europe vs us

[smiley]

Hi, I'm not convinced US servers will be better, heres a little something to read, if you haven't done so allready: ( from WHA

Quote:
Iain: Our relationship with EA Mythic for WAR is designed around the premise that EU customers will get a service that is equal or better than the US operation. Both we and EA Mythic know that this is going to be a huge game and no-one wants to see the European side (which is likely to be the biggest market) get undersold.

* We are looking at extra value that we can add for all of our customers although there will be limits to that due to the fact that we aren't the developers and our rights are necessarily restricted in that regard. Having said that (and to slightly avoid the question as a lot of the plans are still very speculative) we do intend to focus on providing the highest quality community support that we can. I'm not going to say that EA Mythic's will be rubbish by comparison but we intend to be 100% focussed on the European community and that's probably not something that EA Mythic could do if they were running it themselves.
* You'll be able to contact support in a variety of different ways. There will be 24/7 ingame support, there will be a knowledgebase and FAQs so that you can help yourself and there will be webform based support for people who can't access the game for any reason. Again, the design is that EU and US players will have the same options and services available to them.
* Once again, this comes back to the central mantra of 'everything they have, you will have'. It's an important part of our arrangement with EA Mythic that development is done in parallel with localisation so that we can launch simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. For a lot of reasons, that wasn't possible with DAoC and so both parties wanted to avoid a similar situation arising in WAR. You have to remember that DAoC was not originally designed to be localised, it was written to be an English only game by developers that had little experience with localised projects. WAR on the other hand is specifically designed to make localisation as streamlined as possible.

Ok those of you with ADD can stop reading now, the rest is probably going to end up as a bullet point on WHA or somewhere.

* Basically a lot has changed since DAoC launched. We aren't the same company, EA Mythic aren't the same company, the MMO market has moved along and - as spinks points out - players have different expectations these days. Back in the day we did what most of the other MMO providers did, we relied on word of mouth advertising with targetted marketing pushes for expansions and other major milestones. WoW changed the rules and by the time that lesson had been learnt, DAoC was an older game that was difficult to get journalists and editors excited about. Three or four times a year I'd go across to the UK to demonstrate the game to the press and gush about whatever the selling point du jour was but a lot of editors wouldn't touch MMOs that weren't WoW at that point.
* There were a lot of things that we wanted to do for DAoC that we couldn't do for various reasons - legal reasons, things to do with our contract with Mythic, things to do with French labour laws, things to do with the fact that we were a tiny part of a very large company and so forth. When we talked to EA Mythic about partnering up for WAR, we made sure that all of those restrictions were removed. Six years is a long time and GOA is a very different company now to what we were when we started running DAoC in Europe.

If you want an idea of how seriously we at GOA are taking the success of WAR in Europe consider this:

We started a new company based in Ireland (to get around some of the restrictions I mentioned above) just to run WAR. A lot of us who were in Paris sold our houses and uprooted our lives to go to Dublin and make WAR work properly. We didn't just say "We'll do better", we spent a lot of money and put a lot of people to a lot of trouble to make sure that we can do better - before we have a single subscriber and before we've made a single Euro from the game.

allso i think everything you do, will be a tiny bit slower because the info has to travel longer to reach us servers, but I'm not sure..

[Hoonius]

Hi, I'm not convinced US servers will be better, heres a little something to read, if you haven't done so allready: (
allso i think everything you do, will be a tiny bit slower because the info has to travel longer to reach us servers, but I'm not sure..

All we really have to base it on is past performance. They do say people learn from their mistakes however

Let's weigh up the past performance Pro's and Con's and see how it looks

US Version (from a European POV as that's where most of us live)

Pros

• Higher populations on most servers
• Integrated payment gateway
• Quicker game updates
• Minimal waits for GM tickets
• Better client code performance

Cons

• Bad raid timings due to timezone differences

Euro Version
Pros

• Excellent raid timings

Cons

• Sub-standard Flash-based payment gateway
• Non-tested database backup
• Non-existant GM support
• Poor routing to Paris causing major lag
• Extended delay for game patches
• Low population on 'our' server

I joined Prydwen shortly after SI and played both versions for a few years each and can honestly say that i had less lag connecting to US servers than Euro ones. That said, i play mainly casters and i'm told lag is more an issue with tanks so maybe that was laggy.

