Guild Wars 2

Hi All,

I wonder how different the results would have been if EU + NA Servers were combined together for the WvW ?

This would then result in 0 night capping – as it would be a 24×7 fight.

Something I think we all have wished for on a very long time is to be able to play with our EU Buddies in PVE/WvW – the barrier between the two groups is like the Berlin wall.
It served its purpose and would be great to see it come down.

A difference of 20ms or 100ms (connection lag) – it nothing when compared to the server lag (ANET Side) when in the big blob fights where only skill 1 works reliably.

If only.. I can dream.
This is the one thing I would have loved to see happen

Thanks,

Interesting idea, in ESO my ping EU was 97 my ping US was 400~. If the ping would be like this in gw2 i would have serious problems fullfilling my role in a guild zerg though…

Guild Wars 1 had channels to switch between there you could always play where ever you wanted just by switching channels. I do realize that isn’t really and option for WvW but seems to me something similar could be done.

Silberfederling.9302:

Interesting idea, in ESO my ping EU was 97 my ping US was 400~. If the ping would be like this in gw2 i would have serious problems fullfilling my role in a guild zerg though…

gw2 isn’t eso. I don’t have a clue where the eso servers are based or what my pings would be like there though.

what is your gw2 ping?
what is your ping to the other side of the pond?
I personally get reliably ~140ms going to NA servers.

edit: for pve & pvp, I would love being able to switch between EU and NA ‘districts’.

Wouldn’t work to be honest. While the idea is nice and could make the game mode more lively all around the clock I doubt anyone would want to play with 350+ ms latency when they could be playing with 20-100 ms.

I posted something similar here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WvW-Poll-04-28/page/2#post6127826

The question is how much of the increased latency from NA to EU and visa-versa is due to “physics”, i.e. (mostly) the speed of light and how much of it is avoidable if Anet funded and provided the cross-continental routing, instead of relying on ISP peering arrangements/routing.

And although it would almost certainly add a minimum of 150ms to the max delay (say, Moscow to a server farm on the East Coast of the USA) how much total lag is due to server processing and could investment in the servers more than compensate for the extra travel time?

Only Anet can find out, but it sure would help with nightcapping if there was one global league.

I agree Jong.. people could still connect to the local server – ANET just flips on the back-end which server people are actually routed to if its a NA Based one or EU One (dependant on time-zone).

For all purposes ANET is carrying the traffic across a routing between the data centres.. and individuals still connect to the local side. ANET does the routing on the back-end.

The ping differences then would not be large either… then its just a ‘client’ side – do I connect to EU or US server (as my primary connection).

I think on GW1 – all servers were US Based and we just got pointed to different NA Server instances on the back-end.

tbh, its not even a case of “only anet can find out”.
We could just get the community to make f2p accounts and connect to the alternate continent and post the ping results.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

tbh, its not even a case of “only anet can find out”.
We could just get the community to make f2p accounts and connect to the alternate continent and post the ping results.

No, that’s the point. People do that already but they are relying on their ISPs routing to the other continent. Only Anet can find out what the latency would be if they handled the cross-continental routing by buying it themselves, with guaranteed service levels, or whether they could compensate for any delay by speeding up their server processing (I added this bit later, so you may not have seen it!).

So, beside potential lag/ping/connection issues nobody has anything against the idea?

That would be really interesting and is probably easiest way to stop night capping and I have talked to a lot of guy who have played on EU and NA and they all said the ping is literally the same not much difference

I would love this. I have an EU account (~40ms) and an NA account (~160ms) playing from London UK.

This chart gives some indication of what Anet could achieve if they had a managed service agreement to route traffic around the world: http://www.verizonenterprise.com/about/network/latency/

Realistically, probably about 100-150ms added latency from Central Europe to the west coast USA. But if they provided entry points to their network from around Europe, UK, France and Spain would probably only have an extra 70-100ms. Sounds manageable for an MMO to me, but whether that really matters or can be made not to matter by improvements on the servers probably only Anet know.

Here’s an article about what the competition are doing from a little over a year ago: http://www.wsj.com/articles/videogame-firms-power-up-networks-for-online-players-1422927189

NA T1 servers have WAY better coverage than EU servers as most OCX and Sea players get better ping on NA servers. So no you wouldn’t have 24/7 fights, you would have EU and NA fights with nothing else.

How do you figure?
I’d expect anet to consolidate onto an NA server anyway.
OCX/SEA pings wouldn’t even factor into it.

FogLeg.9354:

So, beside potential lag/ping/connection issues nobody has anything against the idea?

Depends on what the idea is exactly.

If anyone is suggesting that freshly paired NA servers be paired with freshly paired EU servers (cutting 30 servers down to 15) well, yeah, I have a problem with that.

