Guild Wars 2

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.

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.

Speaking as one of those Australian players, it’s not ‘fine’. It’s acceptable at best and extremely frustrating at worst. You won’t be able to perform at the same level of an equivalently skilled player because of the ping disadvantage and pvp is a real struggle. So yes it’s not impossible to play the game but it’s anything but ‘fine’.

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.

To be honest the single biggest quality of life change for me would be a server hosted in Australia. I think this game is the best MMO on the market but it’s very hard to enjoy with 300 ping. Holding out hope that Arena Net will open a server here with the new xpac. I thought HoT was a super cool expansion but the lag is prohibitive.

A small ~10ish group of friends that have started playing this game. In the past we’ve played a lot of world of warcraft and achieved a very high standard of play in that game. However GW2 has really caught our eye so we’ve started a small guild on SOS. What we’re after is a few more friends who can make sure we always have enough people around to do stuff with as sometimes we’re missing a few people. A big goal of this group is to take on raids and high level PvE content, however the PvP looks interesting too.

To stress, we’re Australian and play at Australian times.

Hit me up if you’re keen.

Any news regarding this patch? My partner recently started playing and encountered this bug around level 50 and now it seems like all dialogue audio is disappearing on her, even the dialogue with the scouts. It’s really putting her off playing.

I’m making this post on behalf of my friend because he can’t access his account. He made the account a long time ago, and now he is looking to play again but can’t access the account.

He’s had some tickets open for a while with no response. Definitely looking for Arena Net to show some customer service on this issue.

Relevant ticket numbers

#1789063
#1795398

Could we get a response and maybe even a solution to these issues so that we can get on with playing the game?