Best Server Location For Player Traffic

[Edge100x]

I may have done the misinterpreting. I thought he was talking about vehicle respawn timers in the BF4 beta, which I know some hosts have reduced inappropriately.

[Cain]

John. Just looking at NFO servers Chicago and Atlanta keep rising to the top.

Questions please:

1) Do you have more servers running the BF4 Beta in Chicago, or an equal number in NYC?

2) Has the Atlanta datacenter gotten better, or are Chicago and NYC still the best datacenters??

Thanks!!

[FAST]

Dallas has a great backbone and it is centralized as well.

[Trick]

Yea i was talking about BF3 instant spawn and have seen many bf4 server with it. Kinda Surprised when they are out there already.

[Edge100x]

Cain, we have more BF4 servers running in Chicago right now than other locations, yes. It's possible that Atlanta rises to the top for you because your personal ping to it is low -- I'm not sure why else it would. All of our locations use low-latency Internap bandwidth and are very good in terms of performance.

[Cain]

Thank you for the reply, but I never said Atlanta rose to the top (for me).

To better frame my question, I remember when I was getting my CSGO server, you told me the best data-centers were in NYC and Chicago, and as I recall that Atlanta was not a primary data-center like NYC or Chicago, thus servers would likely not be as busy there.

I have noticed that the Atlanta BF4 BETA servers have been very busy, much busier than NYC servers actually for 64 players.

So my question was:
2) Has the Atlanta datacenter gotten better, or are Chicago and NYC still the best datacenters??

Thanks!

[kraze]

Thank you for the reply, but I never said Atlanta rose to the top (for me).

To better frame my question, I remember when I was getting my CSGO server, you told me the best data-centers were in NYC and Chicago, and as I recall that Atlanta was not a primary data-center like NYC or Chicago, thus servers would likely not be as busy there.

I have noticed that the Atlanta BF4 BETA servers have been very busy, much busier than NYC servers actually for 64 players.

So my question was:
2) Has the Atlanta datacenter gotten better, or are Chicago and NYC still the best datacenters??

Thanks!

Atlanta has never been a "bad location", all of our locations are good. It does have a smaller capacity than Chicago and NYC but that's just because it's a small location and the cost wouldn't be justified. Many users choose to go with Chicago or NYC due to the routing benefits, people find that they ping better to Chicago than they would to Atlanta.

BF4 is a pretty big game and with a much smaller list of RSP's I imagine people are just packing servers

[Edge100x]

I would not say that Atlanta is better or worse than other locations overall. It doesn't have higher- or lower-performance bandwidth or hardware than the others, for instance.

Players choose to play on certain servers based on a variety of factors, including whether their friends play in a server, whether the admins in a server are friendly, whether a server has players who speak their language or have other common ground, how full a server is when they're looking to play, and their individual latency to a server. These factors, in turn, are influenced my many others, such as how central a server is to major population centers, how many other servers are at the location competing for the same players, and so on. The discussion here has been revolving around whether a certain location would offer better prospects for attracting player traffic to a new BF4 server throughout the day, thus facilitating the startup of a server without an established community nexus at that location, and we've been considering these factors as we talk about that scenario.

[maester]

So im still kinda confused after reading all of the posts? Is Atlanta or Chicago better for foreign traffic for the US?

[kraze]

So im still kinda confused after reading all of the posts? Is Atlanta or Chicago better for foreign traffic for the US?

New York would be the best location for oversea players, such as ones located in Brazil or towards Germany. Obviously our Frankfurt location would be the best for those NYC would be the next best choice.

[Edge100x]

I like to recommend:

Chicago for building US-Canada communities
Dallas for US-Mexico communities
NYC for North America-EU communities
LA/SJ/Seattle for North America-Asia communities
LA/SJ for North America/Australasia communities
Atlanta/NYC for North America/South America communities
Frankfurt for EU/Asia communities

For communities with a more specific nexus, such as those in the Northwest, you should of course just go for the closest city .

[FlyingMongoose]

NYC gets Southeast Canada and Quebec quite a bit as well.

[Edge100x]

Yep, and Seattle gets Vancouver/southwest Canada quite well.

Latency is mostly based on distance, when there's good peering in the chosen city. Our cities are all peering-dense, and Internap bandwidth fills in the gaps.

[Froz3nTundra]

I'd like to add a 3rd 70 player server out west to accommodate the Asian and Aussie crowds, which would be best, SJ or LA? Personally I ping better to SJ from here in MT (52ms vs 79ms atm), but LA has better capacity of 10000 Mbps vs 1000 Mbps for SJ, thanks.

[soja]

The only time location capacity would come into play is to mitigate ddos attacks. If any location was anywhere near capacity i would think Nfo would upgrade accordingly.

Sj doesn't seem like a very popular location for Nfo, so the chances of it getting ddos regularly are low.