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.
The game feels quite smooth given I’ve a 400ms + connection most of the time which is why it’s really weird when I hit patches where lag appears to really mess with the game.
JPs for example I will literally hit patches of the puzzle where I will make a jump then keep warping backwards, either to platform before or some weird midpoint (and then fall). I don’t rubberband much at all in the game so doing it on JPs is frustrating.
Sanctum Scramble is another example – I had to be 4s ahead of the timer because the gates take 4s to activate after I passed. Add that to the fact that the movement skills failed to execute 50% of the time I used them and getting bronze for one of my specialisation collections was nearly four hours of frustration. And I wasn’t doing this during a peak play time. I haven’t finished leyline run for the chrono shield for the same reasons.
Mad King’s clock tower I could probably do with my eyes shut but I’ve never got to the end due to 100% guarantee of rubberbanding back through the final jump. 50% of the time I get frozen right at the start of the clock tower because the game doesn’t seem capable of registering I moved at all.
In the recent PoF preview a mastery point required finding items and throwing them at the chef. They need to hit him to count. My client gave every indication that they hit but the server clearly didn’t get the message. Or they hit but don’t count as hit till the last possible second giving me less and less time.
Gliders at the start of HoT were a nightmare, sometimes they’d take ages to open. It made certain paths to content impossible. Then they fixed it.
Bosses can be anticipated if you play the content enough. Getting hit even though you dodge is annoying but you can recover from it. A 4s response when passing through gates is much longer than the 400ms I play at. (On the plus side during the PoF preview I did not have this issue and was actually capable of winning raptor races against many other players.)
While a lot of this content is optional, more and more vistas and MP and HP are being hidden behind content that is difficult to reach because I can spend four hours jumping only to keep consistently rubberbanding in the exact same location. If the rubberbanding was variable it might be pointing to packet loss somewhere on the route however it isn’t. It’s very specific locations and very specific skills.
On top of all of that try to use Battleping or similar to get a better connection and you risk a false positive ban and it takes several months to get your account back.