Alt-Tab was practically impossible on the Euro TOA client for me, whereas the same PC would run the US one with ease doing whatever on an alt-tab.

Ever tried to get a quest de-bugged on Prydwen? my advice is don't as the GM used to take ages to sort out the problems, despite the fact there were significantly less players to make petitions. That's if you even have a char with any kind of template/items/artifacts after the big bad database wipe. It's old news, i know, but important news nonetheless.

The Raid times, however, were perfect for European players, (love you Arun, Venoid, Peat :¬) ) and that is a big issue with the timezones which can't be helped when playing US versions. However, the service from Mythic was so significantly better that the European population on US servers was, eventually, so big that we were making our own Raids at Euro friendly times instead

Makes little odds either way. It'll be way easier to go to a store and buy a euro version then it is to order the US version and get that sent over so that's where I see the euro version taking off, just through ease of getting the keys and software. It's a little more effort to get US software and that will put a lot of people off

[Genedril]

Iain = Iain C = Requiel per chance??? The one that seemed to be on a one man mission to destroy the UK cluster by lying through his teeth to his customers & also imposing his own ruleset (not even copied by the rest of GOA let alone Mythic as well) upon said servers??? On the bright side they may sort out the backups this time around . That man turned me from a staunch GOA defender to someone that wouldn't touch the company with a bargepole as long as he was employed by them. The sad thing is having met him at one of the meets he was a pretty sound chap.

Hoonius has it spot on - the only thing that a GOA server has going for it on past performance is the raids & if everyone's on the US that wont matter either.

For the record the response from GOA's servers was slower than from the US servers to the UK for me. Distance is rarely the deciding factor in network performance on the internet.

[smiley]

yeah ian is requiel

cool if theres no lag on Us, i thought there would be

And its true one can only look at past performances,, which was poor. I too waited too long sometimes with rightnow, waited for hours for ingame support, and sometimes with no success and so on,

however I'm pretty sure they said they will patch games same day on EU and US servers, leaving only russia and other servers (if there are others) with delay.

and with EA fundings, I believe them when they talk about significant in game support improvments.


anyway I just thought it would be an interesting read

[Genedril]

I'm not arguing with you here Smiley as pre-Req I couldn't fault GOA. Some people complained but they did the best with what they had (license agreements meant they couldn't offer the same level of support as Mythic).

Requiel destroyed my faith in them though; started with the Pryd DB crash & his never ending rubbish - followed on through the OT 'we're trying to sort it' debacle - continued through the 'we'll employ whatever ruleset I see fit on my server' - finished off by the 'we're doing all we can to save the EU servers'.

If it had been any one of those & some honest appraisals had been done then I'd have taken it as part of the ongoing saga's of MMO's (they're never easy tbh). The mendacity that ran through all of the above means I have no time for GOA at all. Whether or not WAR floats my boat (current reports of it means it doesn't) was secondary to helping GOA. It would have been cool to see where WAR is at before release even if I don't like the sound of it but I just can't go anywhere near the EU product.

Though my guild got accepted to the WAR beta I turned down a place as I've no interest in ever being involved with any company that employs someone like that ever again.

{edit} lest I sound as anti-GOA as Xest I'd like to point out that I've said pre-Req GOA did the best I think they could have done. I even said that having met Req at a met he seemed ok. That said I've many friends who I really like & could never work with nor ask them to do work for me .

[Downy]

It's pretty meh,i'm willing to give them a change and will probably hold abit before buying War so i can actually see did they improve.

[*b*]

as far as i was aware wasn't WAR ment to be hosted in ireland ?

[Xest]

Basically a lot has changed since DAoC launched. We aren't the same company, EA Mythic aren't the same company, the MMO market has moved along and - as spinks points out - players have different expectations these days.

It's stuff like this that bothers me, not the same company since DAoC launched? 5 to 6 years on since DAoC launched GOA was still awful, what we need to know is if they've changed in the last 2 years or so not the last 7 years because for 5 of those seven years they were still atrociously bad.

Perhaps more bothering is the fact they suggest players have different expectations these days - sorry? I'm sure players always wanted stable servers, patches to be on time with the US version and so on and so forth. Certainly just about every other MMO at the time was able to offer these things, EU DAoC was an anomally in terms of specifically poor service not the norm. I certainly never saw the level of faults with games like Planetside and even OU that pre-dates DAoC by a fair amount that I did with EU DAoC.

