Regional servers: what can we do to help the people who play in the various regions of the world have a better experience? Is regional servers the answer, or are we going towards something different?
TL;DRRegions already exist and more shards get deployed where player numbers reach critical mass; the region map is being revisited after hosting changes, but no changes are promised.
Well, I don't know in this case exactly what they're asking for, but let's talk about regions. We already have regions. When you play the game, you can pick one of the global availability regions that we service. Obviously, North America is one. Europe is one. We have East Asia, Australia. I forget the other ones, but I think we have another one. Typically, we look at user data, and if an area reaches critical mass at some point, then it's worth it to deploy shards there and have shards hosted in that region. We do it between US and EU. Obviously, they share our common backend, so your inventory system is hosted in one central area, but then the actual game servers you're playing on, for latency reasons, are going to be closer to your area. We are revisiting our region distribution for a couple of reasons. Without naming any details here, we're in the process of doing some pretty large migrations in how we host the game. Even if it's a bit transparent, there is a lot of change happening there. And so we are revisiting our region map at the moment. But typically, the way that we've done this is we look at player data, and if we reach critical mass in an area, then it's worth it to start deploying some shards there. But it needs to be more than one, because deploying one shard in one area is problematic: there are cases where a shard goes into trouble for some reason, and before a hotfix is actually deployed, that shard is no longer usable. So it needs a critical mass, a proper cluster size, to be able to get there.
And the short version of that is you're currently having conversations about where...
Yeah, we're looking at that, because we've done some changes. So we have access to more regions than we used to. So we're looking at that. But I can't promise any changes. Again, it's completely based on players using the service.