We plan on moving the MC server to a different data center within the next 1-3 weeks. The new server will probably be more powerful, but in in a fairly negligible way for Alice and Vincent. The main difference will be that the server will now be located in (eastern) North America, whereas it is currently in Germany. Some people have had intermittent network connectivity problems with our current data center so those issues may be resolved. As far as downtime goes, we plan on the server being down at most 5 minutes between server shut down on the old system and server startup on the new system. However, the address that you use to connect to the servers will likely point to the old IP address for some time due to caching done by your internet service provider, so it may take up 24 hours for the change to kick in. To work around that, we plan to issue new, temporary addresses for Vincent and Alice pointing to the new IP address.
That doesn't sound good for me, considering I live in the UK... luckily my internet is 100mbps, and I have a good ping to the L4D2 server, which is hosted in America.
Well the big thing is players in the UK will likely experience client desync the way US players do currently, as well as connectivity issues. However I think the UKs backbone is a bit better than USs.
Distance isn't as important as where and who the network interconnections are. Someone in New Jersey gets 5ms ping to a server I have in Arizona -- a state that is literally right next to us in California -- but here in California we get 50+ ms ping. New Jersey is on the other side of the US.
That basicly means end of my playing on Alice. I live in Bulgaria, which means, I'll have crazy ping from here to NA.
Good news guys. Tonius (Netherlands) and I (United Kingdom) both received a relatively low ping to the new server 96 and 93ms respectively. This is around a 50ms increase from previous pings and should not effect gameplay by a significant amount, certainly not enough to render it unplayable. I'm sure the most noticeable times will be with tools like the ichorium pickaxe with the 5x5 mining area.
Yay! I also get a really good ping to the Arizona server, so hopefully I will have a good ping to the New Jersey server. I don't know where the network interconnections are but hopefully the routing is good