I think GOAs biggest problem is simply that they cried wolf too often, they told us so many times things would change, things would get better, but they didn't, with the likes of the database crash and the handling of it it's arguable that things in fact even got worse.

It's nice that they've setup in Ireland, that they've invested in a new infrastructure and so forth, but here's the real question - have they invested in new staff and got rid of a lot of the old? The database corruption occured according to GOA themselves from a failed fan on a server leading to a CPU overheating and in turn leading to corruption, a hardware fault which is easily detectable and a resulting problem which is easily preventable. The server hack was down to a GM allowing his passwords to be leaked and many other faults were down to poor planning. So this is the problem then, it's not that GOA has been unlucky and suffered unfortunate events, it's that the company was very clearly rife with incompetence, the majority of the faults that occured come down to sheer incompetence, nothing more and nothing less. If the staff haven't changed or learnt how to offer a proper service then the problems will persist, because with all the money in the world invested in infrastructure you still can't always fix incompetence with anything other than a change in staff. I'm not even opposed to going back to GOA anymore, but I can only do so providing guarantees are in place and as I've said all along, as any IT company might if GOA really believes they're capable of delivering the service and want to convince us so I challenge them, provide an SLA as part of the terms of service- give us a guaranteed uptime as any web hosting company might and like many other internet services that have enough faith in their company and as such provide an SLA, guarantee some form of compensation if you fail to meet your SLA. If GOA's changed, if it can guarantee a set amount of uptime, if it can guarantee support response times, if it can guarantee patches on time with the US version then it should have no fear of offering an SLA because it should have no fear of ever needing to pay out said compensation. If GOA can't give that kind of written guarantee then they clearly don't have faith deep down in their ability to offer the service they're saying they can offer. As an aside, the compensation doesn't necessarily even have to be monetary, it could be a free months service for each and any failure in reaching their SLA for example. It's up to GOA to win our confidence back and if they can't put their money where their mouth is then that's cause for concern and no real effort has been made other than a bit of cheap talk to try and prove they've improved.

Regarding connection to US servers, lag etc. it really is a thing of the past. We live in a world of broadband and much better transatlantic links and capacity than ever before. That's not to say that you can't detect differences in pings, of course you can but combined with modern network programming techniques the few ms difference is meaningless in real terms. Ironically, without meaning to slag GOA off too much again, in DAoC due to GOA's poor infrastructure the US servers actually used to offer lower ping times to European residents than the European servers themselves did- that's not necessarily going to hold true with WAR of course if GOA really have improved as they say.

[Belisar]

there will be limits to that due to the fact that we aren't the developers and our rights are necessarily restricted in that regard.

When I began my DAoC life I was happy with what we had. As I got to know it better and began reading the various forums around I suddenly realised how much of an issue the above quote had become.

GOA were representing the European community, a damn big community but this quote came out a lot when it came to taking on board thoughts and suggestions from those that were playing the game. It was a hell of an excuse.

It makes no difference whether it was a genuine reason or a load of rubbish, the way the agreement worked was that GOA had limited ability to change the game and Mythic were working towards what suited their servers best.

The fact that this quote is still there worries me about the Euro servers. At the beginning I am sure it will make no difference, just as it did not when DAoC started. But I wonder how much of a difference it will make going forwards. Will things that suit the Euro servers not be implemented because GOA have a limited ability to influence Mythic's thinking ? If so will the US servers be better ?

Xest makes some good points. A change of location does not mean GOA have changed. Data loss, poor ping rates, slow responses to issues and a real lack of understanding for how the wider community felt on certain RvR issues were not the result of the location but of the staff and systems.

Ultimately the enjoyment of this game, as with most others, will be greatly affected by the community and friends. I guess that will be my deciding factor.

[Hoonius]

as far as i was aware wasn't WAR ment to be hosted in ireland ?

Well they started a new company in Ireland to get around the more restricitve elements of French working laws. The company is still based in france though so i'm not sure what good it'll be, aside from having it all under the same timezone

GOA press releases are still from their PAris headquarters

http://www.war-europe.com/#/pressreleas ... =3&lang=en