Why Not Merge NA and EU?

[meatgrindr]

   This subject came up in another thread, and I didn't want to derail.  But I have been curious, as the population numbers are an excuse for why certain things do or don't happen in this game.  What would be the reasons to NOT merge?  Technical, politics, greed, other?  Sorry if the answer is obvious, I just don't know.

[Wulf_Ace]

 Hamster would not be able to take all that.

Tonight CB server died on EU, people couldn't play clan battles.

[Navalpride33]

51 minutes ago, meatgrindr said:

   This subject came up in another thread, and I didn't want to derail.  But I have been curious, as the population numbers are an excuse for why certain things do or don't happen in this game.  What would be the reasons to NOT merge?  Technical, politics, greed, other?  Sorry if the answer is obvious, I just don't know.

Basic answer... The structure of each server region is well complicated. 

What do I mean about the "structure"? It means

• Web support for each server regions
  • Remember EU NA and RU regions, use a different web address to contact services
    • These services include Customer Support.
• Payment and billing would be affected.
  • Every region even in NA, the prices are going to be different. With a merger, you might not like the Euro prices for ships for what EU server player play converted to the US dollar.
• Layoffs of workers
  • OR relocation

For the players... It would mean, transferring a lot of accounts to either NA or EU domain.. Which if you trust WG to do anything correct... Expect some lost ships or other commodity.

IMO.. I dont think they're purposely using population is the cause more like the scapegoat. Mainly, bad development and worst in game mechanics maybe more if the issue.

Any game can adapt for any population.. IF a game has bad mechanics... It will not hold any population for a long time.

[MidnightPhoenix07]

Technical is probably the single biggest reason, for the same two reasons most online games tend to have different regional servers. Lower latency and better maintenance times.

 

In a game like WoWS, the slightly higher ping from NA to an EU server might not be game breaking as long as you have a stable connection, but it can still be noticeable. In one of my old clans, Saturday clan battles used to be on the EU time slot for the handful of CB regulars that were in EU or didn't want to play late into the evening every session. Going from ~35-40 ms ping to NA up to 100-150 ms ping to the EU servers was getting to the point where it felt a little different, but when you got a ping spike it was more noticeable.

 

There's also the practical benefit for maintenance schedules that comes from separate servers and therefore separate and staggered prime times. If you need to schedule a 2-3 hour server downtime for maintenance, it's a lot easier to do with NA and EU servers (and prime times) being completely separate. For example, NA probably doesn't have many people playing from 4-7 am eastern time, so that's the best time to take the server offline to affect the fewest number of players. Prime time for Alaska and Hawaii would end up being cut short, as would people on the west coast that play later than prime time, but that's likely to be the time with the fewest players online. 

But if NA and EU were on the same server, that 4-7 am eastern downtime means the UK would be down from 9-12 and central Europe from 10-1. Still before most of the players are online, but you're going to have more players affected on EU now. On the flip side, scheduling it for the "best" downtime for EU (4-7 am CET) means the eastern US is down from 10 pm to 1 am and the west coast from 7 to 10 pm (right in the middle of prime time for most of the NA server).

 

At this point, it would also be impractical to combine multiple servers onto one server. They'd probably keep the new "combined" server in EU since that's the larger region by player number (or at least it was at one point, but I assume it still is), but simply transferring an entire server's worth of accounts will take a lot of time to do and cost a lot of money in the process. And since the only way to guarantee you're copying over all of the data and not missing anything added after the transfer process starts, every account being moved has to be locked until the transfer is complete. If WG uses the existing EU servers, they might be able to keep playing during the server combination process, but every NA account would be locked for likely several weeks. If they go to new server infrastructure, then both servers would be locked. That's a great way to upset your playerbase.

[Aethervox]

24 minutes ago, MidnightPhoenix07 said:

cost a lot of money

This is why Wedgie, likely, won't do this.  😁

[Wolfswetpaws]

2 hours ago, meatgrindr said:

   This subject came up in another thread, and I didn't want to derail.  But I have been curious, as the population numbers are an excuse for why certain things do or don't happen in this game.  What would be the reasons to NOT merge?  Technical, politics, greed, other?  Sorry if the answer is obvious, I just don't know.

Technical.
Internet lag over longer distances.

Even a the "speed of light" it takes fractions of a second for data-packets to travel, be processed and repeat the process again and again between the player's computers and the game server(s).
Increasing the distance between the players and the servers will cause an increase in the travel and processing time of data packets.
This could cause situations which involve ping/lag times of over 1,000 milliseconds and disconnects from the game (which aren't the player's fault, per se).
 

[Guest]

probbly slow down the game , load in time and updates 

[Volron]

As someone pointed out, hamsters would melt trying to keep that powered.  Ping would be an issue overall.  Where would you put the servers to give both sides the best ping?  EU has a hell of a lot more folk if I were to guess, so priority would probably be given to them.

Either way, I think it would be interesting.  I'd love to see how our EU friends handle Op's personally.

Edited July 29, 2024 by Volron

[meatgrindr]

    Okay, thanks for the informative responses.  Naively, I thought we could simply combine in actual games without some of those other issues.

[Volron]

It can be easy to overlook, despite it staring us in the face.  I've done it, hell I still do it every now and again.

 

Didn't hurt to bring it up though!

