.5209:

It’s not going to happen with GW2. That ship has sailed long ago.

Jesus!! We would still be in the stone ages if everyone thought like you.

Saraneth.6021:

Pino.5209:

It’s not going to happen with GW2. That ship has sailed long ago.

Jesus!! We would still be in the stone ages if everyone thought like that!

Ha, that’s not a correct logic. By “that ship has sailed long ago”, if you didn’t understand. I meant, if Anet wanted an Oceanic server, it would have been on the initial release where they can actually maximize profits.
Box sales is one thing, GW2 needs constant gemstore revenue. How many of us here are actually spending money on gemstore regularly these days?
When was the last time retailers carry GW2 gemcard here? i can’t remember.

No. What I was referring to was the “give-up” attitude you seem to have. “That’s how it is so that’s how it will stay”.

Also, no sure about others but I still spend about $20 every month. Been playing on and off since beta. Whenever I come back to the game I always drop a lot of cash.

Saraneth.6021:

No. What I was referring to was the “give-up” attitude you seem to have. “That’s how it is so that’s how it will stay”.

Also, no sure about others but I still spend about $20 every month. Been playing on and off since beta. Whenever I come back to the game I always drop a lot of cash.

It’s not “give up”. It’s called being realistic.
Seriously, not expecting Oceanic server from a 4 years old game. Even with expansion releases, player base can’t be bigger than it was on release date, not to mention paying one (gemstore).
I’m sorry to tell you this, you spending $20 a month is not really a reflection of the amount of ppl actually spending rl money.

Do remember…there would have to be enough players to sustain 6 separate Servers (for WvW).

Unless, of course, the players would either want to forego WvW, or with even only 3 Servers, play the same match-up forever.

Confused exactly on what you want and the comments below aren’t helping.

If you want your own region, then no. I don’t think it would be healthy for the game to fraction off into a 3rd piece. I never liked the fact the game was split into two to begin with…. Should have kept the GW1 system of being able to bounce between regions freely with the added bonus of your server determining your region for WvW purposes only…

If you want your own server, I don’t think it would be cost effective… if anything at best… maybe reallocate one of the least performing servers in NA or EU to geographically meet Oceanic and toss that server in NA or EU region for WvW. Maybe the least performing of NA & EU so Oceanic can pick and chose which one they want?

Then again, I’d rather see NA get 1 Spanish and 1 Portuguese specific server.

There are plenty of Australian/NZ players a server would definitely help pvp/wvw quality of life, probably even raiding. Playing with 350-400 ping sucks :/

Moved to Sydney from London 3 years ago. Not been able to play GW2 due to the lag. If they started an AU server I’d buy the expansion in a heart beat. Fingers crossed!

Supz.9836:

There are plenty of Australian/NZ players a server would definitely help pvp/wvw quality of life, probably even raiding. Playing with 350-400 ping sucks :/

But, it wouldn’t be just one server, they would need 6 to accommodate WvW (or, at the very least, 3 and then they would only ever be matched against each other). Unless you are asking for a special GW2 for Australian/NZ players that lacks WvW.

tempted by the expansion but constant 200+ ping is keeping me off the game

There’s a lot of arguing about if there is/isn’t enough people in the region to justify the costs when not a single person here has any idea what the costs are, they’re just making numbers up from thin air.

How many players does gw2 need to justify the server costs? For starters there is a lot of evidence that suggests that micro transactions make more money than subscriptions. It’s easy to spend a lot more than 15 dollars a month on a game you play everyday. So this idea that they need enough people here to make money from box sales is a myth since they’ll be making the majority of their income from micro transactions.

There are almost 30 million people between Australia and New Zealand. How many players does Arena Net actually need for these servers to be profitable? I don’t know the exact numbers but it’s not a number in the millions or even 100s of thousands.

There are a lot of people like me who would play this game over WoW or many other games if the ping wasn’t so prohibitive.

FearMeMortals.4516:

There’s a lot of arguing about if there is/isn’t enough people in the region to justify the costs when not a single person here has any idea what the costs are, they’re just making numbers up from thin air.

Actually, numbers have been presented in numerous threads: there just aren’t as many potential players within 100ping of e.g. Sydney as there are near Texas or Munich. Just the fact that ANet doesn’t have a server farm in Australia tells us they don’t think it’s a good investment at this time.

So if you have data that would help convince ANet to revisit this, please share it. (With them — you don’t need to convince anyone here.) Like most businesses, they would love to increase their potential customer base, without adding much to their overall risk.

I have no other evidence other than successful games have no problems hosting servers in Australia. People use games like swtor as examples but that’s insane as this game wasn’t successful anywhere for very long. Guild Wars 2 in the other hand is one of the very few proven mmos on the market.

If you had a game like swtor then sure I’d agree it’s risky however they have a proven game. There’s no reason that gw2 can’t be successful in Australia. The games that host servers in Australia such as Lol, Wow, Dota, Hearthstone, CSGO, etc etc are all popular and successful games in NA and Europe and thus they find success in Australia as its a similar market, just smaller.

I can’t think of a single big online game (defining big as having millions of players) that doesn’t host oceanic servers other than GW2. Can you? Why do the same ‘its not profitable’ arguments get made when Arena Net is the only company not doing this.

I hope you can understand our frustration when GW2 doesn’t have servers in our region when every other big online game does and then we get this nonsensical argument that it’s not profitable as an excuse. The reason we don’t have servers is because of the logistics. It would probably take a lot of work for AAnet to set up servers in Australia. We’re trying to encourage AAnet to take the effort to do so because we’d like to enjoy their game. Then the tread gets derailed by these baseless claims that it’s not affordable for them to do it.

