Guild Wars 2

You can already join any server you want; there is no player segregation. The “EU” and “US” designations are simply an indication of where the server resides physically.

Latency is an issue, especially in high-bandwidth situations such as WvW fights (where data has to travel back and forth and the game client needs to wait for replies from the server before rendering some things). A difference of 100 ms can easily be multiplied 2 or 3 times in practical terms, due to that back-and-forth communication.

It makes perfect sense to have localized data centres, and if Arena Net matched worlds from different regions people would whine that the ones connecting to the “local” data centre had an advantage (“I’m on a US world, why is my connection in WvW being routed to a server in the EU…?”).

The issue of “night capping” is just a symptom of a specific type of population imbalance. The “fix” for that should be a generic fix for population imbalances (such as giving the outmanned team extra supply and reduced build times, which would improve their ability to hold objectives without affecting 1v1 combat directly – as would happen if they gave players a stat boost).

People seem to be missing something. Yes, right now servers with coverage have an advantage. However, it would be the EXACT same should the servers be merged into one ladder. EU servers win during their primetime, NA wins during theirs. Then, if one server has more coverage than the other, they win. It’s as simple as that, it wouldn’t change anything other than the fact that now NA vs EU is an option. Coverage still wins out.

Kman.7358:

People seem to be missing something. Yes, right now servers with coverage have an advantage. However, it would be the EXACT same should the servers be merged into one ladder. EU servers win during their primetime, NA wins during theirs. Then, if one server has more coverage than the other, they win. It’s as simple as that, it wouldn’t change anything other than the fact that now NA vs EU is an option. Coverage still wins out.

Except in merged servers US/EU would spread out more for coverage. So the tiers would take care of themselves with coverage spreading out. Russians/SEA could still stick to their servers but does the technology not exist for the US/EU data centers to talk to each other?