After dealing with Server Lag spikes for a couple of years, I did some research and found out that the EA servers used for all SWTOR servers are located in California. I may be the only one that didn't know this, however it does seem a bit biased to those people who live closer to the west coast. As I live in Georgia, it takes me 12 hops to reach the servers. With an average of 179ms, they've done a decent job optimizing the data packet transfers, but it can reach as high as 1000+ms, which is where my connection drops. I'm not sure how the European servers are even playable. I may be mistaken about how the data is sent/received and maybe I'm missing some further optimization done on the nodes in between locations, but that being said, I think the east coast players would benefit from having a server closer to us, such as Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, or Atlanta (*cough cough, my own bias, *cough). At the very least it feels nice to vent my frustrations here, where someone might see them, and say "Yeah that makes sense." Do I actually think anything will come from this rant? No, of course not, EA and BioWare are massive companies with millions of dollars, and they will do everything in their power to continue making millions of dollars, and avoid costs/expenditures and from a business point of view I totally agree with their model. As a customer though I do feel that they could do more to listen to our concerns, and maybe even address a few of them. Not really asking for a solution, but acknowledgment of the issue would be nice.
TL;DR:
Servers are all located in California, I would like more equitable distribution.
- The Student of Citadel
P.S. I don't enjoy lagging out.