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Maintenance: October 24th, 2017


EricMusco

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Hello BioWare and Keith,

 

This change was not announced well in advance of its implementation, which is a far cry from the transparency we were as a community hoping for. That said, even with a proper announcement I can not say I'd find this remotely acceptable. The West Coast is a sizeable part of the country, and thus also your largest NA server prior to the merges. Not providing those players on the West Coast or APAC players the opportunity to play on a reasonable MS server, is not good business practice. While it may be economical to have only EC datacenters, it is not ethical to force so many people into a seeming permanent state of being second-class/second-rate. Many of us already experienced non-playable MS rates on your Harbinger server, now we're getting considerably worse pings? How is that not going to impact gameplay performance? I'm in California, and I now walk through Oricon with 440ms as my most consistent ms, frequently spiking to 600-1000ms. How am I supposed to raid in this game now?

 

I'll be writing a more detailed ticket to customer service, I just felt the need to write here as well.

 

~ Glor

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I made a couple observations that I think are pretty interesting, using the site https://gsuite.tools/traceroute

 

Let's first look at the hops made by The Harbinger (East Coast, IP 159.153.65.219), and by Jedi Covenant (West Coast, IP 159.153.65.234) - they both go through Texas and end in California.

 

Now, let's look at an EU server; TRE (159.153.78.101) - the hops end in CA also, kind of strange for an EU server, yeah? But actually, instead of jumping through Texas on it's way to CA, it hops through Ireland. It's been known for a while that EU servers are based in Ireland, so that hop before CA must be the actual server. If we follow that logic then we should assume that all US servers (both WC and EC) are actually currently located in Texas, near Houston.

 

That's where my logic takes me anyway.

Edited by Dilemmas
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Um... wasn't reduced latency the whole purpose of having a West Coast server located on the West Coast? Now agreed, most people don't really need single-digit pings, but there are those PvPers and NiM ops teams that will notice a difference.

 

I understand this saves money and makes maintenance and patches easier, but WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?

 

#facepalm

 

Unfortunately, you answered your own question. Renting service space gets expensive, providing bandwidth into data centers is even more so. I expect consolidating into one rack in one data center saved them a LOT of cash. There are no longer enough players to support multiple data centers, etc. My only question would be why the location they picked (wherever it is) and why continue 2 NA servers if they are in the same rack?

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I made a couple observations that I think are pretty interesting, using the site https://gsuite.tools/traceroute

(snip)

 

Texas would be possible. The location the IP addresses claim is just the business office where they are registered and has nothing to do with the physical location. If they are in Texas, that's pretty central for most of the NA players (as opposed to New York or the like. Not that it helps the APAC people at all.

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If it was located in Texas, the ping would not be as high as it currently is for the people on the west coast.

 

I'd be more interested to know what people's lowest recorded pings are in these cases, not so much the spikes (even if they're currently forming an average), which could be caused by technical issues on BW's side rather than the actual location.

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Texas would be possible. The location the IP addresses claim is just the business office where they are registered and has nothing to do with the physical location. If they are in Texas, that's pretty central for most of the NA players (as opposed to New York or the like. Not that it helps the APAC people at all.

Not TX. My ping is worse and I'm in TX.

Another thing to look at is packet loss. I've always had crappy connection to their servers. I've said this before, but ALL of their servers were hosted in Redwood City, CA before, but not sure where they are now. My ping plotter has me routed through Level3 hops and getting 80-100% packet loss. It used to be 40-80%, but Harb gives me 3 bad hops now(Was 2), TRE is 200+ ping and 1 bad hop now(Was none), TEH is 4 bad hops now(was 2). I have talked, argued, been banned from calling, and account temp banned from talking with customer/technical support over the past 5yrs....NOW everyone else is having somewhat the same playing experience I've suffered through, and I'm even worse than before. Tried to play on JC yesterday and it is just unplayable...smashing no one when player was clearly there...heals not going through...can't backstab someone because they are not in the location I'm seeing them, missing taunts, not activating nodes, moving and players asking why I'm standing still.

I'm finally done...it will not get better, and reading that this was an improvement has put the finishing touch on it. This sucks, because I love Star Wars and this was a great game....just too many bugs and bad gameplay.

