Consider changing Hosts

Hi,

My suggestion is that you review your hosting arrangements. I will provide a few reason why it is a good idea.

1) Charlotte , when compared to other locations, is not necessarily peered as well as Dallas.
2) Although the game at the moment is not overly ping sensitive, Ping will always be a contentious issue for players outside of the USA.
3) Change host, because your current one is very Mid/East coast focused.
4) If you want to stick with Quickpacket, then look at moving to Chicago. Chicago is better peered than Charlotte, and will provide a better experience for your CA players.
5) Dallas would be a great compromise. It is geographically 'central' for US players, and it only a 20-30 ms hop from LA - Dallas, not too bad a route for players from South America due to cable landings in Florida.
6) For Asia / Australian players, having the servers central provide many more opportunities for good routes.


Side note: Do not underestimate the Brazil factor. I've seen the stats firsthand on MMO players origin countries(IP logins), it goes USA, Canada, Australia/Brazil. Consider having a Portuguese Language version of the game.

I was previously the operations manager of a ping reduction service (50 servers at one time), and these suggestions are based on many hours of choosing server locations to provide 1) better routes 2) reduced ping (via proxy). Yes, TCP for MMOs is a lag creator, and you can ignore the unnecessary TCP header that have no purpose (ack/nodelay) with a smart proxy.

Moving the servers central (DALLAS), evens out the overall experience for users.

For my case (Aus), moving the server to Dallas would reduce the ping from 260+ to a likely 215-230, and if it was LA it would sit around 200ms.

I'm currently playing around with full vpn tunneling to US East (Atlanta - RamNode) to see how the game feels with an optimized route from AUS - ATL then 2-3 hops to the game server (via GTT.net) .

To get an idea of what I am on about; here is a link to a Network Map, and you will see how Charlotte is not really an overly serviced pop in comparison to Dallas.

https://www.gtt.net/us-en/our-network/