Homecoming Team News (May 8th): Pack your bags, we're going to Canada!

[GM Tempest]

Hello, everyone!

 

I just wanted to say, first of all, wow.

 

This community has absolutely blown me away, the support we received in our donation drive was so far beyond my wildest dreams! We reached our goal in less than 20 minutes!!!

 

If that isn't impressive, I don't know what is. You all have made me, and the rest of the team absolutely overjoyed at your support. We honestly, truly, openly thank you for your donations, and for all of the well-wishes of those who wanted to but missed the window. When we open them up again, we'll announce it like before!

 

In fact, you guys donated so quickly that our PayPal account was flagged for review! We’re working to get this resolved right now, and as soon as it is we’re going to get started on the move. In the future, something a little more robust than PayPal may be necessary. Stay tuned, we'll keep you updated on that front - we've got some options in mind, so we'll have some solutions soon.

 

OVH Move

We'll be moving to OVH soon, likely this weekend. This move is a big one, and we're expecting a transition time of around 6 hours. I do have some good news though, for you NA folk - the servers are going from The Netherlands to Canada! This should reduce latency a good bit. Additionally, we will be running at max-capacity full time after the move, instead of spinning up and down mapservers on demand, which should make for a more smooth experience for everyone involved!

 

Once we've moved to OVH and settled in, we're going to look at regular maintenance windows, which should give you definite heads-up ahead of time for when we need to restart the servers or some such thing in order to do maintenance, patches, updates, whatever might be necessary that would impact your gameplay! We'll let you know when we have these things settled in.

[DJBlack71]

I had no idea there were donations, I would have gladly given if I knew, I did not see it in the announcements.

 

[_NOPE_]

I thought the Netherlands were chosen due to their more "liberal" policies in terms of permitting this kind of server that might be "illegal" in some countries, and its distances from both the US and Korea. Doesn't moving your servers to Canada put you both physically and legally closer to NCSoft America, and the legal dangers they pose? I mean, I appreciate a greater ping time as much as the next player, but I want to make sure Homecoming sticks around for the long term!

[BlueDrache]

Patreon and PayPal are, IMO, bad choices because of their recent anti-free-speech issues.  SubscribeStar may be something to look into.

 

 

That being said, Even in the Netherlands, I've never noticed a latency problem.  Only when the servers were hammered did it seem to get a little wonky.

 

 

Thank y'all for what you do!  It's much appreciated.

[Andreah]

City of Heroes is very forgiving for modest latency. It's been doing very well from me also, from the center of the US.

 

I'm curious which city(ies) in Canada the new providers' data centers are located?

[Misguidance]

As a non-American user (UK here), I hope the move will not make things juddery for us over here. ;)

 

But this is all good news!! Great work guys!!

[Maleus79]

Hi may i ask how badly this will affect EU ppls now, when server moving to Canada what will be our ping to game now? Thanks.

[Apparition]

City of Heroes is very forgiving for modest latency. It's been doing very well from me also, from the center of the US.

 

I'm curious which city(ies) in Canada the new providers' data centers are located?

 

OVH's Canadian datacenter is near Montreal.

[jkwak]

As a non-American user (UK here), I hope the move will not make things juddery for us over here. ;)

+1

yeah could be problematic

[ZeroHeat]

Great news on the donation front, not so good news on the servers being located in Canada soon. Hopefully it doesn't feel as bad as Champions online did ping wise from UK to US servers!

[Luxinus]

Given I've been playing out of Canada, Alberta in particular, and noticed latency issues only when the servers have been under very heavy load I doubt you should notice any major issue. Most of the time I haven't even felt lag of any real amount.

[Maleus79]

Little worried on servers moving to Canada as this will affected EU ppl now (i know before this NA ppl were affected), but best would find some solution for NA an EU ppl separately maybe, so everyone is satisfied in some way.

[Balince]

That's awesome news! Will this effect AE at all? I'm a huge AE user normally and would love for it to come back.

[beelzebram]

Little worried on servers moving to Canada as this will affected EU ppl now (i know before this NA ppl were affected), but best would find some solution for NA an EU ppl separately maybe, so everyone is satisfied in some way.

 

Unfortunately the only way to be certain that neither side suffers from latency would be to have multiple servers setup in both EU and CA, the downside to this would be with out the proper architecture in place they would not be able to link it so you could play with your American/EU friends unless you logged in to the opposite servers serving their side of the pond.

 

[SinergyX]

So I basicly donated to get a worse ping? Bummer :(

[thejustchad]

i know before this NA ppl were affected

 

See that's where you're wrong mate, it didn't affect me at all, the only lag I ever felt was felt as result of overloaded servers, not ping, this isn't an FPS, people used to play this on dialup back in the day <56k! :)

[The Fifth Horseman]

Hi may i ask how badly this will affect EU ppls now, when server moving to Canada what will be our ping to game now? Thanks.

