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The history of issues with Oceanic Region connectivity
Why start off in Singapore?
We picked Singapore originally because it was fairly central to a lot of countries with players. We had hoped to provide a good experience for most players in the region. Singapore also had the best selection of hosts who could meet our technical needs. It seemed like a good place to establish a presence in the region and provide a better play experience. There were a couple of caveats that we were prepared for, but ultimately weren't able to mitigate fully.
Routing is not always something you can control
When it comes to the Internet, your traffic doesn't always follow the shortest path possible. This is due to a massive list of reasons that are sometimes technical, sometimes physical, sometimes business related, and sometimes even political. Nearly none of these factors are something we can control or change directly ourselves. As such, we have to work with others to try to make things better, or do our best to work around problems.
One of the problems we've been consistently facing for Australian players is a routing issue. Australia currently has two exit points for Internet connectivity to the rest of the world: Sydney (East Coast) and Perth (West Coast). Traffic leaving from Sydney will generally have poor connectivity into Asian networks, but traffic leaving via Perth is usually much better. Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will send traffic out of Australia via Sydney and there's nothing at all we can do to change that. Some providers will use the Perth link. This East-West problem is the root cause of the connectivity issues players in Australia had when using our servers based out of Singapore. We had worked and worked to try and fix this issue, but in the end we decided we had to try something different.
Moving to Australia
We made a strategic decision to move the servers to Sydney, Australia, which is closer to the problem area. Our goal was to see if moving the servers closer to the players experiencing the biggest issues would help them out while not causing serious issues for the rest of the players who use this region.
It didn't work out as we had hoped. That Internet routing issue I described above reared it's ugly head again, but this time it affected everyone else but Australia. Asian players got routed through California, or sometimes even Chicago somehow. EU players always ended up crossing two oceans. NA players took a longer than expected route. We had fixed one problem at the cost of making it far worse for everyone else. We once again tried to work with our provider to see if we could get things working better. In the end, we decided that the time it would take to get things fixed could be too long. We needed to find something better.
Why have we chosen Perth?
We had looked for a provider in Perth that could meet our technical needs in the past, but weren't able to find one. Perth is an important server location candidate for us. It's in Australia, and therefore mostly eliminates the East-West routing issue. It's directly connected to Singapore, and so players in Asia should have a solid route (again, assuming their ISPs take it.) This would let us put a server in a location that would service both parts of the region well. Maybe not provide either AU or SEA with the best performance, but provide a consistent one.
We spent some time recently making some changes to our technical needs so that we could be a bit more flexible with whom we could choose as a hosting provider. With the slightly relaxed criteria, we were able to find a hosting provider in Perth that looks like it will do that job. That server is what you will be testing out.
But what happens if the SeaMeWe-3 cable gets wrecked again?
That cable seems like it is made out of shark bait and attracts boat anchors. If it happens then SEA players are going to have a worse play experience while it's being repaired. If it's broken for a long time we will look into alternative options. The good news is that the Australia Singapore Cable submarine fiber cable is coming online in a few months which should reduce the risks of this scenario causing issues.
What should I expect from this server?
Here are the rough ping times you should get with this server:
- Australia/New Zealand/South East Asia: under 150ms
- Rest of Asia: under 200ms
- West Coast North America: under 250ms
- East Coast North America: under 300ms
- Europe: under 300ms
If you get a result that is above these numbers please follow the steps in the FAQ section for reporting results so we can take a look.
FAQ
Why not add a 4th region?
We get asked this frequently, and the answer is simply "there are a variety of reasons why we can't at this time."
What about North American and European players wanting to use the Oceanic Server?
We do take this into consideration, and do work to try and provide an adequate play experience for all players to any regional server. However, at some points the limits of geography and physics end up applying. If you are in these regions and are getting very poor connectivity. We do want to hear from you. I'm going to be looking for outliers and obvious bad routes and will work to improve them. My reach for a lot of this is limited, but I will make my best effort to do so.
What's the best way to report results if I think there's a problem?
Ping times alone are nowhere near diagnostic enough. We need to know more about the route your traffic takes to us. The traceroute tool is decent for providing routes, but there is a more modern tool you can use instead: MTR. MTR stands for Multiple Trace Route and it provides more detailed looks at all the hops your traffic takes. You can download it for Windows at: http://winmtr.net/. You can use the following IP address for MTR testing: 45.121.208.130
Once you have generated an MTR for us, please send it to support along with your IP address via email at technical@mwomercs.com instead of posting it here. I might miss it here but our Customer Service team will definitely forward anything that requires my attention on to me.
You got <technical detail> wrong! It actually works like this...
I know. I'm keeping it simple for the sake of brevity. I am also aware that there are lots of small details about how everything works in the region that I might not be fully up to speed on. If you'd like to have a more detailed conversation about the issues in this region please feel free to discuss it in the thread or open a PM conversation with me.
Can we see more detailed data?
We have shared all the data we are able to share at this time. We are not able to share additional details for a variety of reasons.
You don't post anymore. Do you still like to post?
Yes.
How many times did you edit this post to fix typos and mistakes?