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If it was located in Texas, the ping would not be as high as it currently is for the people on the west coast.

 

Actually, based on what I am getting doing some speed testing to various places around the country, if I double what speedtest shows as the one way ping, I get the ping reported in the game when the servers were separate. To Northern CA, I get 12 and my ping to Harby used to be between 20 and 25. To the far East Coast (NY and GA) I get 68 and used to get about 100 ping in game to SL. I now get 85 to everything in game and to Austin Texas, Speed test shows 43. SO, I'd say Texas looks like a believable location. But I'd like to see what people on the East Coast are reporting for PING.

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Actually, based on what I am getting doing some speed testing to various places around the country, if I double what speedtest shows as the one way ping, I get the ping reported in the game when the servers were separate. To Northern CA, I get 12 and my ping to Harby used to be between 20 and 25. To the far East Coast (NY and GA) I get 68 and used to get about 100 ping in game to SL. I now get 85 to everything in game and to Austin Texas, Speed test shows 43. SO, I'd say Texas looks like a believable location. But I'd like to see what people on the East Coast are reporting for PING.

 

The servers are on the east coast not Texas dude.

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Ping reports so far definitely look that way. Not a bright choice, but not surprising either.

 

I say this because friends of mime from Austin Texas are getting the same ping times as before the change if they moved to Texas they would be incredibly low.

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Hi all,

 

Today’s maintenance was part of the United Forces effort!

 

We have completed the upgrade of the Game Servers along with all their supporting infrastructure in the Data Centers. We made a large investment of new hardware and software and one of our primary goals was to substantially reduce our footprint while improving our overall server capacity. During our evaluation of the new servers, we determined we could also combine our North American datacenters. That also occurred today and we have officially moved out of our West Coast location. Our testing showed no impact on the gameplay experience, but we expect some of you playing on formerly West Coast servers may see higher ping times. We’ll use the next two weeks to smooth out any kinks and resolve any performance issues encountered.

 

You’ll see the same Servers today that you saw yesterday. They’re just running on new hardware and, some, in different locations. As announced previously the move to the five (5) new Servers will be on Wednesday, November 8, 2017. At that time all Game Servers and the SWTOR website will be down for up to 12 hours. We’ll let you know the actual start time a few days before.

 

Report any specific issues you encounter to Customer Service as we’ve established an escalation process for critical issues. Please be a bit patient with us over the coming weeks as we unite players from a variety of servers and try to make this a smooth and painless process for everyone.

 

Cheers!

 

-Keith--

This is a disappointment to see from being in Australia and we are already suffering longer ping times than most on average I get about 200-250ms but lately and during increased server load it will shoot as high at 500ms when still connected, this is not those situations where you lose connection and waiting half a second is a significant increase.

 

I am sorry Keith it is nice you have reduced your footprint but to what end. Toe further disenfranchise players who have an increased ping time when things are good, let alone when things get bad. I personally find this a further kick in the teeth for Asia Pacific players especially in Australia. How much thought did you put into the current latency already seen in these region, knowing we will get them but understanding the impact on these when those in the US and in Europe do not see these kind of issues. This move I cannot congratulate you on, I am sorry.

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I just want to add. That increasing the ping times has an impact on gameplay. Examples of the fact that you can't invoke as many abilities just because of the time it takes for data to travel the physically distances (of which kinks will not be ironed out as a result), the other is also getting out of area affect damage, you see a circle on the ground, it has already been on the server for about 500ms before you see it, your reaction time, is 70ms, and you move the time travels back to the server, cast time is 1 second, you move out of the way on your screen but in the server's eye, you are still in the circle and you get hit by whatever is coming. THIS directly affect game play. I see this now. Many times I will see a cast of something, move to get out of the way and just purely because of lag and the time for data to travel to and from the server, I get hit, or fail to interrupt.

 

This change and see the issues with ping have gotten me really upset, having stuck around this game spent countless dollars on subs and copious more on cartel coins, and this has just further disappointed me. You truly have Keith and the gang, disappointed me, there is no other way to say or communicate it. Come and have a Cantina in Australia, see what the turn out would be like, this shows the large number of people in this country you have hurt. Then log onto to the game and just play and tell me how you cope with this ping time. But we aren't the only ones the only country affected by this. Is the cost of saving having an additional data centre offset by the potential loss of subs and subsequently CC purchases that will occur because of this change.

