Currently we have US (Central), US (West), US (East), Finland, Australia, Japan, and Singapore worlds.
My goal with hosting is accessibility. Players deserve reasonable connectivity regardless of where they live.
I know some players would prefer if we had only 2 worlds, but that isn’t an option.
Here’s some info:
The current Australian datacenter has had some issues recently which may prompt switching providers. I’ll have to research providers and regions there again, soon.
I had to stop the Russia server earlier this year, wasn’t able to continue that (I wasn’t funding it). We’re missing a second EU offering.
We have 3 US regions because North America is our largest user base, but my budget could be reallocated if there were more important areas to cover.
Cloudflare acts as our DDoS protection and unfortunately they DDoS us with intermittent disconnects! Some players are affected with constant reconnects, some never experience a thing. It isn’t a server-side issue – no problem with the hardware/network/code. There’s no fix that keeps DDoS protection, because with anyone else that gets expensive for the amount of worlds we have.
Game balance can be impacted by having too few or too many worlds.
I’m asking you for your input, what demand for regions do you have? Any thoughts or questions?
As US East Coast player I feel covered in terms of needs for servers. I do at times get those quick frequent disconnects. Somedays one random force log. But overall no complaints tbh.
I’m glad the objective is to have more game worlds. I’ve played Open RSC since 2018 and it is legit one game server and extremely annoying and makes certain content impossible w/ griefing and competition.
Also nice to have more game worlds so I don’t have to look at some peoples’ bad fashionscape
I exclusively played on the Japanese servers and I’m from central US. They were always low pop and I rarely had an issue. Down the road at KQ, DKs, and Jad because of the occasional 2-3 second DC I’ll play a US server but for everything else never had a problem. I play mostly mobile and I’m not always on wi-fi and it runs fine. Those DCs also never fully kick me so I remain in combat, continue to cut trees, fish spots, etc …so it really is negligible.
I’m happy with the amount of worlds right now for the amount of players playing.
I don’t mind the servers right now, I have Fibre Broadband and very rarely does the WiFi drop or lag when I’m playing. I think I had it saying “Connection to the Server is lost, attempting to re-establish…” once or twice on the US server (East), but it was barely noticeable. Not like the old days of Dial-Up when it would lag something terrible.
I live in the UK by the way and my Fibre tops out at 67 Mbps so I don’t really notice any Ping difference as such to European servers. I know not everyone has super fast Broadband, so I support adding more European servers if others log into them, I don’t want to be the only one logging in!
We have pretty spoiled ping options. Like most users have better first and second options than for OSRS or what they ever had on real RS. - That’s not historical!!!
There can’t be too many Iceland users that would benefit from an England server or something. UK to Finland is pretty low ping.
The world list of 7 feels fine for shop and monster competition.
I don’t know how everything is set up on the back end but you could have another american server that’s not ddos protected. The theory is it won’t dc/rc unless someone gets mad instead of cloudfare ddosing us.
The only region with significant osrs or rs3 players that we dont have covered is central and south america. If hosting is a problem you can always buy a Miami server which is how LoL first solved it before getting their brazil server and how Rs3 currently handles it. For whatever reason the osrs miami server is limited to only world400 since it doesnt have the special ddos protection. But you’re the one with the data pazaz… do we have central or south american players?
mpbs doesn’t affect ping. it’s just the routes your ISP chooses to get you to the destination. you can have 1000 up/down and have terrible ping if your isp chooses to route you from UK to USA to AUS to Finland. And sometimes they do do stupid stuff like that which we’ve seen for osrs players and sometimes it’s jagex’s anti ddos system causing the rerouting
Well like I said, I remember how bad it was using Dial-Up back in 2003 when I first started playing RuneScape and the lag was awful. I would hold off doing quests that required you to fight, just in case it lagged and I died during one of the frequent disconnections.
Ever since I first got Broadband it was night and day difference the experience in game, I could actually fight and not get disconnected randomly. It was usually on the way to somewhere that I would get booted from the server, which is better than being in combat!
My ISP is Vodafone and I rarely have a slow connection to any website or online game, especially on Xbox Live. My previous ISP was awful and was glad to finally leave them!
We do have players in Brazil and other nearby countries. They don’t seem to care about ping and will connect to any world. They mostly follow their friends!
We had more Central/South American players early in the server’s history when clans were paying their OSRS vennies for gold or account services. They were caught and dealt with. Now players from those areas is much lower but still present… and there is also the possibility new players from there try it because they see representation.
Also if it wasn’t clear, the ones left are real players enjoying the game
Of course I have a soft spot for UK players, but UK always scared me away from the legal side. I don’t want to open a world there for it to get me put into trouble because it’s competing on their front door either.
EU I could do.
FYI the f2p resource consumption is so low that they aren’t separate hosts, they piggyback off the same host as their members counterpart. It’s not as easy to do 2x members worlds.
