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NoMadtech

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Yeah. Best we can tell, they consolidated things to save $$ and they intentionally didn't tell us ahead of time because they didn't want everybody jumping to one server (apparently they didn't think one could handle the load). So we get double ping and EA saves money. Everybody wins!! /sarc

 

Official answer here:

 

 

Hey folks,

 

As many of you know, on Tuesday Keith explained that in preparation for United Forces we moved all current west coast servers into our Virginia data center. Here’s some of the key questions we have received about the North American datacenter change:

 

Why not communicate this ahead of time?

We made the decision to not communicate this information ahead of time because we wanted you to have the ability to immediately login and determine the impact to your gameplay experience. This meant we could quickly start gathering feedback on what you were seeing in-game (more on this in the next question). However, we have seen posts from players who made specific decisions based on location (such as character transfers) and we will be in touch with them to discuss. To ensure there is no confusion about this update in-game, we adjusted the server selection screen to reflect that all NA servers are on the east coast.

 

My ping has gone up since the change and it is affecting my gameplay, what options do I have?

Please continue to report it! As Keith mentioned in his forum post this is something we are actively tracking and working with our network partners to address where possible. We will be working through this especially over the next two weeks as we ramp up to United Forces.

 

Could there be one data center in the Central US so that pings are more even for each coast?

Creating an entirely new datacenter is a daunting task, even above and beyond the substantial changes we have already made this year. This just isn’t something that was viable in the scope of the changes we made for United Forces.

 

Since all of NA is in one datacenter, shouldn’t we just have one server?

Moving all of NA together would create a very heavily populated server. This would introduce several challenges: 1) Players would likely experience queues accessing the server and 2) It would increase the chances for server instability and downtime. There are also a variety of other issues, but a key concern was combining all of North America would result in substantially more character name collisions.

 

We hope this answers some of your questions and lets you know what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks. Please remember, on November 8th we will move all players to their new servers during an extended maintenance (currently looking like 12 hours). We are also discussing starting a few hours earlier than usual (e.g., 2 or 3am CT), but will let you know a few days beforehand.

 

Thanks everyone.

 

-eric

 

 

Edited by teclado
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Even though it's physically in Virginia, I would assume Satele Shan will remain the unofficial West Coast server, because Harbinger residents are unlikely to transfer en masse to Star Forge for the exact same latency. So you'll probably see more players during west coast's primetime on SS.
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I don't understand how you guys are getting so much latency. Is America's internet services really that bad that you literally have to be near the server to receive a decent response time? In my country, I can do Star Forge, Satele Shan, and Darth Malgus, and it all has the exact same latency for me. I don't understand how it affects you so poorly.
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Well, the main thing about SWTOR is this:

 

1. It's not a high-quality game like Ghost-Recon Wildlands/ Destiny 2/ whatever other game has the capability to have high-end graphics that require you to have the best system in the gaming community in order to perform decently. So many who play SWTOR aren't necessarily playing with a potato (though I'm sure some are) or are close to it. So it's safe to say that many players have an average or slightly above average system. Which can alone effect gameplay based on location to the server. (What I mean is, your system can only take you so far as to how your game performs thus directly effect things such as ping/lag).

 

1a. SWTOR also isn't the game where you need a higher graphics card, you really could use an 860m GEFORCE by INVIDIA if you choose. As long as you meet these next two requirements. SWTOR doesn't rely on the state of what kind of graphics card you use, sure it will help, but SWTOR mainly runs off of your CPU, the higher your CPU you'll see much better results than if you were to just update your graphics. The reason behind this is: Your connected to a server that is always loading and keeping you at roughly the same time as everyone else (ping).

So the better the CPU you have the better performance of the game you'll see. (Once again, this will only take you so far. If your internet isn't up to par you will still see lag/ping issues).

 

2. My final point is this: Mostly everyone who plays SWTOR has good-excellent-balls to the wall crazy internet will see a great game (as long as the meet/exceed the above 2 requirements) Having the worlds best internet means nothing if your computer can't process all the information it receives. This will also make your ping/lag shoot up. There are ways to compensate for a low grade system on a high power internet service. Lower the graphics. You will be amazed at how many people try to play games higher than what they can handle, this will cause then issues, not with just ping and lag, but with frame rates dropping to the floor.

 

This also works the other way, if your system is amazing but your internet is slow, you will still need to lower your graphics. Probably not as low as the people who have a bad system and good internet but you will still need to lower it some to compensate for what you are missing.

 

Ending statement: Everyone who has lag/ping issues usually has one of the reasons I've listed above. This doesn't mean I'm right about this now because of the server merge. That could have effected things greatly. Therefore we need to be supportive as players and give them the bug reports that they need. Because they can fix the problem. Don't just tell them you have a problem. Give them the w's.

 

When: When did it happen?

Where: Where were you when it happened?

What: What were you doing when it happened?

 

Be informative yet polite and they can get to it fairly quickly. If enough people report their issues they way I have said to. They will probably feel more obligated to solve the matter sooner and will feel better for receiving such polite responses/bug reports. Remember, most of them who build/fix the game play it too. They want to see it fixed just as badly as you do.

 

That being said, it will probably still be at a minimum two months before they get all the issues fixed that are causing the issues.

 

If any of you have any questions. Feel free to send me a message on this site and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!

 

Have a great day everybody!