If on the other hand the suggestion is hey, when this current merge beta is over and we go back to 24 NA servers, it’d be really cool to merge EU in. Well, yeah, I think someone somewhere would have a problem with that too.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

This won’t happen for technical reasons (our NA and EU datacenters are entirely separate.) Though even if it was technically possible, there’d still be design reasons to avoid doing so, like that EU national worlds wouldn’t have NA partners that spoke the same language.

True but almost on every EU server there are some English speaking commanders and most people do understand what they are saying

Would be nice to try this idea out even for just a week just to see how it goes.

NA-EU pairing beta?

Spanish and French servers work this way already, just suffering lag. Spanish servers have a substantial South American community and probably North American too. French have Canadians. Germany is probably a problem, but shouldn’t stop all the rest of the world if this could really make the game 24×7.

And, honestly Tyler (thanks for chipping in btw), while, as we discussed, there may be technical reasons this can’t work the fact that there are currently 2 separate datacenters is hardly it. We know that and we know why, but at some point, if it’s technically possible, other games will be doing it! That article from the wsj shows people are working on it. Truly global esports will be a thing unless the laws of the universe stop it!

Tyler Bearce.3427:

This won’t happen for technical reasons (our NA and EU datacenters are entirely separate.) Though even if it was technically possible, there’d still be design reasons to avoid doing so, like that EU national worlds wouldn’t have NA partners that spoke the same language.

Real. Life. Hero.

Only if they were hosted on the NA data centre, otherwise I’d skip WvW until it got changed back. 250 ping is enough of a disadvantage already

Meh you don’t need to link servers, just link scores lol.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

This won’t happen for technical reasons (our NA and EU datacenters are entirely separate.) Though even if it was technically possible, there’d still be design reasons to avoid doing so, like that EU national worlds wouldn’t have NA partners that spoke the same language.

Virtual Worlds inside a game should be promoted as and designed to be melting pots. This is a 24/7 game mode and any location based division, language division, or nationalism, should not exist. Dividing the players ultimately hurts each world and the subsequent game mode overall. The technical barrier between EU and NA should not exist either. WvW should have been run on one data center only. It’s the logical choice for again, a 24/7 game mode.

Have the server located in the middle of the ocean and latency for all will be perfect

DeWolfe.2174:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

This won’t happen for technical reasons (our NA and EU datacenters are entirely separate.) Though even if it was technically possible, there’d still be design reasons to avoid doing so, like that EU national worlds wouldn’t have NA partners that spoke the same language.

Virtual Worlds inside a game should be promoted as and designed to be melting pots. This is a 24/7 game mode and any location based division, language division, or nationalism, should not exist. Dividing the players ultimately hurts each world and the subsequent game mode overall. The technical barrier between EU and NA should not exist either. WvW should have been run on one data center only. It’s the logical choice for again, a 24/7 game mode.

no thanks i like my servers in frankfurt, i dont need a 100-200ping

Sekai.2987:

DeWolfe.2174:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

This won’t happen for technical reasons (our NA and EU datacenters are entirely separate.) Though even if it was technically possible, there’d still be design reasons to avoid doing so, like that EU national worlds wouldn’t have NA partners that spoke the same language.

Virtual Worlds inside a game should be promoted as and designed to be melting pots. This is a 24/7 game mode and any location based division, language division, or nationalism, should not exist. Dividing the players ultimately hurts each world and the subsequent game mode overall. The technical barrier between EU and NA should not exist either. WvW should have been run on one data center only. It’s the logical choice for again, a 24/7 game mode.

no thanks i like my servers in frankfurt, i dont need a 100-200ping

Then continue to enjoy poorly organized Worlds with unbalanced coverage. Btw, I’ve had an account on EU from the US and ping difference went mostly unnoticeable.

CrimeMaker.8612:

Have the server located in m middle of the ocean and latency for all will be perfect

lol! Seriously, people are looking at putting datacenters on the bottom of the sea – infinite free cooling! Probably not the middle of the Atlantic though, sadly.

Sekai.2987:

no thanks i like my servers in frankfurt, i dont need a 100-200ping

Your perceived latency is a lot more than the raw ping time to Frankfurt You don’t know that they could not remove 100ms by investing in new server infrastructure, making the change invisible. It’s possible.

Funny thing Ping is irrelevant when 3 blobs collide…
All we can do is spam 1 – I’m sure you have all seen the ‘server side’ lag…it’s not the client side of 100-200ms which is going to kill you.

If all your ‘timeZone’ has roughly the same ping it’s no big deal.
If you are fighting people which has a large difference in ping 100msv1000ms then yes it makes a difference. This happens if some SEA/OCX fight EU or NA in WvW/PvP together (which is made less likely due to timeZone overlaps).

