Oceanic Soapbox: Local Servers

oceanic-soap-box

Nothing gets a community of gamers more passionate than an argument over game servers and where they are located. Using Star Wars: The Old Republic as an example, there was huge lobbying for local servers, which were finally delivered just under a year ago. Since then, those servers have struggled population-wise, and even with the move to F2P there are still issues and BioWare have the local servers under active review as to ways to deal with the issue.

Based on that, I thought it’d be interesting to have a debate on whether local servers are a deal-breaker or not for you with an MMO or other online game? For me, I’ve not found it a huge issue across my WoW, SC2, GW2 and SWTOR experiences, although I still get more lag than I’d like with The Secret World.

What about you? Also, what games do you play that are in need of local servers if that’s a big thing for you?

Comments

  1. While local servers are a nice touch, and it is great to play with a decent ping. However i doubt it is ever going to be a worhwhile investment for most companies, we simply do not have the gaming population to make it cost effective for them.

    More often than not the companies would need to monitor the popularity of their games here and then introduce local servers at a later time. Which is rarely going to work because it divides guilds and splits established players from their friends in other regions.

    I honestly couldn’t care less what server i play on so long as my friends are on it as well, i maintain a presence on the EU SWToR servers because i have friends there and happily put up with the lag

  2. Having Oceanic servers is nice, very nice. Love the low latency, 39ms from NZ aint too shabby. If they closed down the servers for down here, would I leave? No. Another game will, but not moving to a US located server.