So there are a few reasons why the server is in Europe.
- Our provider at the time only had Datacentres in France at the time (and had possibly recently opened in Canada with limited models).
- All of the original team were located in Europe.
Over the years there have been many points.
- Bandwith was often much more expensive. (But not as high as Australia)
- We have had a larger playerbase in Europe prime time than USA prime time, and therefore on average ping would be worse for players.
- The world isn't divided up evenly. So there is a greater population to serve.
- Regarding Australia, peering isn't great. Which I've read is becasue Telstra controls around 50% of the market. Cloudflare did a good writeup
here.
- All of our infrastructure is already in Europe, including 5 Bare-metal Servers, a few VPSs and offsite backup solutions. Moving is would take time and more money as we would have to have both environments up while we migrate.
- CLOUD Act, gives U.S. law enforcement authorities the power to request data stored by United States operated cloud providers.
If we the population grew to a state which could sustain 2 servers, I expect the other would be in the States or Canada. Ideally we would want cross-server scenarios and other things before we did this, and we are moving closer to this when systems are rewritten. Additionally, a longer term super side project I am working on is the ability to proxy connections to offload encryption and certian data to be processed away from the main game simulation, although the main simulation isn't distributed. This could possibly allow different part of the game world to exist in different parts of our world. However, this thing sits on the backburner most of the time. Ideally during the hours the game server which handles the simulation could move round the world as the prime time moves, that would a fun experiment.
Myhic ran their game servers with a much-much slower tickrate than we do, so the experience back then would have been possibly closer having an NA ping, when playing from the same region. We could possibly move our tickrate closer to what Mythic had, perhaps we can experiment with that one day, it might put everyone at a closer level.
Hopefully they can start putting fibre through the centre of the earth in the future.