According to Mark Jacobs every North American Warhammer Online server will be in Virginia. Those of you who played DAOC will be familiar with Mythic’s practice of keeping all their servers on the MAE-East. What’s a MAE you ask? “A MAE (pronounced MAY), originally an abbreviation for Metropolitan Area Exchange and now a service mark of MCI WorldCom, is a major center in the United States for interconnecting traffic between Internet service providers (ISPs).” It’s basically the backbone of internet. There are several MAE placed throughout the country and Mark Jacobs has this to say:
“Oh, and all our servers will be in Va. or with our overseas partners. We will probably not be hosting regional servers especially considering that our servers currently reside in the best location on the East Coast, Mae East. It doesn’t get better than that, being part of the Internet backbone.” – Mark Jacobs
What will this mean for those of us on the West Coast? From playing first person shooters I have experience with how much distance from the server matters. On West coast servers I’ll have 40 ping. On East coast servers I’ll have anywhere from 120-200. In twitch based games that absolutely matters. Let no one tell you otherwise. In a MMORPG though, does it mean diddly? In Dark Age of Camelot I recall people were shifting and bouncing around quite often. That very well could have been the client and pc lag though. That was many years ago and most people were probably still on Dial up.
It’s been said that WAR will be more twitch than DAOC. Distance does matter. How much will it matter? That remains unseen. While some west coasters have already given up I’ll reserve my judgment until the game releases. Even then, It’s more than likely that I’ll play regardless.