I understand your frustration. What I don’t understand is why you somehow assume that ANet doesn’t want to make money, that they haven’t considered exactly what you are asking them to review.

When you say things like “nonsensical argument”, it gives the impression that you can’t imagine any other way to see things other than through the eyes of the customer.

How big is the US & NA gaming market? How many big is the GW2 playerbase relative to that? How big is the Aussie/NZ market? If all things are equal, how many potential players would we be looking at? Of those, how many already own the game (those wouldn’t be new customers)?

How much does it cost to rent space in a data center that’s big enough to support this sort of game? What sort of additional staff does ANet need to maintain to deal with issues that come up? What sort of additional costs are there (taxes & other maintenance) by having a business presence in another country?

Now, neither of us are going to know most of these things with any sort of certainty, but we can come up with some numbers (as folks have done elsewhere). And we can get an idea of how plausible the idea is.

There are tons of games with servers in Australia… and tons without. Why do you think some companies decide to invest in more areas and others don’t?

Simply put, Guildwars 2 is the only big online game that does not have locally hosted servers in our region. Everything you’re saying is based on an illogical idea that there’s no money for AAnet to make in Australia. This is false.

The reality is that AAnet, like any other company, has limited resources and cannot simply do everything at once regardless of if it will make them a profit. They have to prioritise. The only thing that is evident by their lack of oceanic hosted servers is that they don’t consider it a priority. It is not evidence that there’s no money to be made in this market. There is no chance at all that this game would not be profitable in Australia when every single other big time online game that is successful in NA and Europe is also successful here. They have a proven product for a proven market.

The purposes of threads like this are to encourage AAnet to invest their resources in setting up OCE servers. It’s much, much easier to do now than it was in the past since third party hosting companies now have a significant presence in the Australian market. Blizzard hosts their servers here with Amazon, so it’s not like AAnet couldn’t do the same. They don’t need to send over engineers to set up a server cluster anymore when they can just give Amazon some money and have it all taken care of for them.

Still, will there be enough players to populate 6 servers? Will the Austrialian, etc. players be content to play with only themselves (Data Servers being region-locked)?

WoW is the only MMORPG that has local servers (local to ANZ) so saying GW2 is the only large game that doesn’t have them is very misleading. Games like MOBAs and FPSs are a completely different kettle of fish to MMORPGs like WoW, GW2, ESO, SWToR, FFXIV, WS, Rift, etc.

Of all of that list of similar games only WoW has servers in Australia and they were added with WoD – so a recent development. SWToR began by having Australian servers but they also began by locking Australians out of the US servers completely and releasing the game three months after it was released in the US. Those who didn’t use a VPN to get around the purchase restrictions simply cancelled their pre-orders so SWToR is hardly a great example of an MMORPG which put servers in Australia. Unsurprisingly sales for the game here were poor leading to them closing the Australian servers less than six months after they opened.

The problem with GW2 is not that it’s a US server but that US infrastructure is poor. If I can connect to a game server on the east coast of the US at 200-250 ms why is my connection to Texas (which is physically closer) 400-500ms. Many Australian players of any MMORPG have learned to deal with the triple digit ping and we wouldn’t trade the around the clock population for anything – and that’s before you take into consideration many of us have made friends all around the globe and US servers are typically used for international gathering being the mid point between Asia/Oceania and Europe.

Anet however could do with testing their content on variable pings the size of what Australian players are getting though.

I’m Australian and I wouldn’t play on Oceanic servers! There would be no one there to play with.

Lady Lozza.9670:

Many Australian players of any MMORPG have learned to deal with the triple digit ping and we wouldn’t trade the around the clock population for anything – and that’s before you take into consideration many of us have made friends all around the globe and US servers are typically used for international gathering being the mid point between Asia/Oceania and Europe.

This. I’m on the EU servers and there’s no way I would go from that population to the one Oceanic servers would have.

People cried for Oceanic servers in Diablo 3 as well, They got them. The servers went from near 400 games open on the US/EU realms at all times to 0 on the Oceanic realms.

Lady Lozza.9670:

Anet however could do with testing their content on variable pings the size of what Australian players are getting though.

While I do agree with this in terms of approaching things like interrupts and precision dodging (from thief and co.) in sPvP, it isn’t necessary to test for ping in relation to PvE content, as tolerances are made for exceptionally bad/poor reaction times for players with decent ping, this creates a relatively generous margin for Oceanic players to play seriously, so that things like open world bosses ( for things like break bars), fractals and raids can be participated in by competent Oceanic players, rather than the vast majority of under competent Oceanic players.

And while I have absolutely no clue what Anet’s testing into cross-server play entails, I’m surprised that in small instance interaction (Where ping matters most, in things like fractals, raids and sPvP matches), the server isn’t hosted locally, with a push and pull mindset in regards to accessing character data. Where data is stored temporarily on the server where the instance is hosted, and that when a character updates their inventory/skills etc. that a push is made to the character server, then the instance pulls into a temporary local cache/buffer for calculations purposes. This means only a very small infrastructure is actually required to host the relatively few instances that are actually in existence at any point in time, and doesn’t require the setup of a different region.

All that would be required is a way for players to define what region they would prefer to connect to. Or another approach like with many FPSs to date, you will, 9 in 10 games, play a local game, but sometimes there just isn’t anyone to play with so you end up in a NA match.

I’m Australian and i wouldn’t play on these servers either, it would be a ghost town.