[HogHammer]

Currently, the one and only "consolidated" server for battles is for players in the "protected mode" of play. There, with NA and EU accounts, I had little trouble playing, and everything worked as intended.  I found any lag to be insignificant.  However, real players versus bots averaged only about 15-20 percent at most.  So, if there were any issues with having full teams of "real" players, it is impossible to judge.

I play a regular (second) account on EU from North America, and I have no issues. My ping ranges from 80 to 110 on average, and the game itself can handle that relatively well.  

The only reason I could see any merge of the servers would purely be an economic issue, which I would assume WG has already established.  For example, if NA numbers reach a certain level, a merge of servers could be implemented.  I really don't see that happening anytime soon, even with the current NA server population.  What that magic number would be is anyone's guess.

I will add that if anyone assumed or thought this would improve matchmaking, it does not. Having an approximately two-and-a-half times larger player population on EU servers, I still run into the exact same issues—frequently being up-tiered (2+) and players frankly doing some crazy things.   The bigger issue is the distribution of the tiers players selected for battle.  WG posted several years ago that tier 10 was the most popular tier played.  I believe that would still hold true for today in the current game's environment.  With fewer players playing T5 to T7, chances are that due to overall ship tier distribution being queued up in-game by players and time limits imposed by WG, you will be up-tiered regardless of player population at any given time.  

I've discussed this with Hapa_Fodder on several occasions regarding playing on EU, and we have come to pretty much the same conclusion.  

[Type_93]

Ewww.  Merge with stinky  YouRoPeeAns? No wai!   
 

 

jk. A super merged sever would be fine so long as ping and queue times were reasonable. 

[thornzero]

22 minutes ago, Type_93 said:

Ewww.  Merge with stinky  YouRoPeeAns? No wai!   
 

 

jk. A super merged sever would be fine so long as ping and queue times were reasonable. 

I often thought the english were responsible for  the moniker you're a peons.

[Admiral_Karasu]

Would this server be located somewhere at halfway? That would make the ping times fair-ish for everyone.

[Arcus_Aesopi]

On 7/28/2024 at 5:34 PM, meatgrindr said:

   This subject came up in another thread, and I didn't want to derail.  But I have been curious, as the population numbers are an excuse for why certain things do or don't happen in this game.  What would be the reasons to NOT merge?  Technical, politics, greed, other?  Sorry if the answer is obvious, I just don't know.

NO!   Because they talk funny... (works for either side of the pond 🙂 )

[Wolfswetpaws]

1 minute ago, Arcus_Aesopi said:

NO!   Because they talk funny... (works for either side of the pond 🙂 )

You work in the comedy business?  😉 

[Arcus_Aesopi]

Just now, Wolfswetpaws said:

You work in the comedy business?  😉 

No, but I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express...

[ArIskandir]

26 minutes ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

Would this server be located somewhere at halfway? That would make the ping times fair-ish for everyone.

As far as I understand, the idea they (WG) were considering was more of a 'pooling' players together than a proper server merge. This means, each server is 'home team' in its own prime time and others servers act as 'visitors' during their 'off hours'. 

[Wolfswetpaws]

23 minutes ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

Would this server be located somewhere at halfway? That would make the ping times fair-ish for everyone.

Yeah, they could re-commission the Habakkuk ice-carrier to use as the server-farm in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.  🙂 

[meatgrindr]

25 minutes ago, ArIskandir said:

As far as I understand, the idea they (WG) were considering was more of a 'pooling' players together than a proper server merge. This means, each server is 'home team' in its own prime time and others servers act as 'visitors' during their 'off hours'. 

  This is more of what I was thinking.  Have our differences of currency, support, websites, etc. remain, but pooling of the players for gameplay.  Using the term "merge" was probably not accurate.

[Jakob Knight]

I would also say a merger isn't needed at this point, so why ask for trouble if you don't need to?  The difference in active timezones would be a factor in preventing much change in each community, and I haven't seen any difficulty in getting a match.  

 

A merger would have several costs associated with it, and I don't see any benefit from doing such a project right now.

 

 

 

 

[SunkCostFallacy]

We know that they have the capacity and knowledge how to do it ... the test server worked pretty well before I stopped participating, so unless WG have dropped the bundle they should be able to handle it OK.

I imagine that there would be other issues that the test server doesn't provide for, but in terms of combined gameplay it handles things pretty well.

[UnderTheRadarAgain]

11 hours ago, HogHammer said:

Currently, the one and only "consolidated" server for battles is for players in the "protected mode" of play. There, with NA and EU accounts, I had little trouble playing, and everything worked as intended.  I found any lag to be insignificant.  However, real players versus bots averaged only about 15-20 percent at most.  So, if there were any issues with having full teams of "real" players, it is impossible to judge.

 

I found out (by playing) that the unified server also places veteran players in it when you take a low tier ship into co-op. T1 to T4 inclusive. My SEA account goes from 35 to 50 ms ping to 180 to 270 ms ping on the unified server. I had to increase my aiming lead more than usual to account for the increase in ping.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

Would this server be located somewhere at halfway? That would make the ping times fair-ish for everyone.

iceland or greenland perhaps . atleast its cooler there to stop the servers from over heating 

 

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Arcus_Aesopi said:

No, but I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express...

close enough