When playing in a cross-regional group (e.g. AU + EU + US East), the server region is auto-selected for the party host.
This can result in sub-optimal play experience for other people in the group. It is much more noticeable when three regions are involved as 2 players are subjected to longer latency.
It would be awesome if the party host could:
select a different server region manually based on their own ping; or
view server region latencies for each player in the group and manually select a server region which provides best current latency for the group.
Thanks for the great game ā letās make it greater
I understand if you are firmly against giving server selection control to the players to avoid an unbalanced load on the servers or whatever other reasons you have. An alternative to the manual selection would be a button in the party interface, something like āfind the servers with the best average latency.ā It has to be optional, though; there will be cases when one userās latency is more important, especially when the āaverageā latency is unplayable for one of the players. But from the userās point of view, manual server selection would be best.
This does bring up a strong reason to have manual selection. Iām in West Virginia and if Iām playing with a friend in L.A. the best server for us would be Central U.S. but thereās nothing we can do to make that happen.
As Iāve said, manual selection would be very nice for us, but I understand why EHG might not want to cede control over the server selection. If they have full control, they can do elastic load balancing not solely based on the ping and userās perception of what the best server is. That is, they might move you to a service that has higher ping, but less load. Even if itās not implemented atm, having full control keeps the option open. Whatever their reasons, I just know from my personal experience that a far-flung party was no fun and quite confusing to your average player who is not a network engineer.
@sickpython Have I missed a comment from EHG to the effect of it not being planned?
Youāve twice posted with an apparent belief such an option is likely to never arrive, which strikes me as strange if youāre basing that entirely on whether it is already available. Weāre talking about multiplayer not yet available to the majority of this early access gameās community. Itās obviously a WIP, and manual server selection is a QoL feature which is fairly easy to add later. It wonāt be one of the first things they work on.
You might be right, and I might be overthinking. But, as I developer myself, I would have been reluctant to give users this power over the infrastructure. I think, if EHG engineers wanted to give it, adding a listbox with server selection would have been just a handful of man hours.
This is why MP is useless for me, ill never have less than 250ms, sometimes as high as 350ms. game is still playable but unless im using my party members as minions its a bad experience, I have PvPād on Souls games and I have to put in 3-4x effort to kill someone due to desync
When occasionally I join a group in PoE its pretty awful, there is one gateway Frankfurt I routinely get packet loss on for 3 years, US server isnt that bad but the only saving grace is PoE has 2 netcodes Predictive and Lockstep, Lockstep is out of the question if you dont have sub 100ms
I didnāt see this post, but if confirms my intuition. Itās a big decision to let the players to load balance the servers. Perhaps things would have been different if there were hundreds of thousands of us and youād have enough entropy. But even then, it would not be as good as a proper load-balancing algorithm, or even a possibility of having one in the future. Meanwhile, something has to be done for far-flung parties. I think a button to find the best servers for the entire party as I suggested, is a good compromise.
I dont really play with others much at all but as a rundown most games I do play; you play on the hosts server, so in say PoE you will get 6 players 3 from EU 2 from US and 1 from Australia, the EU (host) will have 30-90MS as the EU players, US players connecting to EU prob about 110 and I will have 350 connecting to EU
Now I can say ask them to play on Australian servers so I get 56ms and they all get 250-350m but thats unfair to them and now theres no reason to group with me
This is the basic way all online games work if you live in the southern hemisphere
With the server being based solely on party host, I am definitely incentivised to play with people closer to me geographically and avoid playing with those further afield.
Unfortunately, that does limit the available player pool (particularly if language is a consideration)
I play PoE a lot and we have a very geographically diverse guild. PoE does allow manual server selection. When we do want to play together on my atlas, I often connect to London to which I have an ok connection and so do others. There is often no hope for the Aussies and Kiwis to play with us.
Exactly. When I played D3 years ago there was 3 Servers NA/EU/Asia on the menu you have āJoin gameā if you click that the game prioritized Australians/Oceanic but were invisible (cant see games) only way to play with US players is to form a party but you had no way to play naturally with them. The game region locked you but didnt tell youā¦ due to sheer numbers US have better quality players to play with. You dont want to always be carrying 3 strangers around
I joined Quin69s guild Juice to be able to play with psychos so I could level my gems, the only way I could play was forming group in chat
Ive lagged out of countless PoE rotations as the host is in Frankfurt and the connection is just hypershit
Poe Servers, Washington isnt normally as bad from memory. Casual 500 ping to South Africa
So you can see why not hyped for MP infact it makes everything worse for someone like me
Short of some ftl shenanigans, thereās not much that can be done with respect to the lightspeed nature of telecoms. Even if it were a direct path around the Earthās surface. 6,371km radius 2pir gives a distance of 20,000 km from Aus to the UK, ish, which at 299,792 km/sec is 0.0668s in 1 direction or 0.133s round trip, so the absolute minimum ping the universe will allow an Aussie based on the non-existant direct path from oneside of the planet to the other is 133 ms. Thatās ignoring any routing (increases distance), the signal being converted from light to electrons (which would be both non-instantaneous and drastically lower the signal travel speed) and any ānetwork managementā (deliberately adding in a pause) or things generally being clogged up at any point in the journey or bbeing sent on a weird-arse route.