 

You have disappointed me you really have.

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You people just screwed over a huge portion of your player base, and you knew about this well in advance. So you just now inform us in some cavalier manner after the fact, as if moving all of the NA servers to the East Coast was some insignificant decision made in afterthought. I and most other people in the APAC/Western regions would completely understand if you made this announcement as a key change in your Roadmap announcement, and just being honest about your reasons for doing so. But it's clear that you have so little respect for your community that you didn't even have the decency to do that.

 

This crew has made some extremely seedy decisions in the past, but this one takes the cake. My server lag tripled overnight, with no explanation as to why until I heard about the move from another player. I was already on the fence about renewing my sub at the end of the month, but this may finally be the straw that broke the camel's back. I highly doubt I'm alone, either. Shame on you, Bioware, and shame on everyone else up the latter that was involved in this asinine decision. You deserve every bit of criticism and income loss for this dogsh*t move, and I hope your branch closes entirely by the year's end for all the dishonesty. Good riddance.

Edited by Trogusaurus
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*reads all the ticked off people who were INSISTING and pushing for server merges, regardless of the concerns of the people who did not want it.*

 

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

I don't get why people keep saying this. But then again, people generally love to be petty and spiteful.

Nobody asked for this, people just want to play with more people and get the most out of their game.

Edited by Eshvara
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Hello. Founding member here, spent hundreds of dollars on this game over the years.

Let me tell you how I feel about this server data center move...

 

 

AARRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!

 

Ive gone from having around 16ms ping to 80ms. The game actually lies to players, stating that you will begin to notice degradation in gameplay at 1 bar (of 4), when many of us can visually see player movement stuttering around 100ms, which is fairly immersion breaking. My ping time to the server has gone up by x5! I'm in California near San Francisco, and have fiber internet. This is horrid, and a back-stab to many of your loyal customers. with no forewarning, or real consideration. Instead a drastic change was done without informing anyone until it was already done to try to prevent what is happening now, the backlash of people who are angry with your decision. After logging in the game I lost my desire to play, and am now seriously considering never playing again despite my investment. Do you understand how big of a deal that is for the continued life of this game and community? Do you realize how this will impact how I (and many others) look at you as a company for the rest of our life?? Some will still play on of course, but for many this anger will be connected to EVERY game you produce.

 

Whoever is in charge of this decision should probably be fired because they have ruined the PR of Bioware. I am connected to many gamers who often want to know what MMOs are fun and viable, well guess what I will tell them about SWTOR and Bioware?

 

Either fix this blunder, or face decades of consequence over this.

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And I want to add that there are many who feel the same as me, but are not represented here because they are not current subscribers, and after this definitely don't want to subscribe solely to complain on the forums. I am lucky that my ping is still below 100, but there are a great many players who are not so fortunate, and regardless the way this was handled was horrible.

 

Plus there's a full blown merger coming. I have many characters on many servers, and bought extra slots to have those characters. When the servers merge, I will effectively be losing character slots/characters, and even legacies potentially, because I don't expect them to be conscious enough to do a good job. It's literally shameful.

Edited by BrightShadow
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Well... this explains why my connection suddenly bounces more than a kid on a trampoline (I wanted to use a different colloquialism but didn't want my post to get deleted). I'll go from full to connection to 1 bar at the drop of a frickin hat. Great job BioWare, and here I was being all optimistic with y'all...
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I have ~60d of sub time remainging, but I unsub'd today. the ping can hit 200 when before it was 25. Obviously west coast players aren't BW's target audience so there's no point in taking west coast money. It's a shame, too, things were just getting good with the ops community we've built, too.
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I don't get why people keep saying this. But then again, people generally love to be petty and spiteful.

Nobody asked for this, people just want to play with more people and get the most out of their game.

 

Mostly they say it because of the things that were said to them when they complained about the server merges. Things like "if you don't like it go play another game" and " Stop arguing about it server merges are happening" and "you lost". That doesn't make the spite any more correct now than it was then but it is understandable.

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  • Dev Post

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

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