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<p>Last week, we asked for questions from you, our community, regarding Bannerlord's multiplayer closed beta and the early access phase that the game will transition through on its way to a full release. We decided to answer a few more than we originally anticipated, and so, we thought it would be best to save the campaign gameplay video until next week's blog instead (our apologies if that is what you are here for!). We hope that these direct and honest answers will give you an insight into what is happening with the beta and a greater understanding of what to expect from early access. So, without further ado, let's get to it, shall we?</p></br> [/parsehtml]Read more at: http://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/125
Dev Blog 06/09/19
- Thread starter Callum
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Nowhere did I say otherwise. If you chose to actually read my post, then you would know I never said anything to the contrary. Only that the potential market there isn't anywhere near as high as the total demographics of the entire country, relative to others. I explained my position quite clearly. Australian servers are ****ing never a priority for anyone. Every official server we've ever had, Australians have had to fight for. The things you take for granted, we have to push, for months/years to get. And unless we do so, we never get anything. I've looked at as much data as I can, and so far I haven't seen a single "objective reason" as to why we get the shaft, while others don't. Feel free to bring some up if you'd like.The Bowman said:
Despite the fact that we exist, and have had quite a number of people participate in this forum quite an amount, well before either of us; TaleWorlds apparently never even thought of servers for us until we started requesting it for over a year. Australian servers, for all of the reasons in the post you responded to, is absolutely a worthwhile investment, more so than most other places. I've checked the costs of hosting servers. The prevailing myth from 15 years ago is that servers in Australia are too expensive to host, but I've checked, and while the servers are slightly more expensive to host (on average 8-12%~ more than North America), when basing from region to region; we have sufficient extra income to justify servers from profit motive, even if the profits from Australia are 5% less than say America, per capita.Yabloko said:
Also, I'm not sure which market data they have access to, but maybe they don't know if it makes economical sense. Nobody else ever does, and everywhere we go, Australians have to justify our existence over long periods of time before we get anything. And unless I sit here and bring the issue up constantly, we will never know if TaleWorlds knows we're economically sensible.
@Sundeki
Australia+New Zealand should definitely have at least 1 server, if not secificaly dedicated, than maybe somewhere in Papua/Indonesia, somewhere in the middle where much of that region could play from ping 16-70/80, which is acceptable range, not just Australia and New Zealand.
Lemme butter you up for this idea before you scrap it, and demand dedicated Australia servers only.
For example, Europe has a population of approx 740 milion,with very good income, tech savy younger population with long tradition of gaming, and buying games through online platforms and so on, i believe i dont need to explain Europe any further.
Now having that in mind, lets take for example some newer titles like Battlefield 5, from a company that is notorious about making money at any cost, no matter how many servers they need to host.
For BF5 there are, as far as i know when i last played it about 20 days ago, only servers for Europe are in Germany and G. Britain.
I now what you are thinking, Europe is so densley packed, it doesent matter where you put servers, everyone is going to have low ping.
Well, not so much, there is great distance in the matter.
I am based in the Balkan peninsula (pop 55 milion, almost double of Australia+New Zealand, and 18 times less area than Australia alone),that has a huuuuge amount of gamers, almost every country having their own gamescom-like events yearly, and i have to play it on german servers, where i get ping from aywhere of mid 20s - low 40s, on busy weekends it gets to 70/80 and its more than fine, i kick some a**.
On brittish servers, my ping is arround 60 standard, with busy weekend peaks to 90s, which is fine too, but i prefer the German ones.
Distance between somewhere in the middle of Balkan, lets say Skopie (North Macedonia) and London is around 2300 kilometers. And to Berlin its arround 1300 kilometers (not saying that is where servers are located, but some may probably be, and its a close approximation even if they are in other cities).
With those distances having about those ping, and have in mind it would be much less stressful for your servers, they would bare way less load in general than european ones, so the distances with playable ping would be even greater.
