Dear APAC Players

[Andryah]

TL;DR my own experience is that the main APAC server (Dalborra) was about 5 times as busy prior to it being shut down, as Harbinger has been for the last week.

 

Re when the APAC servers were shut down:

• this was obviously a business decision to reduce costs (servicing, rack leasing etc) for what was perceived to be too small population to financially support an APAC server
  
• we were told by BW that the merge was to improve player experience, as there were not enough players for group content to pop as quickly as intended (at the time this was true - we did get better pops once we merged with Harbinger)
  
• if memory serves me correctly, the APAC servers were removed before F2P was introduced, so all players represented income (mind you, the Aussie dollar was strong - so maybe that enticed more of us to play as well??)
  
• my own anecdotal evidence of the APAC population is that the largest server (Dalborra) used to average a medium load, with a fleet population of about 200-250 in the evenings. This was before strongholds, so the fleet was not diluted like it is now. (NB the population tanked after BW announced that we would be merged with Harbinger, as people flocked to Harbinger for shorter queues. Pretty much only myself and Gazza the Aussie intern stayed until the end)
  
• the closing of the APAC servers reduced my guild population by some 30-50%, and it never really recovered
  
• I assume the APAC/WC server merge lost at least 30% of the APAC players, based on how many our guild lost
  
• the shorter queues at that stage did compensate, in part, for the slower ping (I jumped from 40ms to 240ms) in terms of gameplay
  
• the current anecdotal evidence is that there are far fewer players on Harbinger now (I have seen fleet as low as 25-40 players) than there were on Dalborra when it was shut down, and Harbinger has not risen above a light server load for a long time
  
• very roughly, the population on Dalborra, that was perceived as unsustainable by BW at the time, could well have been 5 times what Harbinger currently seems to be.
  

 

Caveats:

• I know that my numbers are only based on personal observation, that fleet population is now diluted by strongholds, and that F2P has changed the population as well. I merely present this as my experience to inform the discussion.
  
• I also realise that price structures have changed a lot, and that player numbers are only one aspect of BW's decision making matrix.
  
• Many WC players may be waiting for the dust to settle before trying to play and the population for the last week may be much better than the fleet numbers suggest. Or Harbinger may have had more APAC players than anyone realised, and this is the new population after most of APAC have unsubbed.
  

 

First let me say right up front.... I understand the distance based ping for APAC players from Australia since the last maintenance cycle.. so do not waste time telling me I do not understand.

 

That said.... A number of players from APAC are making claims that the APAC servers were busier then today's Harbinger back when they shut them down. Yet.. readily available information on the internet proves this to be completely wrong:

 

In this very forum.. a nicely consolidated list and discussion about the ACTUAL state of the APAC servers back in 2013 when the decision was made to shut them down and transfer players to US West:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=534412

 

And one, of dozens of trade blogs who reported on it at the time, and the reasons for it: http://news.mmosite.com/content/2013-03-26/bioware_to_close_swtor_asia_pacific_servers.shtml

 

Also, back in 2013 when there was all the vocal complaining in the forum about the sad state of the three launch APAC servers, I actually rolled a character on each of the three servers to see for myself what all the angst was about. And sadly, for whatever reasons.... those three servers were in dire condition due to population attritions (not unlike what we all saw in the US in 2012. Some in Aus in particular were lobbying for the three to be merged into one and remain in APAC... but as can be noted in the above linked information... at that particular time in the life cycle of the game... the studio was unwilling to merge PvP/PvE/RP servers (there was one of each) together to solve the issue. Instead the consolidated them to US west servers.

 

Of course in a perfect world... APAC players would want and would have localized servers. But clearly there is simply not enough business for any MMO other then WoW to actually do localized servers there. SWTOR tried at launch and it failed... so I very much doubt they will retry it.

 

So.. once again.. rage based revisionist history portrayals are derailing fact from fiction about the state of servers in APAC when they were closed. This sort of exaggeration method actually works against any sort of productive discussion about what can be done to help mitigate some of the recent impact as it permits the studio to dismiss the claimants as spreading false information.

 

As for performance differences between west coast and east coast server locations in the US.... the physical distance results in an ping difference of ~ 75ms on a non-obstructed round trip ping test. Now, the larger issue though is that there are different quality backbones across the pacific, and it very much appears that the main backbone from Aus in particular is both congested and older (and therefore more prone to spikes and transient delays) which is beyond the control of any studio to mitigate. Perhaps.. if there were actually enough active players in Aus.... the studio could and would lease a dedicated channel and optimize it for the trans-pacific hub in order to smooth out some of the wide variations in ping being seen by some. But I seriously doubt there are more then a couple thousand active players in all of Aus.

