Aussie/Oceanic Server

I saw this while surfing (yea its old news), and... it maketh me think that maybe it isn't that hard/implausible/ impractical/ stupid etc to have a server located in the South East Asiatic/Australian region for an mmo-esque game?

Of course, I'm no genius at telecommunications, so I'd love to hear why not from ppl that are.

I think the biggest barrier is cost. Until the the pipe between Australia and Guam is finished, there isn't enough economic forces to drive down price on bandwidth between Australia and international links.

And it's not even started yet AFAIK, and the ETA for completion is "mid-late" 2009.

That's one of the reasons why you wouldn't have an Australian server. Even after the completion of the pipe, it's still money out of ArenaNets' pocket for an additional set of servers.

well yea... the cost's always been there, but the main thing is that one company has decided Oceanic servers are worth the money, and if I ever decide to play another MMOesque game in the future, its definitely going to be one which has good pings.

I most definitely won't be purchasing gw2 if it doesn't have an aussie server, cos I seriously would hate to imagine the frustration of running and jumping around with a minimum of 200ms ping!

Its already heart breaking for me whenever miss a heal, interrupt by that many ms, or stop moving only to be kd'd by bulls strike half a sec later...
Imagine playing Mario 64 with 200ms lag, with Mario falling into a ditch every time u told him to jump 200ms before u got to the spot were suppose to jump!

So basically, if not for the current guild wars, then I'd think it would be considered for gw2( cos i wouldn't buy it otherwise ), and if you're putting servers up for that you may as well run em for gw1 too

The problem isn't with Guild Wars , it's your country, Australia doesn't even allow Blizzard/World of Warcraft to have servers there, let alone GW.

Well, we got korean and chinese districts not too long ago, I'm sure you've seen how popular they've become....

Cost effective its pretty shit.
There are maybe a thousand players in Aussie/NZ, and of that, how many of them do you think play in high end pvp enough to actually have that 200ms make a difference?
(before anyone says it, no it doesn't matter in PvE)

Doesn't allow? Source?

Most likely it's the cost that's prohibiting them from deploying servers in the region. After all, why bother to pay for servers and their ongoing costs, when the players can still connect to and play on US, Europe or Asian servers? The cost then goes to the player (via ISP) rather than the company.

Well you've obviously never played a mesmer.

don't play high end pvp because its just plain impossible to be effective when you've gotta pre-empt every single action you take...

...too frustrating when you miss key interrupts by that many milliseconds, or cripple a warrior only to see a teammate kd'd...

even in slavers and other high end pve dungeons, its hard to operate efficiently...

ever wonder why a lot of mmo fans in australia/new zealand dont play in the first place? i know my mates would love some local servers too. saves the regular server-jumping.

and it too me ages to locate factions n nightfall too. last i heard, they sold out.

heres one for the auzzies!

A Community Manager in the WoW forums.

There is an oceanic WoW server.
And @ AC28, yes I do understand exactly what you are saying, but the question is, how many other people do you think it really effects? Not many, which is what I was getting at when I said it wouldn't be cost effective for Anet to do this.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to be able to interupt and perma KD a monk, I just have to harden up and handle the fact the this won't change.

Firstly there is an oceanic region server for WoW. It is near impossible to get on to too.

Secondly there are NO legal restrictions on servers in Australia. None, zero, zip. Whoever informed you was wrong.

What is involved is $$$. And no one is interested in paying for it, no matter how much money the company makes. When push comes to shove Australia is such a small customer base, no matter what game you are playing.

I know a player in Perth who gets a decent ping from the Asian servers. I've tried that and unfortunately my ping is as bad to many of those as it is to the American.

I would LOVE a server situated closer than halfway around the world, but it isn't going to happen :S

Well the thing I don't understand is that alot of games do in fact run servers in australia (although none of them are MMO's and some of them only have basic matchmaking functions), and most of the servers as far as I know are hosted by Aussie ISP companies.

Also as far as I know, so long as the proper infrastructure is in place...costs of running a server should scale with the size of the playerbase. I mean theoretically u just need a wholesale server service and the cost of running a server should be essentially the same per unit of bandwidth regardless of playerbase...right?

Too much money, not enough people would use it to make it cost-effective.

End of story.

Also our lame as 'broadband' here isnt intenrational standard

I should have clarified. Since the discussion is about an MMO I didn't feel the need original to state that explicitly. You are correct. There are plenty of games that "run" servers in Australia. TF2, CS, BF, etc. Shooters and RTS. Games that are completely seperate from other servers.

I'm not sure how different this is for most MMOs. My understanding is that they keep their servers completely separate, but maybe there is some linking to keep trade prices even across the player community or for some other reason. If servers are somehow linked there is the huge issue of shear distance and infrastructure to consider. These are things that other games don't even consider because each server is a world of its own. It would not surprise me to find that MMOs natively have some sort of link to a master server as a necessity.

ahh well.. heres still hoping the guys at EA/ Warhammer Online hit something... and that it spreads =]

There has been numerous threads about this, it'll never happen.

how does the server thing work in GW anyway? It;s more of a district thing if i am correct? Becauase i have a Euro account, i log into which servers? Euro? Or is ping dependant on district? If i change to Int D1 anywhere else but HA, i get green lights.

so, how does it work with GW? if i could log into the asian servers i would.....

Oceanic Servers?
Lets hope that Oceanic Servers just don't crash on players, leaving them on a mysterious Guild Wars island where the primary henchmen are named Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Sayid instead of Mhenlo, Little Thom, Cynn, and Stefan.

myeah as if the number of players wasn't dropping fast enough, you now want to spread the community even more : /
empty outpost ftw, what they should do is merge euro english and us so we can actually do pugs again