I understand blizzard needs servers in their regions to serve the customers of that region and if their sever was based in america their png or lag or whatever would be up the waaaahhhzzoo!!!
SO im just wondering does this have a potential to bring us closer to just having a game with the whole world on it without individual servers for specific regions? or will there always need to be this divide?
Sorry if this is poorly written, I am just generally interested in the " next step " for tech / games.
EDIT: My name jeff 420 <3
For one thing… Language (globally speaking) would be an issue. I am sure someone is chuckling at the idea of a wayward American creating a human on a random server and reading this:
Надеюсь, ты пристегнул ремень, молодой | 3-6 (<класс>), потому что здесь, в Североземье, есть над чем поработать.
И я не имею в виду сельское хозяйство.
Стражам Штормграда очень тяжело сохранять здесь мир, ведь так много из нас в далеких странах и так много угроз приближается. И поэтому мы привлекаем на помощь всех, кто хочет защитить свой дом. И их союз.
(first human quest, but in russian)
instead of:
I hope you strapped your belt on tight, young , because there is work to do here in Northshire.
And I don’t mean farming.
The Stormwind guards are hard pressed to keep the peace here, with so many of us in distant lands and so many threats pressing close. And so we’re enlisting the aid of anyone willing to defend their home. And their alliance.
But the reality is that such things do play an important part. There is something to be said about having regional locks on server access. Not to mention, the issues that they mentioned before server mergers became an option such as existing player names, guilds… etc.
Also, on an unofficial note: I like having the region locks for the rankings and WFR etc. It gives local regions something to cheer for, and I think that benefits the playerbase writ large.
Latency actually isn’t all that bad between well-interconnected continents. I was getting about 120-160ms playing on NA EST realms back when I lived in Tokyo for a couple of years. That’s good enough for all but the most competitive play.
That said, Starlink does have potential to improve latency for long-distance connections. Its final design interconnects each satellite with lasers, creating more direct and sometimes physically shorter paths from point A to point B in cases where the equivalent ground link is convoluted. Additionally, light travels faster in a vacuum than it does in glass (fiberoptic cable), so in some cases Starlink will best undersea cables and the like in terms of latency.
That’s down the road a few years though, most of the Starlink satellites currently in orbit are not equipped with aforementioned laser interconnect — at the moment only two test satellites have it. The good news is that tests of that feature are looking good so far. Since these satellites are cheap to produce and launch (SpaceX can currently launch 58 per batch and in the coming years, will be able to launch 400 in a batch), they can be burnt up in the atmosphere and replaced with upgraded models every 2-3 years, so we can probably expect full laser interconnect within 3-5 years.