 

As for the ongoing discussion that EA should have continued location of some or all US servers on the west coast... that actually makes practical sense of Aus players who only PvP... but it completely ignores the fact that EA has for many years had a strong server presence in Virginia, particularly for any of their MMO properties as well as some of the other non-MMO games. So given their server infrastructure history, I can understand why they made the decision they did. EA is actually doing a number of things to reduce their total footprint in California... not just closing the SWTOR west coast server locations, but also shuttering a studio as well some office space too. Of course players do not like the fact that a business is in the business to optimize over all efficiency and bottom line by mitigating costs structures that do not make good business sense.

 

APAC response time has always had physical limits driven by distance that impacts ping times. But there are also apparently some notable performance bottlenecks from Aus (compared to some other APAC locations) as well that make the numbers either worse or certainly less stable. But that is largely an "is what it is" reality that cannot be changed without reconstructing the laws of physics or some better infrastructure investment in Aus. That said.. the total net performance loss with the new data centers for APAC players should not exceed +75ms of what they were before the server moves. Anything beyond +75 is actually addressable to some extent by actions taken over the coming weeks by the studio, but there will be issues with hop routes that neither the player (unless they use a VPN) nor the studio can really do anything about. We are all somewhat slaves to the US backbone performance issues that crop up as well as what appears to be a good amount of bad hop performance across the pacific as well. The only thing the studio can really do about this is to lease faster routes from West coast to East coast, and I'm frankly not sure their is business justification for carry such a cost load.

 

Note: This post is for objective information purposes only. I will NOT respond or engage in dialog with anyone looking to personally attack or pick a hyperbole based fight just for the buzz.

Edited October 30, 2017 by Andryah

[ekwalizer]

But when you make a decision like server merges there will be collateral damage. Name conflicts being a clear one.

 

I suspect given the mass exodus following 1.2, the mass exodus during 2.x, the mass exodus of waiting 14 months for a new op between 2 and 3, the mass exodus resulting from the broken promise of "new ops" that did not accompany 4.0 and the mass exodus following 5.0 .... name collisions aren't very likely at this point.

 

I made my current signature block well over a year ago, population has only gone down since then.

 

I wouldn't expect a major population spike following Episode VIII, that traffic is going to go to Battlefront II. If anything has held true in the MMO community over the years, word of mouth makes or breaks a game and this game hasn't been widely popular since before it launched in 2011.

[Tsillah]

Regarding the last part of your post, imo it wasn't 5.0 that got the game to this point. It's partly the natural evolution of mmo's, it's partly the vastly varying expectations of a Star Wars game online, it's partly 4.0, 5.0 6.0 ... it's a huge combination of events and decisions. None of them alone would have driven the game to it's current state,some would have put the stake through SW:TOR's heart far earlier, others would have pushed this far further back. All of the missteps contributed. Just my 2 credits worth, I've been known to be wrong.

 

We haven't had 6.0 yet, that's still in the future, but I also agree it started with 4.0. What they did there was not good for endgame as they misunderstood what people wanted.

 

To me 5.0 is significant though because it's what you should've been the expansion that rectified what 4.0 didn't do right but actually it made it much worse. Had they not done GC the way they did it and had more actual new content on release it might have done the game some good. The KotET story was actually better than KotFE for example.

 

And it seems that the poor decisions haven't stopped yet. I can't discuss datamining but I read something that's already ticking me off again and I'll leave it at that.

[PennyAnn]

Does it really matter? Server merges are here, and now everyone will just have to "suck it up", because that's what the majority wanted. You can protest and campaign all you want now for the people who are going to suffer, but it won't matter one bit. It's too late, and the decision has already been made to please you in your desire for the merges. Whether people have to give up PvP because the latency difference is too great, or have to give up their peaceful gameplay, it looks like we all have to lose a part of our game to suit this 'majority'.

 

It's a damn shame the game is going to lose so many players because people couldn't see what merges meant, all they wanted was a few seconds shaved off their queue time. Ironic that the queue times for PvP will probably actually go up because so many people won't play it with the lag anymore.

 

Three cheers for the "winners".

 

It's precious that you think the player outcry is why they are merging servers.

