Are Regional Servers Required?

Grimshaw

TLDR: Has Intrepid cracked the code, are regional servers really required?

Over the past few weekends I have found myself forgetting that I am connecting to the servers that are ~8,000 miles away due to the responsiveness. For the first time that I can remember, I didn't care about the ping, because when I pressed attack... I attacked, when I pressed block, I blocked, it was brilliant!

Now sure I was impacted when the servers start to run out of go-go juice, but then, so was everyone, and lets not forget Intrepid have one hell of a network team. As far as I can tell, they are making "the internet" their b...h.

This has made me wonder, do we really need regional servers?

I have been playing MMO's since Ultima Online and over the past 27 years I have notice a bit of a trend. We Oceanic players always want a local server, normally for good reason as no matter the game, the boss mob that killed us most was the dreaded lag monster.

So, eventually we would get a server (or two) and all would be good in the world, until ~ 4'ish months later, when players started leaving. At that point, the world would feel empty, and eventually it would fizzle out until only the most loyal stayed and for them it would become more of a solo experience than an MMO.

I find at times that I can go for 20 - 40 minutes on Vyra, with ~3,000 (assuming we are also capped at that volume) and the map is only 1 biome... 17 more biomes to come and if there are only 10,000 concurrent players on a server, I might only see people in major hubs or via guild organised events.

Imagine if at most, Oceania had 3,000 players... it wouldn't really be an MMO at that point and I am sure those players wouldn't mind connecting to NA if it just meant there were more people to play with.

Uncommon Sense

There will be an Oceanic server. Just not currently under Alpha testing.

I have tested both NA and EU servers from Brisbane Australia and the current ping/latency is averaging about 270ms

I have no intention of playing on a non oceanic server in a PVX game.

If the game population is so weak that the Oceanic server are forced to merge, I think the game will be in too poor a state for whatever reason and that will more or less signal a death spiral...

I understand People think this is a niche low pop game. But I believe if Intrepid does this right it will set a new trend for MMOs and retain a lot more people than expected.

Sathrago

So what a friend of mine told me about the current responsiveness of combat is that it is currently client side combat. So if you hit the mob on your screen regardless of the lag it will tell the server "hey! i hit it!". Apparently this can be abused easily and frequently by bad actors to tell the server all sorts of things to cause them to gain an advantage.

My fear is that this was a temporary solution for their servers constantly crashing and they dont have a real setup for server side pvp yet. We will see later on but yeah, hope that helps you understand it.

IustinusShiva

Regional servers are probably more about the primetime hours for events than anything else.

IustinusShiva

Sathrago wrote: »

So what a friend of mine told me about the current responsiveness of combat is that it is currently client side combat. So if you hit the mob on your screen regardless of the lag it will tell the server "hey! i hit it!". Apparently this can be abused easily and frequently by bad actors to tell the server all sorts of things to cause them to gain an advantage.

My fear is that this was a temporary solution for their servers constantly crashing and they dont have a real setup for server side pvp yet. We will see later on but yeah, hope that helps you understand it.

Oh this is a terrible idea and will get abused. This was one of the key errors New World succumbed to.

Uncommon Sense

Its not so much about hitting mobs on the client its about hitting other players across the globe...

Having almost .3 of a second handicap in a risk reward PVP environment is just to much. let alone adding massive multiplayer element.