Funcom plz tell why Most players have unaceptable pings

[Achreen]

Read this sentence once more please:

sorry my english > very bad XD

[Nusquam]

How did you come up with c) ? "overwhelming majority of the playerbase will not have a reduced experience" come on...
Even those who live in countries where they could get a decent latency don't all have the luxury of fiber optic and optimal routing. In fact very few do. I haven't seen many euros getting less than 100ms so far, even people from Ireland or the UK. It's possible, but it's not a widely accessible luxury.

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?

[letsdance]

Are you guys sure your ISP is not throttling your connection? Because game network can look a lot like p2p downloading, and if the ISP don't know the server have moved then they don't know what this traffic is.

How on earth did you have decent connection to sweden before if you loose 50ms just inside your own country?

I would send a email to the isp, and link with a traceroute to the gameserver and ask if there's anything they can do.

Atleast 10-15 years ago ISP's prided themself in beeing game friendly, and running servers for counterstrike etc, I guess these days it's more about justin bieber and stuff.

[Kurt2013]

There is no need to jump on Arishanya as moderators are volunteers and can't be blamed for decisions we make.

Me however...

I've been avoiding posting because people need a few days to get used to things, but I will jump in here.

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.

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.

a) you may be right, if your goal is the north american market or getting an attractive price for the game from an investor, but i fear you both underestimated the effect of 100ms more of latency and the amount of people enjoying your game, because of pvp (or you overestimated the engine and server tech you have). I am neither blaming you, a mod or someone personal there and sometimes it makes sense to concentrate workpower at one place (like you did). But the company also chooses where that place is and if you move it deliberately away from a large market, don't complain or be surprised of the effect.

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.

c) This is hard to believe now, but it might be true in a month or so.

You have a great game and the players gave you benefit of doubt and understanding for months or years now (because we know it is not funcoms only game or the only mmo on the market). So, the least you can do is focus on network issues now to compensate for the bonus latency in a way at least or work on your engine. In SOLO pve the difference is not big IF there are no spikes, but combined with the troubles your engine had in the past it becomes unplayable fast (like 400ms average with spikes every fight and minute, including freezes). When you do these fixes and upgrades, be sure to test them in a pvp or raid environment (also one including many logins/logouts).

IF the networking on funcoms side AND the engine handling of synchronizing, database queries and rubberbanding improves, it might still work out, even with only north america servers. So, fingers crossed your tech people are enough and very good at what they do.
Lots of this text might sound a bit like "Captain Hindsight", but i actually wanted to believe you at the start of the month, that it would not have such an effect (i did not play TSW and TL does not work for me. and after first day, it did not feel as bad as feared...but with more population and the recent patch it is worse. So at the moment the effect of "clean programming", new server etc. is not making up for the loss through physical distance ).

[Pumpkins]

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

[kalston]

Are you guys sure your ISP is not throttling your connection? Because game network can look a lot like p2p downloading, and if the ISP don't know the server have moved then they don't know what this traffic is.

How on earth did you have decent connection to sweden before if you loose 50ms just inside your own country?

I would send a email to the isp, and link with a traceroute to the gameserver and ask if there's anything they can do.

Atleast 10-15 years ago ISP's prided themself in beeing game friendly, and running servers for counterstrike etc, I guess these days it's more about justin bieber and stuff.

No throttling for me, I get 65-70ms on Stockholm servers (cos yes my routing is definitely good, only my base latency is a bit poor). I'm just limited by the old copper line connecting me to the DSLAM really.

[Casie4President]

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.

I hope this will bring improvements for the players. For me it´s not so bad. I have about 100-150ms, in minigames and raids too. that´s barely playable but not always (it could be a lot better!). But there are other players who plays with 200, 300 or more ms actually. And those players will quit your game if there nothing happens.

Yeah, you got the server merged in a few months but... to which price?

Since 5 years the same mistakes... i don´t understand!

ps.: I hope you understand the excitement...

[Kalgon]

b)If you only have one server type left, why bother with one server tech at all? A way better 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.

I always thought this would be the best route. Never understood why they insisted on going for the single server tech route.

I would think it would have been easier to merge all US servers together and just make a pvp instance for each zone. Same goes for the EU servers.

Though Funcom never goes the easy or right route.

[Kurt2013]

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.

So what? You could do this in pvp flagged instances (type 1) or with anyone likeminded (type2) from a pool of potential players from both the actual pve and pvp server types. With type1 system it would have even been possible to allow for instances with the b&g ruleset (e.g. gold drops, pot drops, different xp, no guards, player looting etc.). Though a gankerlurktroll will probably favour the pvp instance type1 version (no unattackable player will mess with the mobs and ranger track will always show a "victim").
If you think this has ANYTHING to do with carebear attitude, you are completely wrong and have obviously not understood how the variants are supposed to work.
You can not attack people on pve servers now from Fury as well, can you? So, how would it hurt you to have witnesses of your pvp skill around or more people to group up for minis, pve content or probably even more for pvp?

[Zatochi]

Are you guys sure your ISP is not throttling your connection? Because game network can look a lot like p2p downloading, and if the ISP don't know the server have moved then they don't know what this traffic is.

How on earth did you have decent connection to sweden before if you loose 50ms just inside your own country?

I would send a email to the isp, and link with a traceroute to the gameserver and ask if there's anything they can do.

Atleast 10-15 years ago ISP's prided themself in beeing game friendly, and running servers for counterstrike etc, I guess these days it's more about justin bieber and stuff.

My ISP isnt throtteling anything! May i assume your are not very familiar with physics and network technolegy?

its way over 10.000 km from germany to the us. fastest a signal can go is Speed of light (fibre optics actually is even 30% slower than that). Even ligt takes some time to travel 10.000km. In fibre optics a signal needs about 43 ms from one end to the other. but thats only a direct connection. to reach the us, my signal has to pass serveral hops which are connecting the different network layers of the internet. Every Hop means latency because here my signal cant travel with speed of light anymore. and the way a signal travels is even way longer then those 10.000km.

it is physical not possible to play from europe on a us server with a ping under 100. Especially if you are living in eastern europe.