Having said all that, also bear in mind that Taleworlds is not ElectronicArts, nor is Bannerlord same as Battlefield 5, not in scope nor in budget.
I think this sounds quite reasonable for now. If Bannerlord (godspeed) achieves success beyond our belief, then you should and i believe will get couple of servers of your own only, Australia AND New Zealand their own.
Australia+New Zealand should definitely have at least 1 server, if not secificaly dedicated, than maybe somewhere in Papua/Indonesia, somewhere in the middle where much of that region could play from ping 16-70/80, which is acceptable range, not just Australia and New Zealand.
Lemme butter you up for this idea before you scrap it, and demand dedicated Australia servers only.
For example, Europe has a population of approx 740 milion,with very good income, tech savy younger population with long tradition of gaming, and buying games through online platforms and so on, i believe i dont need to explain Europe any further.
Now having that in mind, lets take for example some newer titles like Battlefield 5, from a company that is notorious about making money at any cost, no matter how many servers they need to host.
For BF5 there are, as far as i know when i last played it about 20 days ago, only servers for Europe are in Germany and G. Britain.
I now what you are thinking, Europe is so densley packed, it doesent matter where you put servers, everyone is going to have low ping.
Well, not so much, there is great distance in the matter.
I am based in the Balkan peninsula (pop 55 milion, almost double of Australia+New Zealand, and 18 times less area than Australia alone),that has a huuuuge amount of gamers, almost every country having their own gamescom-like events yearly, and i have to play it on german servers, where i get ping from aywhere of mid 20s - low 40s, on busy weekends it gets to 70/80 and its more than fine, i kick some a**.
On brittish servers, my ping is arround 60 standard, with busy weekend peaks to 90s, which is fine too, but i prefer the German ones.
Distance between somewhere in the middle of Balkan, lets say Skopie (North Macedonia) and London is around 2300 kilometers. And to Berlin its arround 1300 kilometers (not saying that is where servers are located, but some may probably be, and its a close approximation even if they are in other cities).
With those distances having about those ping, and have in mind it would be much less stressful for your servers, they would bare way less load in general than european ones, so the distances with playable ping would be even greater.
Having said all that, also bear in mind that Taleworlds is not ElectronicArts, nor is Bannerlord same as Battlefield 5, not in scope nor in budget.
I think this sounds quite reasonable for now. If Bannerlord (godspeed) achieves success beyond our belief, then you should and i believe will get couple of servers of your own only, Australia AND New Zealand their own.
Piconi said:
Piconi said:
The problems with this are that Papua/Indonesia have very poor internet/server infrastructure (relative to e.g Australia, whose isn't even as good as EU/NA). The second is that the lowest ping I can get to Singapore (which has world-class internet infrastructure, and is barely any futher away from me than most of Indonesia anyway) is 160. Once all things are factored in, I'm not getting lower ping to Indonesia or anywhere else in SEA than I am to Singapore. And I'm Australian, this doesn't even factor in the even greater distance for our New Zealand brothers, who get 60+ ping to even Australian servers. World maps don't clearly show the actual huge distances between locations that are closer to the Equator. As an example, my closest major city, Melbourne, is the same distance away from Indonesia as New York is from London. Singapore is even further.
I'd love to get 80 ping to the nearest country. I can't.
I'm not trying to disrespect you, as you're clearly genuine and trying to reach a compromise; but you really have no idea what it's like for Australian gaming and internet service in general. What you consider to be a relatively bad time would be a godsend to most of us. In all practical terms, the internet infrastructure within and between the major cities of Australia is now quite good (not great or anything, but quite good), and the server infrastructure has built up massively. As I've said in previous posts, the costs of hosting servers in Australia from a few different major server hosts are barely more expensive than the rest of their services in places like America and Europe. Amazon GameLift is an example of a company that provides major server infrastructure, and the pricing they give (obviously they're still making a profit from it too) clearly shows that their pricing for Australia is no more expensive than anywhere else in South East Asia, even Singapore (which has the best infrastructure in all of South East Asia, last time I checked). The other benefit in the modern age is that, with Amazon GameLift as an example: you only have to pay for usage. The ironic thing is that on the GameLift service, their Sydney servers are actually cheaper than one area of the United States. (https://aws.amazon.com/gamelift/pricing/).
