Hopefully not, I don't want terrible Ping to NA.

the region servers are in different physical locations so that does actually seem more work.
EU is in Germany and NA is in Texas, more than an ocean between them.

https://help.elderscrollsonline.com/#en/answer/6421
The North American megaservers are hosted in Texas (North America). The European Megaservers are located in the European Datacenter in Germany.

They have already confirmed that it will still be separated by region. The servers themselves are in different countries.

Furthermore, it is highly unlikely they will consider account merges, as that would involve manually disentangling several things. It is most likely to mean that if someone has a PCNA and XBNA account that those would be two separate accounts that the player can log into.

It would increase desync on both servers. So, basic positioning - Where am I stood?

My PC tells the server what movement I just did, the server calculates the new position and tells my PC which then verifies.
My friend who was stood next to me gets a notification from the server telling them I've moved to the new position and verifies their current position.
The server then calculates the new distance between us.

Any delay in both myself moving and my friend seeing me move is positioning desync. Distance affects interaction, damage landing, heals landing.

Having both servers in the same game world will mean the server in Germany and the server in Texas are constantly having to talk swapping positioning data between the two. It's around a 200ms round trip. That's an extra 200ms of desync.

I doubt they're going to *do something* as they have clearly have stated that crossplay is not being implemented between regions... and probably for good reason as this is a recipe for increased lag and delay and desync and connection issues for players who are distant from the new server location (if the regions were to be fully merged), or for players across regions generally if two distant servers are having to communicate with each other, as pointed out above.

No, the ping and lag would be out of this world.

mdjessup4906 wrote: »

And they said we'd never have crossplay at all. networking wise other games do it so there is a way.

Not even remotely the same thing. ZOS would literally have to break the laws of physics to pull off merging the US & EU servers. The desync would destroy the game, especially in PvP.

mdjessup4906 wrote: »

And they said we'd never have crossplay at all. networking wise other games do it so there is a way.

Other games I’ve played have the ability to transfer characters between servers, but I don’t recall there being many that host everything on the same server. Except for Minecraft, I guess. No idea how Minecraft server connection works.

Omg no, god no. Physics is physics and you just can't change it when you want.
I have about 42ms on the EU and about 220ms on the NA.

The server lag would get much worse if they combined NA and EU together and it wouldnt solve any of the problems on console regarding improving player counts because EU on console isn't that large.

Adhara wrote: »

I don't know what ISPs the rest of you have, but my ping/latency tends to be about the same for both EU and NA.

I have the best home internet you can buy in the UK for reasonable sums of money: near-gigabit. Here's a Speedtest by Ookla done a few minutes ago:
Download Mbps 934.37
Upload Mbps 877.38

My ping to PC-EU tends to be in the 46-60ms range, and my ping to PC-NA tends to be in the 160-200ms range. (Excluding stressful situations like loading into a new zone, where the ping always jumps considerably for a short while.) I am extremely lucky. There are people within North America who have 300ms pings to PC-NA, and remember the Asians who connect to NA too (Japanese players are all on PC-NA). By the time you're in Oceanic regions, you have 300-400ms regardless of which server you choose.

@Gabriel_H's calculation is correct, and if anything an underestimate. There is no single straight fibre optic cable connecting ZOS's data centre in Texas to ZOS's data centre in Germany. Internet traffic between the two must go in a number of hops, not directly. That absolute minimum of 84ms is more likely to be 200ms in practice, as they said.

They talked about positioning desync. To put that into context, have you ever gone to loot a corpse and found that it isn't where you think it is? "Why can't I loot this corpse?" That's positioning desync. That's what happens when the server thinks the monster died in one place, and your client thinks it died somewhere else. It happens rarely due to internet blips.

Imagine how much worse this positioning desync would be if your client had to talk to two different servers instead of only one.

Imagine our Oceanic players, who already have a ping of 300-400ms connecting to one server. Their ping is going up to 600ms or more.

How do you expect the basic anti-cheat functions of the game to work under those conditions? The game server and your client are constantly talking to each other to check that your character hasn't moved further than is possible, or used more attacks than are possible. Players who live far from both servers would find themselves constantly flagged for cheating just because of lag.

I understand that you want your friends from PC-NA to be able to play with you on PC-EU. The easiest way to do that would be to fund Aetherial Ambrosias and Mythic Aetherial Ambrosias for them to grind rapidly to Level 50 CP 160, and then to help them run Dungeons and Trials to grind up gear. I've started over on PC-EU and it honestly doesn't take more than a few days if you know exactly what you're doing.

I feel like the people who suggest rather extreme changes to the game don't really think about consequences those can bring.

Adhara wrote: »

I don't know what ISPs the rest of you have, but my ping/latency tends to be about the same for both EU and NA.

I'm sorry to hear that. Have you tried to talk to your ISP why local connections have such high ping? Since it's not physically possible that your connection to a local server and a server across the world both run at the faster connection's speed (physics don't physic that way), for the both to be the same, your local connection has too high latency.

Cross-play is about letting different platforms talk to each other, not about letting different regions talk to each other.

As already mentioned in the thread, the simple answer is distance.

PC/NA and XB/NA both live in the same physical building. PC/NA and XB/EU are on opposite sides of the planet.

Adhara wrote: »

I don't want account merges. I just want to be able to do Night Market and get the dye on EU with my NA guild. That shouldn't be so hard to ask.

Why are you in an NA guild when you are on EU server?