Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing playing this game for about two weeks now. This is a game I was very excited for, it was top of my list (along with Planetside 2 (which will be getting an Aus server)).

For the most part, the game has been very fun and enjoyable, however something that greatly disappoints me is the lack of Oceanic servers.
When I first started up the game, I was both surprised and disappointed to not seen any servers for the Oceanic region and I don’t understand why they would not be there.

Other games (including large MMOs) have been able to maintain Australian servers, so why is it that the biggest MMORPG in about 6 years is unable to do this (or should I say; unwilling)?

I live on the eastern side of Australia (Queensland) and ping ~275ms to the US data centre.
Now some people will probably want to say a ping like this is fine for an MMORPG, and for most games in this genre, they’d be right. However, this isn’t really the case with GW2, mostly due to the dodging which plays a big role in GW2 combat.

I’m finding this latency pretty border-line, it’s playable, but it can get frustrating.

Thoughts?

It’d be good to specifically hear from people who live in Australia, New Zealand or surrounding countries and their interest in an Oceanic server.

First, the game just barely came out. Are you saying they should roll out with world-wide servers to start? And if they are unwilling, then so what?

There was the same request for Oceanic servers in SWTOR. They finally put them in, just in time for most of the playerbase to quit.

Atticus.4851:

First, the game just barely came out. Are you saying they should roll out with world-wide servers to start? And if they are unwilling, then so what?

There was the same request for Oceanic servers in SWTOR. They finally put them in, just in time for most of the playerbase to quit.

It’s pretty frustrating waiting for skills/dodge to go off, some things require the ability to predict the future to dodge and can be pretty fun destroying.

Imagine playing Dark Souls but everything happens half a second after you do it.

In the end it’s still playable but it would be nice if sometime in the future an Oceanic realm was added.

I Live in Perth, get between 100-200ms ping. But yes, an oceanic server would be nice, since our peak play times don’t line up with seppoland

Also gotta remember an oceanic server might not mean its based in Oceania, but could still be based in seppoland, just tagged oceanic so all us southies know where to go

yes please do and take sea of sorrows with you , its a pain to work hard in wvw and have to log to go to sleep for work the next day and wake up to having every single thing taken on your map by sea of sorrows and oceanic world vs world players. You cannot blame them , they are playing during their prime time , 14 hours ahead of ours…… please give them their own servers , whoever thought world vs world would be okay with oceanic servers mixed with American should seriously learn something about timezones and geography…..

scourn.6042:

yes please do and take sea of sorrows with you , its a pain to work hard in wvw and have to log to go to sleep for work the next day and wake up to having every single thing taken on your map by sea of sorrows and oceanic world vs world players. You cannot blame them , they are playing during their prime time , 14 hours ahead of ours…… please give them their own servers , whoever thought world vs world would be okay with oceanic servers mixed with American should seriously learn something about timezones and geography…..

I play on Sea of Sorrows, however i live in North American, during “North American” prime time, we don’t have a large amount of people, and generally throughout the day we slowly lose all the work the aussies did, they probably feel the same as you when they wake up and think “Those Americans keep losing all our points!”

That’s the main reason there aren’t oceanic servers, I suppose. There would need to be at least six to support any sort of WvW rotation schedule, and from what I can see there aren’t that many oceanic players. It would have been nice had the oceanic population spread around the other servers a bit more, as it stands the few unofficial oceanic servers will suck for anyone interested in actually fighting much in WvW.

Sea of Sorrows (for example) will end up winning lots of points due to being the only ones awake at the time. That will place them in a higher competitive bracket. Their smaller NA prime time population will be fighting against the high ranking NA servers. I don’t think a perpetual cycle of taking and losing points which are basically undefended was what the developers had in mind.

Definitely not, however it appears it that might be what it will become, just due to the fact the player base happens to mostly Australians, and then the North American people are unable to hold points without their Australian counterparts.

If a mod sees this, be good if I could get this thread moved the the General forum, which was not up when I created this thread.

Thanks.

Jermaya.2895:

I play on Sea of Sorrows, however i live in North American, during “North American” prime time, we don’t have a large amount of people, and generally throughout the day we slowly lose all the work the aussies did, they probably feel the same as you when they wake up and think “Those Americans keep losing all our points!”

That’s pretty close to how it is.
But I don’t blame anyone for losing points while a chunk of the server is asleep.

The servers are in mid US not west coast for anyone using a tunnel/proxy you need to set it to connect to a tunnel/proxy there to get a more accurate ping, someone above said they got 100-200ms… go run a traceroute or pingtest dot net to dallas texus to get latency and packet loss results because 100ms or even 150ms to Texas from Australia even from sydney would be near impossible due to how fast light(data) travels through fibre can travel and hop let alone perth which is even worse distance.

Most in reality regardless of proxy or not will get ~250 to mid US and ~200 to west coast give or take. These tunnel services can be misleading due to showing the latency to their proxy server not to actual game server and you must always set the tunnel/proxy to the closest server to the game server locations (mid US Texas for GW2) or the ping you see is not anywhere near your actual.

the funny thing about having an Australian server is that it needs to be hosted by/thru Telstra. A certain *other popular MMO game (not swtor) approached Telstra about hosting Australian servers. The price Telstra is demanding for this service is so high that to developers, it’s really just not worth it. The Australian player base just is not big enough.

Thrashbarg.9820:

…from what I can see there aren’t that many oceanic players.

They are great at hide and seek. Likely MANY more than you think there are, spread out across all servers.

I wouldn’t play on an Oceanic server tho (I’m in NZ).

Before the game launched, I was trying to find out where the Oceanic population would be based (according to several threads on other forums), but I ended up coming to the conclusion that, for WvW reasons, having the Oceanic population dispersed across many servers would be better than a small number of (un)official Oceanic servers.

