Does living within physical proximity to Zenimax servers affect performance?

ixmike

I currently live in Washington DC (I think Zenimax is nearby in Maryland), but when I first played this game at launch I lived in Wiesbaden, Germany as a DoD Federal civilian employee (the city is 20 minutes driving distance from Frankfurt, which I've heard is the physical site of the European server. I have no idea where I heard this)

I've never had issues with "lag".

But yet I've heard this complaint of "constant lags" (especially in Cyrodiil) from everyone who has played this game.

Is physical distance from ESO servers a factor?

WhyMustItBe

Depends on what sort of lag you are actually talking about.

Latency is generally the most commonly experienced "lag," which you can see if you enable showing it in game options. This is the time it takes a signal to go from your computer, through whatever ISP and routing from where you are on the internet, to the server. Anything over 200ms (about 1/5th second) will result in an increasingly noticeable delay between hitting an ability and it actually registering on the server. It is possible to play with this sort of lag, but definitely affects performance and how good the game feels.

Another type of lag however is purely server related. This is when you are fighting a world boss or public dungeon encounter, and everything just freezes and stops responding for a few seconds, then "rubber bands" forward, often with enemies and AOE etc. being in totally different locations suddenly, which can even result in player death. This can absolutely decimate performance and fun factor. Although this generally happens less often it is directly proportional to the number of players participating in a given "shard" (server instance) and the resources of that server.

Since ZOS still hasn't added new central processing servers (due to covid according to community reps), it is definitely happening often enough to be an annoyance. Neither of these types of lag will affect your actual video rendering performance however.

Things like your ISP being hard line or wireless or satellite (which is the worst), as well as internet congestion, bad routes, things downloading in the background, etc. can all affect your ping (latency). I play from the west coast of the US on a DSL connection (25mbit) and generally maintain around 100ms ping or less and have no real issue with that type of lag. If I were on wireless or satellite that would make more of a difference than my proximity to the server, although it does have an impact since light speed is obviously not instant, and routers don't actually route at light speed.

I believe people in Australia for example tend to see around 400ms on a hard line connection to the US server, according to people I talk to in-game. Sometimes you can improve this with an optimizing VPN that attempts to find the best possible route between access points, but distance is still a hard limiter.

Not sure if that helps.

ixmike

Yeah. Zenimax should definitely have a third server in Asia/Oceania.

Chips_Ahoy

ixmike wrote: »

I currently live in Washington DC (I think Zenimax is nearby in Maryland), but when I first played this game at launch I lived in Wiesbaden, Germany as a DoD Federal civilian employee (the city is 20 minutes driving distance from Frankfurt, which I've heard is the physical site of the European server. I have no idea where I heard this)

I've never had issues with "lag".

But yet I've heard this complaint of "constant lags" (especially in Cyrodiil) from everyone who has played this game.

Is physical distance from ESO servers a factor?

What does DoD mean?

If I do a DoD will my lag also reduce?

ixmike

Chips_Ahoy wrote: »

ixmike wrote: »

I currently live in Washington DC (I think Zenimax is nearby in Maryland), but when I first played this game at launch I lived in Wiesbaden, Germany as a DoD Federal civilian employee (the city is 20 minutes driving distance from Frankfurt, which I've heard is the physical site of the European server. I have no idea where I heard this)

I've never had issues with "lag".

But yet I've heard this complaint of "constant lags" (especially in Cyrodiil) from everyone who has played this game.

Is physical distance from ESO servers a factor?

What does DoD mean?

If I do a DoD will my lag also reduce?

In essence, a government welfare recipient.

Sylvermynx

Department of Defense.... my entire family (other than me) has worked in that "industry" since the 1950s.

Lag is - interesting. Some people have reported 20-50 ms - from various places around the world. That might be something with either their machine and setup or due to really great broadband.

I don't have either of those - so my lag averages 750+ ms. The game works fine for me for what I do - which isn't pvp or pve endgame. But if you have 100+ ms lag, and you're wanting to do trials or pvp - you probably won't be happy.

Chips_Ahoy

I see, ty ixmike, and thank you Mrs @Sylvermynx as usual helping in the forum

WhyMustItBe

Sylvermynx wrote: »

But if you have 100+ ms lag, and you're wanting to do trials or pvp - you probably won't be happy.

Actually anything under 170ms works just fine for vet content. Above that though, you feel it.

DreamyLu

I don't think the impact of distance is significant because I'm myself in Switzerland, playing on NA server, and I never ever experience any sort of lag.

The only lag I get is when I log off, the 9 seconds waiting time till really quitting.

Kwoung

There are different types of lag, Cyrodiil is server lag and 100% on ZOS. Most people talk about network/Internet lag though, which isn't purely from a measurement of distance, it has more to do with what provider you are using, what provider Zenimax is using and the route your packets need to take to get to/from there. There are also great inequalities across various Internet providers in general. I can get 50-60ms response across country (USA) on some, while on others it can be double to triple that, simply due to how they route the traffic or congested they are.

Short answer... yes living closer to the servers (they are in Texas no?) will generally give better performance regardless of providers because it will be less routing around. That said, if I am on the same network as Zenimax, I will probably get better performance from 1000 miles away, than you would get next door to them if you have a crappy Internet provider.

As an extreme example, I had this happen... I live not far from San Francisco, Ca, but one particular provider I tested actually routed ALL their traffic through Dallas Texas, so for me to hit a website hosted a stones throw away, my connection travelled half way across the country and back to get there. I could go into great detail about this, but there are many Internet providers, and most don't like each other, but are forced to "peer" in order for the Internet to work. The particular provider I mentioned was not well liked and no one would peer with them at MAE West (a huge west coast Internet crossover point), which is why my traffic had to travel to Texas and back.