Developer quotes[]
Here is my guess.
1) It depends on what company you are working with
2) Time zone of the company you are working with, working off the 9 hour time difference even when you obviously have 24 hour support for servers is a pain
3) For deployment reasons even the best servers on the west coast will still go to the east coast before heading to europe unless its going via a Sat link so for patching and whatnot it is better to have them there.
4) You want to have as few datacenters as possible to unify your support so problems can be quickly addressed.
I've played demo versions vs Norwegian servers a lot over the past few years and don't think West Coast to East Coast is going to be a big issue. Theres a lot more logistics to Data Centers besides simply ping.
Forums, 12th November 2007 (Athelan) [1]
That's our US office, where much of our QA and Customer Service work is based. The servers arent hosted there.
The Anarchy Online servers are based in New York, however that doesnt mean that the Age of Conan ones will be there. For Age of Conan we plan on having multiple datacenters around the world.
The game will most likely be playable on any, but we will probably recommend that you play on the servers closest to your location to ensure the best online experience. Whilst we will be striving to make the game as playable as possible from 'anywhere' it is pretty safe to assume that you will get better performance from the servers closest to your geographical location. We also havent finalised our plans in regard of the different territories in terms of questions like 'can europeans play on american servers?'. There are several factors in that kind of decision that havent all come together yet and will be made closer to launch.
Forums, 26th May 2006 (Silirrion)
As has been confirmed a couple of times we will be running many smaller dimensions rather then a single large dimensions. That won't be changing as it is core to the way that everything is designed.
We havent finalised the peak number of concurrent users that we will host on a single server yet, but certainly something between 1500 and 2500 will probably be a good educated estimate, but it might be slightly higher, like I said it isnt set yet,and probably wont be until we get closer to launch.
Forums, 29th April 2006 (Silirrion)
I believe we have stated it before but we have some completely new netcode for scaling lots of players in an area and a few other tricks up our sleeves. We as a team are aware that pushing the envelope of action oriented gameplay is also going to push the envelope of MMO performance.
Forums, 7th December 2005(Athelan)
As for servers, again we havent announced or plans for server hosting as yet, but the plan is to have localised servers for at least europe, the US and asia.
Forums, 20th November 2005 (Silirrion)
I posted in another thread we have not stated that we will have 1500 people per server, current Anarchy Online technology can easily handle many many times this so there would be no reason why Conan could not. That being said we may shoot for 1500-2000 concurrent users which means people online at once, this will mean many more accounts per server and probably a bit higher numbers during "peak" hours.
Forums, 10th October 2005 (Athelan)
Our server technology is all created in-house. We have used very few licensed / sponsored modules, and not more than about one percent of the total server code base. One of the things that we are pushing to a new technological level with Conan, we think, is the load balancing system. With this, the level of detail for updates around you is defined by load. The more people or monsters around you, the more focused the updates you get will be. You get most updates from the monsters you are fighting, the people in your team, etc. This enables us to control the frame rate on the server and the client - making it scale much better with the dynamic load changes. This also allows us to let the players see really, really far when the server frame rate is good or when you are at certain lookout points. Basically, it is a much more custom tailored experience than seen in other online games.
IGN, 22th July 2005 (Gaute Godager)
Yes, combat is the heart and soul of Conan and will be a vital part of the gameplay experience. We still don't know exactly how many we can have on screen but we have run tests with several hundreds on screen at the same time without any significant drops in frame-rate. This is something which is incredibly important to us (large-scale PvP and PvE battles) and we have dedicated a lot of resources into load-balancing and network traffic improvements. I know that we have managed more people on screen than most other MMO's with AO (300+), and with Conan we are taking this a long way further.
mmorpgs.info, 8th July 2005 (Gaute Godager)