[MikeTheDuke]

One choice was made, hence why I am willing to believe the reason we haven't really heard anything from anyone on this issue. Financial matters are what drove this shift from a west coast server to a east coast server. The people in the know would have looked at the potential loss of the people from APAC unsubscribing because of the increase in pings to the server and the cost saving of moving the server. One was higher and they went with the one that would net them the most money, hence the move to the east coast. I really would like them to come out and dispute that, but since we have heard nothing other than;

...we know you might see higher ping times but give has a couple of weeks to sort the kinks out....

 

My feeling is, they will monitor the server, find where the server is the reason for the increase in latency on the connection and can potentially fix that, or the data centre provider can, or they can for more bandwidth (if there are restrictions on that). But they are unable to, and they know this, change the number of hops it will take to go from APAC to the east coast server, they cannot limit the latency that is introduced by the routers as the packets are traversing these hops.

 

Services such as WTFast, Battleping and the like help provide a more stable connection as it enables the shortest possible path to the selected server region, thus the potential for there to be a reduction in the number of hops and therefore the potential increase in latency introduced along the path to the server. They smooth out the connection so to speak and provide a more stable ping time across the board, I know I use one.

 

I have provided Keith and customer support with information about the pings, with the spikes in the hopes they can see what was happening. I showed in game ping times in what I was doing, also a video that shows just how an increase in ping (pings) can affect simple things in game like buying schematics from the crafting vendor and the number of times you saw you know that schematic but the schematic hadn't been removed from the UI.

 

I am willing to see what they are going to do, but the lack of communication we have seen from them since they dropped this and the explanation from Eric around their reasoning to not tell us they were moving the servers (which was feeble by the way). I am disappointed by all of this and despite the number of words I have written I am a loss for words as to why Bioware did what they did, I can understand, but that doesn't make it good or right.

[americanaussie]

It's precious that you think the player outcry is why they are merging servers.

 

Exactly my thoughts. They're prepping for as little equipment as possible as the game enters the final stages. It's lost too many players. When I transferred to harb during Dvl, there were hundreds of people on fleet. Now there's barely 50. There used to be heaps in strongholds, now there are usually less than 12. Pops were instantaneous (and not because someone quit a game in progress), now they are not. The loss is shocking. It's a lot. Like seriously a lot. Even the starting planets have 1/3 the population they used to have 1 yr ago.

Edited October 30, 2017 by americanaussie

[DiamondDove]

First let me say right up front.... I understand the distance based ping for APAC players from Australia since the last maintenance cycle.. so do not waste time telling me I do not understand.

 

That said.... A number of players from APAC are making claims that the APAC servers were busier then today's Harbinger back when they shut them down. Yet.. readily available information on the internet proves this to be completely wrong:

 

Snip

 

Note: This post is for objective information purposes only. I will NOT respond or engage in dialog with anyone looking to personally attack or pick a hyperbole based fight just for the buzz.

 

Ah Andryah - I feel privileged to have brought you out of your forum slumber. If you trawl through the posts, you will see one from me wondering where you had gone, and hoping you are OK. Every forum needs a contrarian, and I sense that you enjoy the role

 

Onto more serious matters - thank you for the links. They do not provide numbers, but do portray the issue as it was in 2012/13.

 

I stand by my numbers as what I genuinely recollect before the mass exodus started from Dalborra. I did not play on any other servers, so I cannot make any comparisons with their populations at the time. This also means that the APAC players were expressing great concern about group activities with a fleet population of around 200-250. Many people started to leave before the official BW announcement. I am not sure when you joined APAC, or what population you saw. It did get down to about 10 on Dalborra fleet between the announcement forced merger and the actual date, which was dire indeed.

 

Did I provide a little hyperbole? Maybe . I was not trying to scaremonger, however, but to provide context. I really have seen the Harbinger pub side fleet sitting at 25-50 players each time I have logged in for the last week. I doubt (hope its not, really) that is a true representation of the total player number.

 

Thank you for your considered rebuttal - if you do any have any numbers from that period I would be genuinely interested to see them.

 

PS am I am annoyed APAC customer? yes! I will try to play up until Christmas, and hope that I can find a way to do group content. If not, I will have about 70 baby toons by then to run through the story, which is still playable at 300ms or so.

[fushnchips]

I stand by my numbers as what I genuinely recollect before the mass exodus started from Dalborra. I did not play on any other servers, so I cannot make any comparisons with their populations at the time.

 

Yes once people left with the free transfer system before they closed Dalborra the server was a ghost town because most had already gone to the server they felt was the best I even sent low level toons to all servers in EU, US to spread my legacy since it was free.