 

-Elledes

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I live in Australia. I used to play on Dalborra with 40ms. They closed it down(instead of merging the 3 APAC servers).

I moved to Bastion with 210ms. That server died cause nobody cared about a PvP server.

I moved to Harbinger with the same 210ms. I played there for years, learning to cope with the high latency.

Now they move the "west coast" server to east coast, I get 295-310 ms.

 

It really feels like BW just doesn't want me to play this game. :(

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It really feels like BW just doesn't want me to play this game. :(

 

Don't worry man, and most importantly don't give up! I'd wait a long while. Give them a few months for fix their server issues first. They aren't going to give up on you Aussies yet! You all are a great part of the community that they honestly can't afford to lose. :)

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It really feels like BW just doesn't want me to play this game. :(

 

"Don't worry man, and most importantly don't give up! I'd wait a long while. Give them a few months for fix their server issues first. They aren't going to give up on you Aussies yet! You all are a great part of the community that they honestly can't afford to lose. :)"

 

I think you're kidding yourself here...

 

Also, idk how BW managed to break quotes on the site

Edited by auroroavalor
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This also works the other way, if your system is amazing but your internet is slow, you will still need to lower your graphics.

No.

 

Elaboration...

 

 

Your graphics data is not being transferred over the internet; merely positional data (x, y, z), ability activation, stuff like that. Lowering your graphics setting will have precisely zero effect on your ping. If you see any performance improvement whatsoever from lowering your graphics settings, it would be due to an increase in your framerate, not ping. Framerate and ping are not the same thing.

 

Besides, the network data being pushed is relatively small. A 10Mb/s up/down connection will not yield better ping than a 5Mb/s up/down connection. The only way that would be true would be if more than 5Mb/s worth of data were being transferred for the game in either direction (to server or from server), or if somebody on your shared connection is hogging bandwidth. Anyway, that would be ludicrous and a massive waste of bandwidth. Maybe a few hundred thousand bits per second, but certainly not five million bits per second or more. The limiting factor in terms of your network connection is the path that your data has to take to and from the servers that are now on the east coast. Your ISP can pretty much guarantee your up/down bandwidth to a point - certainly not all the way across the country, on infrastructure (routers, switches) that they have no control over. Your ISP in CA cannot control loading on a router in (totally made up) Omaha, Nebraska.

 

So, complaining to BW to "fix the lag" is pointless. Unless it's a server loading issue, there is nothing that BW can do about it. It's either your computer (and therefore framerate) or something with your network connection from you all the way over to Virginia. Ping issues are geography (limited by the speed of light, number of hops), network infrastructure load (your ISP as well as a slough of other people's network hardware), and loading on your local network (maybe you get 500kb/s upload, but somebody else in your house is using 450kb/s of it).

 

 

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I don't understand how you guys are getting so much latency. Is America's internet services really that bad that you literally have to be near the server to receive a decent response time? In my country, I can do Star Forge, Satele Shan, and Darth Malgus, and it all has the exact same latency for me. I don't understand how it affects you so poorly.

 

Play from Australia and it adds 70ms on top of the 210ms we already had.

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It really feels like BW just doesn't want me to play this game. :(

 

Don't worry man, and most importantly don't give up! I'd wait a long while. Give them a few months for fix their server issues first. They aren't going to give up on you Aussies yet! You all are a great part of the community that they honestly can't afford to lose. :)

 

I’ve been in contact with Keith in a few PMs to give him network feed back. He’s admitted that they always expected there would be an increase of 70ms fro APAC players 😢

 

There is nothing they can do to fix that... thinking it will is very naive... we could give them 3 years and it won’t get better... so saying we shouldn’t give up isn’t helpful... Bioware have most certainly given up on the APAC community

Edited by Icykill_
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I don't understand how you guys are getting so much latency. Is America's internet services really that bad that you literally have to be near the server to receive a decent response time? In my country, I can do Star Forge, Satele Shan, and Darth Malgus, and it all has the exact same latency for me. I don't understand how it affects you so poorly.

 

I believe the crowd that is actually suffering is the Pacific. They are after all, the furthest from any avaliable server.

 

As a west coast US player, I went from ~30-60 ms to 80-110 ms. So it's still perfectly playable.

 

The outrage is because we weren't informed ahead of time and it feels like a snub to west coast players and a slap in the face for Pacific players.

 

Like I get you need to save money and I get moving all data centers to the middle of the country costs money. But really, this feels like a snub.

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I don't understand how you guys are getting so much latency. Is America's internet services really that bad that you literally have to be near the server to receive a decent response time? In my country, I can do Star Forge, Satele Shan, and Darth Malgus, and it all has the exact same latency for me. I don't understand how it affects you so poorly.

 

I think you underestimate the sheer size of the US and the obstacles that must be crossed.

 

Imagine driving from Lisbon to Moscow or from Darwin to Victoria and back again!

 

Also unlike ocean crossings there are dozens of connections cross country, it is not just one run coast to coast.

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  • 2 months later...
I’ve been in contact with Keith in a few PMs to give him network feed back. He’s admitted that they always expected there would be an increase of 70ms fro APAC players 😢

 

There is nothing they can do to fix that... thinking it will is very naive... we could give them 3 years and it won’t get better... so saying we shouldn’t give up isn’t helpful... Bioware have most certainly given up on the APAC community

 

This is a confession that I would like to see. Any chance you can post on here exactly what they said?

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