Before harping too much about OMG the ping it will kill me – create a F2P account on a US or EU server and try it. If you meet a big blob and things slow down – you’ll see your ping is steady and fine. The problem wil be you cannot use any skill but 1 in WvW due to server side lag. It’s all server side not client side.

That is an OK test, but far from perfect. It would be much worse than a proper managed solution. The problem is ping is currently far from dependable when it depends randomly on how each packet gets from your PC to the transatalantic fibre and then down to the remote server. It can be not bad, it can be poor.

There is absolutely no doubt that if Anet positioned their servers in a datacenter on the fibre backbone somewhere “in the middle” (eg. Ireland or East Coast USA), bought entry points, with guaranteed service levels, to that backbone across the USA and Europe and then set the client to use the nearest entry point, the latency would be far reduced from what we mostly get now, if connecting from Europe to USA or visa-versa.

Of course, this may not be cheap! I understand that. But, if not Anet, a competitor will provide such a platform.

I think some folks are missing the fine subtle hints from EU that they don’t want to play with NA

I would wager, nobody in EU gives a kitten about feeding the 24/7 NA machine. WvW is working well over there, even with gaps in coverage. It’s why there’s such a variety of matches.

Jong.5937:

Spanish and French servers work this way already, just suffering lag. Spanish servers have a substantial South American community and probably North American too. French have Canadians. Germany is probably a problem, but shouldn’t stop all the rest of the world if this could really make the game 24×7.

And, honestly Tyler (thanks for chipping in btw), while, as we discussed, there may be technical reasons this can’t work the fact that there are currently 2 separate datacenters is hardly it. We know that and we know why, but at some point, if it’s technically possible, other games will be doing it! That article from the wsj shows people are working on it. Truly global esports will be a thing unless the laws of the universe stop it!

Aa the infamous French Canadians.

CrimeMaker.8612:

True but almost on every EU server there are some English speaking commanders and most people do understand what they are saying

Define “Some” please….
In french servers, you’ll find maybe 1 or 2 commanders per server able to properly lead a zerg in English…. That’s not much at all !
Almost all commanders can write in /map their orders in English, but leading a zerg on TS in English is something completly different, espescially under pressure in TF.

DeWolfe.2174:

Virtual Worlds inside a game should be promoted as and designed to be melting pots. This is a 24/7 game mode and any location based division, language division, or nationalism, should not exist. Dividing the players ultimately hurts each world and the subsequent game mode overall. The technical barrier between EU and NA should not exist either. WvW should have been run on one data center only. It’s the logical choice for again, a 24/7 game mode.

I disagree…
A lot of players from the national server just don’t want to speak English in game. Anet told them the game was entirely playable in their language (french, german or spanish)…. If now English is mandatory to play WvW, these players could legitimately ask for a refund.

And for the data center…. yes it would belogical to have only one data center, but where ? In the middle of the Atlantic ?
People here are saying that it doesn’t really matter when it’s blob vs blob. Ok, maybe. But what about small fights ? roaming ? duels ?

Tyler Bearce.3427:

This won’t happen for technical reasons (our NA and EU datacenters are entirely separate.) Though even if it was technically possible, there’d still be design reasons to avoid doing so, like that EU national worlds wouldn’t have NA partners that spoke the same language.

Didnt stop the Chinese guilds from joining T1 NA instead of playing on their own GW2 servers.

The Ventari Ele.5812:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

This won’t happen for technical reasons (our NA and EU datacenters are entirely separate.) Though even if it was technically possible, there’d still be design reasons to avoid doing so, like that EU national worlds wouldn’t have NA partners that spoke the same language.

Didnt stop the Chinese guilds from joining T1 NA instead of playing on their own GW2 servers.

Their own? You mean the one that was launched in 2014 when these players already had an account? Also, many of them aren’t from mainland China where GW2 of China was released. The one released in mainland China is handle by different company KongZhong and probably has the “Great firewall”…

Even is they arent from mainland china, some of them still did not speak english.

Part of anet’s reason not to do this is because of the language barrier.
But this doesnt really matter, even on EU servers, half the zerg isnt on TS, so arent listening. How many commanders still type in team chat? Not many. Pugs just follow the tag, language doesnt come into it.

So the reason Tyler has given is mute. The rest they havent listed.

The only problem here is ping and nothing else.
Unless they put some server in the midle of the ocean, either NA or EU will have huge ping delay compared to the other team.
As much as I would like to see that happen, it probbably never will.

The Ventari Ele.5812:

So the reason Tyler has given is mute. The rest they havent listed.

I think the word you’re looking for is “moot”.