[Icykill_]

Yes once people left with the free transfer system before they closed Dalborra the server was a ghost town because most had already gone to the server they felt was the best I even sent low level toons to all servers in EU, US to spread my legacy since it was free.

 

It took about 24 hours to see people start to leave after the announcement it was going to happen... then when they opened the free transfers... the population drop so fast it nearly gave you whip lash... one day it was 200 people on the fleet... the next day it was 80, then 60,... then people stopped logging in

[flavmad]

Exactly my thoughts. They're prepping for as little equipment as possible as the game enters the final stages. It's lost too many players. When I transferred to harb during Dvl, there were hundreds of people on fleet. Now there's barely 50. There used to be heaps in strongholds, now there are usually less than 12. Pops were instantaneous (and not because someone quit a game in progress), now they are not. The loss is shocking. It's a lot. Like seriously a lot. Even the starting planets have 1/3 the population they used to have 1 yr ago.

 

Yeah, I know. It's just that some people thought it would be the best thing ever (the merges), and were cheering it, and now they get to see what's really like. It's not pretty but the game is on it's last legs.

 

I really love star wars and I think there are very good things in the game, especially in vanilla swtor. It's one of the reasons I've always came back. But it's getting unbearable. It's not just the merges, nor just the removal of a physical server, and possibly a playerbase. The classes are getting attroucious balance (take a look at the Classes subforum here to see what I'm talking about), there's barely any new content, and the new content is bland, IMO.

 

TL;DR: the game is dying, we should all start thinking about "moving on".

[PennyAnn]

Lots of RP folks are just using this unexpected, unannounced removal of a west coast server farm to grouse and be sour grapes about server merges in general. We've been talking about it for YEARS, and it's only happening because the game's population has shrunk enough to not warrant the number of servers they have. Yes, we've been telling them this for a loooong time, but they finally put the pen to the paper and reached the magic number that meant they HAD to merge.

 

It was not like the outcry finally reached some epic zenith and they relented - no, this is about money and that's it. I'm sorry that you fear griefing of your RP, but look at it this way - by the time the actual merges happen and no west coast servers or better options are implemented again, you'll have your completely dead server to RP with again. It will be called Satele Shan. No need for RP instances, just transfer there. There won't be anybody left to bother you.

 

These merges are too little too late, and they poured acid on the wound by removing west coast servers such that the only decently populated server that was to be merged into Satele Shan is now dead also. GG, Bioware. GG.

Edited October 31, 2017 by PennyAnn

[Icykill_]

Yeah, I know. It's just that some people thought it would be the best thing ever (the merges), and were cheering it, and now they get to see what's really like. It's not pretty but the game is on it's last legs.

 

I really love star wars and I think there are very good things in the game, especially in vanilla swtor. It's one of the reasons I've always came back. But it's getting unbearable. It's not just the merges, nor just the removal of a physical server, and possibly a playerbase. The classes are getting attroucious balance (take a look at the Classes subforum here to see what I'm talking about), there's barely any new content, and the new content is bland, IMO.

 

TL;DR: the game is dying, we should all start thinking about "moving on".

 

If we had somewhere to go... I think we would have all left by now

[Eli_Porter]

If we had somewhere to go... I think we would have all left by now

 

You have BF2 coming out to satisfy your SW PvP desires. Even with the RNG progression it's still a solid game from what I can tell.

[Icykill_]

You have BF2 coming out to satisfy your SW PvP desires. Even with the RNG progression it's still a solid game from what I can tell.

 

I will never touch another EA game... it’s a real shame that Disney gave them the licence...

Edited November 1, 2017 by Icykill_

[flavmad]

I will never touch another EA game... it’s a real shame that Disney gave them the licence...

 

How about ESO? I hear it's pvp is beautiful (such a shame I can't properly run it on my setup). Or you can go to the most solid choice and go for WoW? I know they don't have lightsabers but at least they have good content.

Edited November 1, 2017 by flavmad

[Icykill_]

How about ESO? I hear it's pvp is beautiful (such a shame I can't properly run it on my setup). Or you can go to the most solid choice and go for WoW? I know they don't have lightsabers but at least they have good content.

 

Played WoW for 9 years before swtor... I tried to go back... but it’s just too child like now after playing swtor

 

I tried ESO and didn’t care for it...

 

I’ve been playing GW2... but I’m not used to the skills yet and pvp is a nightmare when they drop you in with max lvl players and you get killed in 2 secs... so I’ve not been playing the pvp part and I’m getting bored...

