Funcom plz tell why Most players have unaceptable pings

[Kalgon]

No. I want to play in a PVP server where I can kill and get killed all the time. No carebear in my world pls.

Funny, I see my share of carebears on PvP servers. So you really don't make a good point there.

[Invino]

How we arrived at C) technically? We actually know where our users log in from and we did a coverage graph to see where and how things would affect most of them?

Please Joel, we love you man. Don't sell us fog and old rope.

I would kill to see that graph which shows that majority are not going to be affected adversely. Simply can not be true, since majority are not US based.

[Shax84]

No, we have a bunch of network layer rewrites that have been done to improve stability (see removing lag spikes) and we aim to reduce the general latency by improving the network code.

As I said though, we can't decrease the speed of light so some people will have high latency no matter what.

It is not only the speed of light that comes in to consideration. Light takes like 20-25mS longer to reach the new location. But how the signal is routed is a different story. From Norway, we have to go through Oslo, Copenhagen, Dusseldorf, Amsterdam, London before we can go to New York and then Newark. I have 43 mS ping to London, and from there to New York (112mS) I have 69mS extra. So, roughly 3 times the speed of light lost in the cable and network equipment I guess. I am far from the worst affected of this and can play the game "fine" with 120-160mS. If you fix the spikes, this is all good for me. But as you see, it is not only the speed of light that comes in to consideration but also the route of the signal, and that is decided by location and ISP.

[smacpro]

We moved the servers because:
a) We had to do something about the long term viability of Conan as a financial product.
b) We want to implement the single server tech to consolidate the player base.
c) We believe that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase will not have a reduced experience because of this.

a)i think you did exactly the opposite but lets see

b)how will you do that if there is 100ms (or even more)between us?

c)you believe and i still have more than double ping after transfer wich means reduced experience

Let me be clear, this has been signed off by the tech leads, the operations leads and the the upper management layer. I was the biggest holdout in making the decision, because I am the guy who has to shoulder the blame for this.
I agonized over it, because we can't change the speed of light and the additional MS will hurt some players and for others it doesn't matter if the difference is not noticeable, a perceived downgrade is still a downgrade.

In the end, I signed off on it because I do believe it is the only way forward for the changes that the community has asked for.

Why the US and not the EU? We pay for our server farm in the US and it supports AO, AoC and TSW. The US server farm has the newest hardware and it has more connection links than the EU servers. It is, in short, technologically superior.

I am not saying people don't have a right to post their opinions on this and if you only care about your experience playing AoC, I understand and apologize if this has impacted your experience. Unfortunately we have to make decisions so that we can keep these games and services running, and keep them financially viable in the long term.

I hope that clarifies my position on this and at least provides some of the reasoning behind it.

An addendum - lag spikes are not latency. We are actively working on removing the lag spikes from the game.

the additional ms hurts alot of players
after all it will be one step forward 3 steps back

the best harware doesn't help if the connection sucks

and again ping near 100 ms feels not very fluid in pvp wich i liked most in aoc
Sorry Joel but i will not renew my sub until this 100 ms thing is gone
regards

[Vahush]

I rather have aoc servers in US than seeing it shutdown.

If you read between the lines you can easily tell that we are hanging over a cliff, be grateful that fc is not shutting aoc down . They are putting in an effort to have it up and running.

Unlike what NCSoft did to City of Heroes/Villains an 8 year old game with roughly same number of players as aoc has but NCSoft shamelessly pulled the plug.

Obviously FC thinks the same way as we do about this game considering all the flaws this game might have it's still a piece of art, it would be a shame to shut it down.

IMO they are trying to save the game not being greedy or trying to eff with us. The story is they are out of funds hence the incomplete new area and they are trying to cut corners to save costs or would you rather see your game join the ranks of CoX instead?

[Invino]

Can we have price parity with US at least then? Since we do not play a EU game as of this week, why are we paying EU prices?

..Unlike what NCSoft did to ...

NCS is far bigger than FC. Also FC has only 3 revenue streams and none are very good, so closing a game = mega loss = end of FC.

Pissing off majority of your playerbase is not a sound business decision + throw in 25% higher income per EU player and it starts to look even worse.

[kennyfisterbotm]

Can we have price parity with US at least then? Since we do not play a EU game as of this week, why are we paying EU prices?



NCS is far bigger than FC. Also FC has only 3 revenue streams and none are very good, so closing a game = mega loss = end of FC.

Pissing off majority of your playerbase is not a sound business decision + throw in 25% higher income per EU player and it starts to look even worse.

This makes sense! With the servers upon U.S. soil, do the U.S. prices get transferred to them? They should imo.

[Vedmed]

Invino, what if EU-PVP players are not majority of AoC's paying playerbase?
I feel for EU folks, but whine on forums won't change anything.

Most likely Funcom accounted loss of some % of playerbase and found it acceptable to keep game afloat. If loss will be bigger than expected... well then AoC may as well be shut down. My guess - you won't see servers back on EU soil either way.

[Allandir]

I'm wondering how it's gonna be to play melee classes during sieges =] It was actually playable on EU servers, most of the times at least, but with current ping and siege lags... Bai bai sieges =]

[yuisoku]

b) have you tested the one-server technology at all? we would all feel better, if we knew it will actually work with aoc engine and is worth the effort. If you only have one server type left, why bother with one server tech at all? A different solution for example would have been to merge pve and pvp servers and let players choose between pve and pvp instances upon entering (or allow for some kind of flagging system). The result would have been one european and one american server bank with better connections worldwide, instead of two banks (or more, if you keep b&g) with mostly bad connections.

No, this let people exploit PvP rules. You follow rules if you have chosen them. This is same like some people farm only bori to get PvP 10 then they join for PvP, but now they avoid also open world PvP while leveling.

If they do this, then PvP instances would be empty until people get their precious t4 weapon or bori gear.

bye bye gank/hunting

No deal!