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We had an Oceanian server on EA launch, but sadly due to this region size, we were unable to get it populated. The truth is, you can only get one Australian player per +- 50 other players.
Which means that when we have 300 players from Europe/America logged in, we will have only 10-15 Australian players same time.
As our game is MMORPG, it's very, very hard to make the game fun enough and balanced in the case when there are 15 people online on the server - that led to players being unhappy, not finding other players on their game session or being invaded by other server players a lot.
We have decided to find the closest host possible to Australia, but which can also bring Asian players to play together with them - and we have chosen Singapore.
Same time, we did our best, to make game playable with 150-200 ping - because we know that most Australians will have this kind of ping.
Now, we have a Dukla server - which is targeted for both Australian and Asian people, and thanks to that it has people to play with always online, our in-game special events like "Valley of Death" or "State of War" are starting three times a day - to make sure we cover as much as possible time zones, for example for Australian players.
I would like to add, that all of our servers are region based, so, for example, we have one server for Europe and Russia, Asia and Australia, North America and Canada and entire South America. It means, that average ping of our player varies around 100 - and so Australian players can play us the game and be great players, even tho they have a bit higher ping.
Also, we are making official tournaments from time to time on different servers, many time when we were making it on an American server, a player from Europe won it - and backward, American players won European tournament - even tho they were playing with 250 ping.
When we are balancing our game, we are trying to make an absolute minimal time (for example from start attacking to deal damage) of average human reaction + 250ms, which means that players with higher ping still have chances to be competitive.
Of course, there are still things to tweak up, sometimes some things might bug up on higher ping on very specific cases - but we are on Early Access for the reason.
I hope this will be a fine reply to you.
Hope to see you in-game.
If you put an Australian Server sticker or tag on a game it will get our attention, but lazy, greedy companies just throw us onto ♥♥♥♥♥♥ american or european servers with 200 ping that means we can't dodge ♥♥♥♥ and max out at half the DPS of local players, meaning that the MMO Aussie crowd shrinks even more. Just look at the EVE scene in Australia where the game is designed with high ping in mind, even today that game has a huge following here.
Which is exactly the opposite of being lazy and greedy - we would really, really want to have those AU players come and help us make the game. But when we had the server just for them, it was totally empty, leading to all of them leaving. Now, when we have Singapore server and they are playing with people across Asia having ping 100-150 most of the times, and we are designing our game in the way they can enjoy it - much more AU players are playing than before.
As for a server in singapore, that only works for people on the western side of Australia where the gaming population is the smallest, you see on the east cost where we all mainly live, the connection to singapore is unstable, it's not about ping, but packet loss, so it's actually better for us to connect to the US and sit at 220-300 ping and just never be able to compete properly, because the majority of online games like this boil down to PVP for the endgame content and you just cannot block and dodge with that high a ping or that much packet loss.
I know you have to play the role of a dev and pretend to care about our little island the size of texas, but it just sucks that we'll never get the same love because we just don't offer enough profit to make a good sales pitch to a boardroom, your game looks fun, I wish I could play it, I really do.
The thing is, there is a shortage of online games for Australians to play, so a good game with good content and regular updates that don't just add microtransations could do really well here, keep in mind most of my frustration is at the industry trend not just the individuals that follow the trend, I've wanted to put time into so many great games only to find out they are unplayable from where I live. I've tried tunnelling programs to help, waited for private servers once the game is dead being hosted by die hard Aussie fans for many decade old mmo's, like most of us have to. It's just a shame I can't enjoy games like this in their heyday.
One last thing, the defence that a server fought another server and the one with high ping won may sound good at first, but that means nothing, I enjoyed the game Planetside 2 years ago and for that whole time we fought 300 vs 300 and won every time with massive ping disadvantage against servers that didn't, we won because we wanted it a hell of a lot more, it wasn't because the game was forgiving to ping, it was because we fought harder. I imagine the same is true for the tournament you're talking about.
What I mean - you are trying to force something which our Australian players actually denied, they wanted to play with other players - and while Planetside 2 years ago had 30 000 concurrent online players years ago it might have 300 concurrent Australian players, but for 98% of Steam games, having less than 1000 concurrent players it means it would have about 10-20 of players online. Once more - we had AU server for a year and those numbers never exceeded them.
Now, when they have people to play with the numbers of AU players are higher.
Of course, having a server in AU would be cost-effective - as AU players pay for the games twice as much as Chinese players for example due to Steam regional pricing - and as numbers of AU players are low, we wouldn't need a top-notch machine to handle the numbers.
But, it would be a bad decision and w already been there, people would jump in and be unhappy because they won't have enough people play with - if that was for the first year, there's no reason it would change.
Only happy people would be people who are not having the game at all (like you) or those who would jump in, see that they have 50 pings less, and quit after a few hours of not finding people to enjoy content with - as our game shines most on the battles between players.
We are really choosing the best thing for AU players, if we would be greedy, we would actually keep that server on and don't care.
Btw. you should be able to ping our server to check latency and timeouts on your side if you want: 52.187.188.132 we have been picking the one which gave best results for our community players. Of course, it won't be perfect for everyone.