All summed up:
-There is no practical way for most Australians to play a game like Mount & Blade (which has virtually zero lag compensation, for good reason) on servers outside of A/NZ, the ping is far too great.
-The pricing of servers in Australia isn't more expensive than anywhere else in the region, and the server/internet infrastructure is better here than everywhere for 10,000 km, with the exception of Singapore(the issue lies with getting the data out of Australia and into everywhere else)
-And even if it was more expensive and our community was as small as everyone here seems to think it is(it isn't), major server hosting in the modern age, such as Amazon, provide a pay-by-use model, meaning a lack of players wouldn't be punishing their wallets, really, anyway.
-The higher levels of disposable income that your average Australian has, compared to many other regions, means that whatever increase in cost associated with hosting in Australia (which doesn't really seem to actually be there, now I keep looking) would be negated by income levels should TaleWorlds' implement microtransactions of some kind.
In terms of practicality there is no argument against Australia having it's own servers. Or at least nobody has come up with one yet.
Piconi said:
Oh yes, believe me, as a general rule I don't like microtransactions either. But in the modern age with centralized server hosting, a responsible microtransaction model is understandable and acceptable. If they keep the prices low, don't have lootboxes or any other random-roll service, and keep the microtransactions to not over-the-top but interesting cosmetics (while also giving players the opportunity to get most of them through regular gameplay); then I will have 0 issues with that.
@Piconi
Hello I'm from NZ and thought I might interject.
The distance from NZ to AU is like 4000km and I get ping between 40-80 and sometimes as high as 100. Not having an NZ specific server from Auckland or Wellington is fine as long as AU servers have room. It's just a lot further away, and as Sundeki pointed out, the internet in Indonesia/PNG is pretty bad, and Australian internet is not great either.
There was a bit of discussion somewhere, I think in the AU community thread, about having a server for Asia and Western AU (plus Darwin possibly), but that wouldn't be good for me (NZ) or even many Aussies from the Eastern states.
I think the main point Sundeki wants to make is that not having any way of playing online for the beta/EA would be very disappointing to the AU community. I certainly appreciate suggestions and support but everything down here is so far away we can't effectively share servers between SE Asia and NZ/AUS
At the end of the day, if there's no servers for us then what's waiting another 8 years for the full release and community servers?
Hello I'm from NZ and thought I might interject.
The distance from NZ to AU is like 4000km and I get ping between 40-80 and sometimes as high as 100. Not having an NZ specific server from Auckland or Wellington is fine as long as AU servers have room. It's just a lot further away, and as Sundeki pointed out, the internet in Indonesia/PNG is pretty bad, and Australian internet is not great either.
There was a bit of discussion somewhere, I think in the AU community thread, about having a server for Asia and Western AU (plus Darwin possibly), but that wouldn't be good for me (NZ) or even many Aussies from the Eastern states.
I think the main point Sundeki wants to make is that not having any way of playing online for the beta/EA would be very disappointing to the AU community. I certainly appreciate suggestions and support but everything down here is so far away we can't effectively share servers between SE Asia and NZ/AUS
At the end of the day, if there's no servers for us then what's waiting another 8 years for the full release and community servers?
Sundeki said:
I cannot stand having 60ms latency much less 160, so I feel you and hope you get the servers you want... However the largest argument against it would be situation you already find yourself in. Nobody 'forgets' about setting up servers for US, or Europe, or China; If it happens to Australians there must be a reason, maybe the overhead is too costly or the return on investment too low. Not many companies would ignore a chance for profit.
