Steam Launch v Current Hosting Provider

[Arindor 27]

I was disappointed to hear during Retro's twitch this week that Wurm is not considering changing hosting providers.  For us (my family) who plays from East Coast US (PHL area), which is pretty much as close as possible to the servers from the US, the game is completely unplayable often, and for long periods of time.  Here's tonight's ping result:

 

--- freedom001.wurmonline.com ping statistics ---
76 packets transmitted, 23 received, 69% packet loss, time 76438ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 185.825/187.866/194.502/1.857 ms

 

And if I do a traceroute, I see the issue is again between hetzner and their peering, which from reading other forum posts is a known issue.  I do realize that not everyone in the US uses this data path.  However, I'm on perhaps the largest hosting provider in the US, and geographically closest to the servers on that provider.  Most other US customers will be in an even worse situation than myself.

 

So my question is this:  If you're not planning on fixing this, what is the plan here for the steam launch?  Are you just blindly charging forward hoping that come steam launch there will be no issues?  Or are you happy to bait US players into buying the game, with the hope that not every one of them will request a refund when the game becomes unplayable?  Or just going to hope for subscriptions and stick with the no refund policy for subscriptions?

 

Other games get around such issues by offering geographically diverse servers, and then letting players choose a server that is "nearby".  Wurm doesn't seem to do this though and hosts all servers at this particular third tier provider.  Perhaps there is something in the infrastructure that requires the servers to be on the same provider?  But since Wurm Unlimited has no such requirement, I wonder if offering geographically diverse servers is an option.  If you want to become a "global" game, what is the plan to become global?  Or is the plan to just offer the game globally and let it dwindle down to those that can play the game with the current hosting provider?  If the latter is the case, I hope you're staffing up your support department to deal with the complaints.

[Samool 2,004]

But we are in the middle of switching hosting providers? You must've misunderstood Retrograde on that stream.

We're moving the servers to AWS - the test servers and the Jackal server (not available to the public, but still) are already on AWS. See Keenan's report on the matter:

 

We'll very likely be fully switched over to AWS prior to the Steam launch.

The change is largely due to those common issues with Hetzner that you mention (routing and hardware issues)

[Arindor 27]

I believe I've got it right, but it was just a quick response to a comment on twitch.  I'm glad to hear that a change is in the works - your quote was posted since my last research on the issue, and to be honest, I have not been paying attention to Jackal.  AWS should fix the network issues for many folk, and (obviously) IMO Wurm should actually have this as a milestone prior to launch.  From the thread it looks like you are still testing, so I get that you're not quite ready to announce that yet.

 

But thanks so much for your response!  I am now hopeful!  🙂

[Angelklaine 4,266]

I am East Coast US and have no latency issues or anything like it. What gives?

[Ekcin 2,418]

There is indeed considerable though stable latency when playing from the Americas, or Asia/Pacific. But if latency/lag is spiking, it is either a server, or a routing problem, and rather rarely, a hoster problem (there were a few in the last months though where Hetzner threw up). Those may happen with AWS as well. Friends in the RSA recently suffered from a damaged sea cable on the African coast.

 

If you have troubles with "long pings", check your routes and packets (with traceroute/tracert.exe or similar, or Wireshark). Fairly often, your ISP in the area is the villain.

[Eyesgood 2,121]

I had the same issue last night the OP had.  I also live on the east coast USA.  I tried downloading and installing ProtonVPN.  I chose a USA server for Proton's connection and I was immediately able to launch Wurm for both my mains with no lag, no issues, and great FPS.  Proton is supposed to be free so I hope they don't hit me with a bait-n-switch and try to make me pay to keep using it after the trial, but so far it works well.  However, I consider this a work-around and I hope that moving the servers to AWS will permanently fix this for those of us enduring this frustration.

[Jaz 2,666]

I think the free tier of ProtonVPN will stay free - limited features as there are but if those work for you I doubt they will ditch the free plan. I'm using their free secure email for years and now I've even moved my freelancer business email to them on a paid subscription (hopefully they gather enough income to keep the free tiers up on the long run  )