Rough expectation based on what I've seen in Mechwarrior Online - ping to EU servers in the 50-100 range, ping to US servers typically in the 150-250 range. Not as big an issue as it might seem, COH doesn't depend heavily on reaction speed and manual dexterity.

[lunafish]

As others have said, I wouldn't worry about latency.  I play from New Zealand, and have only ever noticed any issues when the servers were under heavy load.

[DarkSynopsis]

As others have said, I wouldn't worry about latency.  I play from New Zealand, and have only ever noticed any issues when the servers were under heavy load.

 

Same, CoH is quite forgiving when it comes to latency, according to the game I sit at around 500 or at least last night and played fine, dunno why 500 though... normally like 350 is my max to like UK, in theory Canada should at least be better ping for NZ :)

[Smuggnat]

For the people concerned about ping, I currently play from Canada (Western) and I can say ping is not an issue. My average ping in-game right now is between 250-300 and you can not notice any discernible delay, with the exception of very high server load (which likely everyone experiences). I don't see this move impacting the EU players experience at all. As others have been stating.

[autographedcat]

See that's where you're wrong mate, it didn't affect me at all, the only lag I ever felt was felt as result of overloaded servers, not ping, this isn't an FPS, people used to play this on dialup back in the day <56k! :)

 

Its true.  I did play an entire weekend on a dialup modem, when my DSL was down. 

 

To be fair, we *did* refer to the experience as "City of Slideshows", but the only time it was a huge problem was when there were a lot of power effects going off at once in a big team fight.  You could still do a lot of normal missions with a fair bit of smoothness.

 

Anyway, that was more a bandwidth problem than a ping issue.  I've been playing Homecoming from the west coast of the US, which is about as far away from the servers as you can get without getting wet, and I've had zero network-related issues, only server load issues.

 

Great job, Devs!  Thanks so much for bringing us home.

[tsalaroth]

To echo autographedcat , I'm currently in the US and have not really seen any significant latency - at least, not anything that I didn't experience (arguably, more often) with the old NCSoft servers. In fact, on my newer hardware, it runs so much better that it's basically a new game for me.

 

Not that it matters (and I mean that!) - but are there any metrics on where, regionally, the donations came from?  Perhaps some day that can guide where to place additional servers that target a region, if demand calls for it.

 

I would really like how you're managing this.  I'm hoping this project enables a community of open source MMOs some day - a community like you've been creating has a way of keeping something like this alive for a very, very long time.

 

If the NPO (once it is an NPO) would accept it, I'd be willing to donate my time; I have experience with multi-continental (banking) and high-traffic (wagering) digital services. You can do a lot with $6k/mo, and that you're doing this WITH $6k/mo tells me you already have a number of experts working on this and probably don't need my help - just know you have it if you ever do.  I'll also be donating, if I can ever get in to an open donation window, lol.

 

Thanks, guys! And keep up the great work!

 

[Dark Friar]

I'm connecting from South Korea and I haven't had any major issues at all to the Netherlands... Sure Canada will be a bit better for me, but I doubt it'll make that much of a difference.

Congratz on the goal. As others have said, this isn't a FPS, milliseconds in CoH don't spell death for players.

[Primantis]

I thought the Netherlands were chosen due to their more "liberal" policies in terms of permitting this kind of server that might be "illegal" in some countries, and its distances from both the US and Korea. Doesn't moving your servers to Canada put you both physically and legally closer to NCSoft America, and the legal dangers they pose? I mean, I appreciate a greater ping time as much as the next player, but I want to make sure Homecoming sticks around for the long term!

 

Take this with a grain of salt, as I am not a Lawyer and this is all just info I pulled from reddit.

 

Apparently there's a specific Canadian province that has some really funky internet privacy laws that pretty much makes it a safe haven for all things private-server related. Something about the parent company having to prove they handled personal data 'up to spec' before they can do anything. Which.. given the potential user data leak; is going to be a catastrophe for NCSoft from the word "Go"

 

Sadly I cannot find the 'source' (but I read it on multiple occasions, and even once about Epic Games an account hacking incident)  nor do I remember the specific province, but maybe this can serve to give you a little peace of mind. Homecoming seems to know what they're doing. There's got to be a reason they chose Canada, and that specific host etc.

 

 

Also, as a US user I have not experienced any detrimental ping outside of rubber banding once in awhile. Unless the servers were about to croak. So I suspect Ping for the EU users should be fine.

[Burnt Toast]

All these people going all hyperbolic about latency/ping who are not even listening to current US players who say it is not an issue currently unless the servers are hammered and then..and only then... are there random ping issues. You guys act like all of a sudden you will be seconds behind the action LOL. Quit being so dramatic.

 

These boards are getting to be more and more like the original boards where people will complain at just about anything. Most people didn't even know where the servers were located in relation to where they live, but now it's all "OH NO MY PING!" hahaha. You honestly think it will be that bad when the majority of the players are from the US and haven't complained about these issues except when the servers are bright red and queued? Stop complaining about stuff that has not been an issue and shouldn't be one... and instead just enjoy the frickin game.