 

I had hoped Star Citizen would have been finally launched this year like it was supposed to be... but they are still milking people dry by getting them to pay for alpha testing... people are just so stupid... if they stopped paying those idiots... they may actually launch the game,

[OwenBrooks]

Yeah I'm from Perth as well. 400-600ms ping rarely goes below 400ms. Can't do anything in the game.

 

How did a tracert hard wired to the 4G device go ?

I am not surprised you cannot do anything in the game , your tracert results do indicate an issue.

 

Here is a simple test , let us both run a tracert to a website physically located in perth

 

My tracert from Sydney to Perth is in the spoiler and as expected is around 50ms stable, what does yours look like actually being in Perth to the same website ?

 

 

C:\WINDOWS\system32>tracert http://www.iinet.net.au

 

Tracing route to http://www.iinet.net.au [203.173.50.151]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms GT-AC5300-ABE0 [192.168.1.1]

2 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms ip-103-85-38-4.syd.xi.com.au [103.85.38.4]

3 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms ip-103-85-38-1.syd.xi.com.au [103.85.38.1]

4 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 4739.syd.equinix.com [45.127.172.20]

5 53 ms 52 ms 53 ms ae16.cr1.adl2.on.ii.net [150.101.33.189]

6 53 ms 52 ms 61 ms ae17.cr1.per1.on.ii.net [150.101.33.19]

7 60 ms 52 ms 52 ms po4.ici-osb-core1.per3.on.ii.net [203.59.13.0]

8 53 ms 52 ms 54 ms te2-3-2000.icp-osb-core1.per3.on.ii.net [203.59.13.25]

9 53 ms 53 ms 53 ms http://www.iinet.net.au [203.173.50.151]

 

Trace complete.

 

[Icykill_]

How did a tracert hard wired to the 4G device go ?

I am not surprised you cannot do anything in the game , your tracert results do indicate an issue.

 

Here is a simple test , let us both run a tracert to a website physically located in perth

 

My tracert from Sydney to Perth is in the spoiler and as expected is around 50ms stable, what does yours look like actually being in Perth to the same website ?

 

 

C:\WINDOWS\system32>tracert http://www.iinet.net.au

 

Tracing route to http://www.iinet.net.au [203.173.50.151]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms GT-AC5300-ABE0 [192.168.1.1]

2 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms ip-103-85-38-4.syd.xi.com.au [103.85.38.4]

3 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms ip-103-85-38-1.syd.xi.com.au [103.85.38.1]

4 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 4739.syd.equinix.com [45.127.172.20]

5 53 ms 52 ms 53 ms ae16.cr1.adl2.on.ii.net [150.101.33.189]

6 53 ms 52 ms 61 ms ae17.cr1.per1.on.ii.net [150.101.33.19]

7 60 ms 52 ms 52 ms po4.ici-osb-core1.per3.on.ii.net [203.59.13.0]

8 53 ms 52 ms 54 ms te2-3-2000.icp-osb-core1.per3.on.ii.net [203.59.13.25]

9 53 ms 53 ms 53 ms http://www.iinet.net.au [203.173.50.151]

 

Trace complete.

 

As a comparison to Owen’s in Sydney

My ping from NSW south coast to iinet (203.173.50.151)

72-73ms on fibre

179ms on Telstra 4G (which jumps from 74ms at hop 12 (203.59.13.25) to 179ms at hop13 (203.173.50.151)... which seems to make no sense at all 🙄

[OwenBrooks]

As a comparison to Owen’s in Sydney

My ping from NSW south coast to iinet (203.173.50.151)

72-73ms on fibre

179ms on Telstra 4G (which jumps from 74ms at hop 12 (203.59.13.25) to 179ms at hop13 (203.173.50.151)... which seems to make no sense at all 🙄

 

I have confirmed performance of Optus 4G with some others and it should be stable no different to any other connection type.

eg 4G ping timing between Brisbane and Sydney is about 20ms and stable on tests

 

I am not sure why he has a hard time understanding that consistent high ping fluctuations especially on local hops is an indication of a link issue or worst case ISP congestion.

 

The ping variance will as seen below be all over the place.

 

1 27 ms 2 ms 1 ms homerouter.cpe [192.168.8.1]

2 * * * Request timed out.

3 144 ms 50 ms 144 ms 10.194.36.17

4 158 ms 65 ms 96 ms 10.194.125.2

5 103 ms 63 ms 135 ms 10.194.125.13

 

I do not think he understands I am not trying to debunk his hate at swtor for moving the server at all with this.

Edited November 2, 2017 by OwenBrooks