With the population for our timezone being concentrated, WvW queues become longer and there really wouldn’t be any challenge due to a lack of opposing force.

I would love an oceanic server but to be honest it doesn’t bother me atm sometimes i’ll get a bit of lag but its not enough for it to annoy me.

If you looking for oceanic servers, several oceanic websits listed :
- Sea of Sorrows, Gate of Madness & Isle of Janthir as the unofficial servers for the Austrailian and New Zealand player base.

Myself and my Guild are on Isle of Janthir and its aways busy.

Telstra, wanting heaps of money for oceanic servers to be installed in Australia is a total myth.

Internode have for years approached numerous mmo (Blizzard being the big one) and offered to foot the bill for setting up and maintainin servers here in Australia, just as long as they can say ’ Internode host official <favourite mmo name here> servers ’.

Most mmo companies just don’t see it as viable, due to the amount of Oceanic players who will still play on NA based servers regardless.

I’m pretty sure we deserve it, hell I would pay a monthly fee for it. I mean, after all, I’ve also bought:

Digital Deluxe
Collector’s Edition (200 AUD right there.)
Over 200 dollars in gems.

That’s almost 500 dollars -or- about 4 years worth of subs. Not to mention my GW1 collection.

…Runescape had Aussie servers and Runescape is awful.

A small review of some UO servers

Well GoM is starting to look like a ghost town (except for the bots) for Oz players,I admit tho the Oceanic community is thinning across the world and I’ve progressed slowly in comparison.

SoS had visibly more players in Oceanic time zone when I was stationed there,however it also catered to a good 60% to 70% more bots and gold sellers,and I found the general population not as socially friendly/helpfull.

I’d like to be doing WvW pretty much all the time after Ive capped a few classes,but I wanted to shy away from the unofficial Oceanic servers for WvW pop balance.

Some Ozzie players/guilds did choose low pop servers,the problem was/is that the US players didn’t come.All the talk and prep months in advance to spread AU players/guilds was pretty much null and void due to US players hording to most of the top servers.

So I’ve got roughly one free transfer left before Anet axe them and have absolutely no idea what server would be best to make home.

Worst comes to worst,I’ll just stay PvE and choose an high pop unofficial Oceanic and forget WvW altogether.

It is not because they are unwilling or whatever, it is because that:

1. The game is pretty new
2. It is a known fact that the NA and EU markets get countless of gamers
3. It is a matter of good value. Will an Oceanic datacentre based server justifiable?
   1. Is the amount of resources (money, manpower, etc.) required will pay off the number of users that are going to choose these servers?
   2. How’s the ping? Obviously, when you release a regional-located server, you will aim for the gamers in the immediate area to connect and have good connection to it.
      1. Example: If there’s an Aussie-datacentre located server, will the players in ASEAN, China, Korea, Japan, India, be able to connect fine?
      2. Forget everything, will ASEAN gamers connect fine? And just right here, it will fail – it is a known fact that peering between ASEAN and AU/NZ is very bad. If this fails, then the whole concept isn’t justifiable
4. They have data from GW1 that they are using as a basis which we do not have access to. If you played GW1, you know that there is a Korea-located servers. But it was a huge waste in resources because it did not fly that long in Korea.
   1. I can not even remember correctly if they had a China or Taiwan located server, but I do know that in Korea and Taiwan, GW1 was also offered as a prepaid-based game (you get an account for free, but you have to top-up load to play – the western world were mostly unaware of this business model for GW1). It worked for them but still it wasn’t enough, as evidenced by not seeing a Korea or Taiwan located server for GW2.

No matter how many of us sign a petition, the decision will always be based if it can be justified. It’s not about if “it is worth it”, it is about convincing to the powers-that-be to invest resources (again, money, manpower, etc. etc.) in setting up a regional-located datacentre server.

And that’s just the tip of it. I’ll bet there are developers who are also not-in-favor of it and I won’t elaborate that one

Now, if you are asking for a server tagged as “oceanic” or whatever, so it can have a timezone set to Australia’s capital, I am not in favor of it. My main reason is that, it is better to be in a server that is 24/7 alive than on a server that sleeps.

I played a lot of online games, and I can tell you that the most fun servers are the ones with plenty of players almost in all time-zones. When an oceanic server is opened up, it is usually sleeping opposite our timezone because no one from their timezone plays on our oceanic servers. Yes there are a few, NA guilds even, but still not enough to keep the server alive.

With games where the Asia-Pacific community decides on “unofficial” servers, the lucky servers gets the benefit of being alive and kicking 24/7. No matter what time you login, there are always players around – it’s not lonely, it’s not sleeping.

This is the case in GW2 for example, the lucky servers being IoJ and GoM where we have a good balance of players across almost all time-zones. SoS isn’t as lucky because many NA players knew about SoS being the “unofficial Oceanic server”, so they avoided it – just like how we avoid NA/EU servers.

I play on IoJ and I can tell you, no matter what time I play, the server is alive, either High or Full. Overflow here and overflow there. WvW is kicking too. So if I have to change my work schedule, there are still people to play with even if all of our members are sleeping.

And, I’d rather e-socialize with the Western players than restrict myself and our guild in Asia-Pacific. There are good players there too.

At the end, we just have to live and accept the kind of ping that we get.

Physically located server in our area = hard to justify
Tagged server as “oceanic” or “asia-pacific 01, 02, etc” = possible, but we risk getting servers that sleeps instead of 24/7 servers.

Whats ASEAN? +15charlimit

I think its enough time now, that they actually start providing us servers. plus with the onset of china’s GW2 they could use it as a proxy for Asian/Ocean people.

Awesome necro.

And I’d still play on NA servers if they did anything.