Yabloko said:
Actually that sort of thing happens all the time. While not a direct example, the recent World of Warcraft: Classic launch highlights the situation perfectly. Blizzard gave Australia a grand total of one server at launch. While the WoW:Classic launch was bad everywhere, the absolute worst was Australia. I got queues as high as 26,000 because I bothered to create my character on the one server they first made. The end result is now we have 4 servers (a grand total of 4x as many, obviously), and during the evening one is full with 6000-8000 person queues sometimes still, two are high population and one is medium population. While obviously it was bad everywhere, the greatest underestimation is in relation to Australia, as always.
I don't know whether or not TaleWorlds thinks our servers are profitable or not. But most often we're completely overlooked because they either didn't realize the potential, or simply didn't care. Major server hosting companies with foreign backing saw the potential for hosting in Australia, and after a few years, despite the rhetoric that it would never be profitable, many of them have reached profitability and their prospects continue to grow. I've also tried searching anywhere/everywhere for an example in the last even 8 years of an Australian server hosted for a game shut down because it wasn't profitable. The only example I found of this was Planetside 2, which shut down it's Australian server a couple of weeks ago after 7 years. That was a free to play game as well, so they didn't even make money off the Australian players initially.
I won't lie and say that Australian servers will be profitable indefinitely. If TaleWorlds finds that the matchmaking service simply isn't worth the investment anymore, 5 or so years down the road, and have to shut the servers down; we would understand that. But for all of the near future, two things seem to definitely apply: Yes, Australia is profitable, and Yes, while definitely profitable, No they aren't as profitable as some other areas probably.
It all falls down to how money-grubbing TaleWorlds' wants to be.
vicwiz007 said:
The whole system for Banners that they have now in Bannerlord is appalling. It looks like every single lord throughout Calradia has a solid background... no variation in the field. Of all the clans in the game there are only 8 different color schemes for Banners?! No accents, no borders, no differential in fields... There is a wide space of middle ground between the stale, uniform, unimaginative way that Banners in Bannerlord are currently done and a completely open and unrestricted Banner editor. I mean why not 2 flags? A national flag in addition to the clan flag. When riding into battle the national standard (Banner used by everyone in the faction) flies above the clan flag (completely unique for each clan). That, I think, would eliminate confusion. Or something else like a multi-colored flag where a certain portion of the flag is the faction color but other elements of the Banner are free for the player to choose. What I see now is as jarring as discovering a third nipple on somebody's butt.
578 said:
I vehemently disagree, so much so that I have a hard time understanding why anyone interested in the single-player portion (or at least the role-playing aspect of the single-player) would be ok with the Banners as they currently are. The current system almost completely eliminates the individuality of the Banners in Bannerlord. They all look far too similar.
These Bannerlord Banners are no good and worse than what Warband offered:
You have uttered the forbidden word. Be wary when you are walking around the streets.Piconi said:
Just wanted to give u guys a big thank you for making warband. I recently just started playing it on ps4 and think the game is an absolute gem! I love it. I'm already a big fan. There's so many good things I can say about warband. Please continue making mount and blade (I know a new 1 is coming out & I'm looking forward to it very much) but I mean after the new 1 is made I just hope it continues. Such an underrated game!
Yea I know, I just wanted to say thanks to you guys for the work put into both games and that I think they're really fun and great
Apolllo said:
I know this is a small point, but the distance is actually about half that, as little as 1600km at the closest (if Google Maps measuring is accurate, at least).
DanAngleland said:
Most Oceania servers are hosted out of Sydney, so the effective distance would be around ~2170km for most major cities (Wellington 2224km, Auckland 2155km, and Christchurch 2137km) though occasionally servers are hosted out of Melbourne or Brisbane instead. Also when I googled it, it said that 81% of Australians live in the eastern states and 77% of New Zealanders live in the north island, so I guess it would be better to have on the eastern side of Australia. Oh and apparently New Zealand is closer to Sydney than Darwin and Perth, which I found a tad funny.
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