Since leaving the US and moving to Australia last year, I've had to get used to a lot of differences between the two countries that I really didn't know about before I packed up: sitting in the front seat next to the driver when you get into a cab, being fourteen hours into the future compared to the rest of my family, the way the entirety of the Commonwealth pronounces fillet like "fill-it." Chief among my culture shock is how comparatively poor internet connectivity is here against what I was used to in the United States. Overall speeds tend to be pretty lackluster and latency is a huge issue, especially when playing online games and MMOGs.
Playing World of Warcraft, for example, my ping is routinely in the 500ms – 700ms range; I know it's a good day if I'm down around 400ms. Thankfully the game is not punishing on those with connections approaching dial-up as far as the network is concerned, though some moments certainly test my stress level. I'm also connecting from one of the better ADSL 2+ lines you can get, right in the center of Sydney, so I shudder to think how difficult it is to play for those out in the suburbs.
While WoW has "Oceanic" servers, in practice this consists of nothing more than the in-game clock being set to Australian Eastern time. The servers are still physically located in California, so it does nothing for those of us outside of the country.
Right before Aion opened the door to their head start, they announced that the game would launch with an Oceanic server of its own. My initial excitement about that hit the "no point" phase as soon as I realized it was Oceanic in name only– just like WoW, the physical boxes would still be in the US.
The explanation behind this practice tends to be "there isn't enough of a market for us to invest in an Oceanic datacenter." While I wasn't able to find any clear demographics as far as WoW is concerned, other (smaller) MMOGs have launched with dedicated servers for Australian players, so someone has to believe there's a market. In the case of Aion this slight is even more ridiculous: the game itself has been running in Asia for the last year+ and it would be easy to set up the Australian boxes in the same datacenters they use to serve Korea, which would give a better playing experience than connecting to California.
It would be nice if future MMOG launches followed the Warhammer Online approach to Oceanic servers instead of the WoW one, but only time will tell on that. I nevertheless created my Aion priest on the official unofficial Oceanic server when the head start began; but with all the queue problems plaguing others I guess I should be happy I managed to sign in at all!
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