Playing With Yourself — The European Battlegrounds Conundrum

The Promise of Battlegrounds

The promise of Battlegrounds has been the opportunity to meet players from other servers and challenge them in meaningful PvP combat. It has been a great time-killer while attempting to form up groups. It has been a fun exercise for guilds from different servers wanting to face off in battle. And it has been an opportunity (perhaps too good of one) to gear up. However this promise has largely gone undelivered to the European community.

Aside from localization issues (language, number and date formats), European servers almost always undergo software upgrades at a different time (and sometimes different date) than Stateside updates. If the software does not exactly match between two copies of EQ2, then these two players facing off in Battlegrounds could lead to character corruption or exploits. As a result of these concerns, Battlegrounds are isolated by language and country. Thus, the French, German, Russian, UK, and US Battlegrounds clusters cannot talk to each other.

The issues caused, and solutions posited on this subject can all be found in this prominent thread on the EQ2 Forums: Battlegrounds and EU Servers

Greg “Rothgar” Spence understands the issues and realizes the problems created, however there don’t seem to be any easy solutions. It doesn’t help that for 2 solid months he’s been mired in trying to exorcise the performance demons afflicting the current servers, and hardly has room on his plate for trying to make them talk to each other better.

As far as combining EU servers with US servers, you guys were correct about one of the issues being due to different patch times.  Another issue is the physical location of the servers.  The US BG server is located here while some of your servers are in Amsterdam.  So, you might experience longer ping times when playing on the US BG world than US players would be getting.

Even if we didn’t worry about the ping times, the different patch times would be an issue.  This would mean either changing the patch times to coincide with US (during your peak) or having battlegrounds disabled until your patch goes live and the versions are in sync.  Considering that we patch pretty frequently for hotfixes, neither of these is a very good option and would disrupt your playtime significantly.

and

We will continue to look at options.  Unfortunately the different patch times and potential for character versions to be out of sync would cause all kinds of problems.

and

Nothing new to report.  The patching issue is still a big problem that has no clear solution at the moment.  Our existing versioning system works for synchronizing client with server, but we don’t have anything in place to handle a client connecting to different servers.

We are currently still focused on server performance and stabilizing battlegrounds.  We’ll need to complete this work before we can look at potentially combining UK and US battlegrounds.

Drastic Problems…

While getting players from the US and Europe into the same Battlegrounds at least some of the time seems a long-term or unattainable goal, being unable to play cross-server is only part of the problem.

There are 3 types of tokens awarded for Battlegrounds competitions. And vendors selling Battlegrounds gear won’t part with any of their loot without a handful of at least TWO types of tokens. The issue here is that, especially on the completely isolated German and French servers, there just aren’t enough players, even during primetime, to stage a Smuggler’s Den (24 vs. 24 players) Battlegrounds raid. As a result, these tokens remain completely unattainable on certain servers.

Player suggestions have included server-specific vendors who will exchange tokens. If you have your own suggestions on a way out of this pickle, without just handing out the most powerful Battlegrounds loot for minimal effort, you should make your feelings known on the EQ2 Forums.