Feature Server Selection Beta

I’m in Kansas...even on central I have 55-60, on East 75-80. I’d love to play on low ping but that just won’t ever happen. Personally, I’d rather every other player on my team have the lowest they can. Lowest “average” should be the goal.

 

That definitely isn't the case for me in Vancouver. I get 64-67 to Central and 80-85 on the East servers.

 

Are you sure you're not just assuming that a lower number means Central? I know for a fact that my 65 ping is North East because I never saw that number before they brought in that server

 

I am 100% sure

 

I'm in Vancouver as well with Telus Fibre. My lowest ping is 60 and it's to the QC server (been in games on it with QCs and asked if this was their server). I don't know which server is the one I get 83ish to but it's 100% either central or usa east.

 

Huh, based on where I am and my buddies' locations it always made sense to us that the central was the lower ping. And even pinging servers on speedtest.net, the ohio servers give lower ping than the montreal ones.

If that Central server really is the higher ping then it has some awful routing.

 

Yeah I don't really know why but the good one for me at least is the QC. I *think* the 80+ one for me is the USA East one but I haven't confirmed it in a pin game yet.

 

83 is gonna be US East. That's about what I get to it

 

This server selection is bs. So i guy is West and I'm east. If we use North American west i get 90 ping and up. On east its 30s. I was ok on west but guys I'm playing with lagged to bad. they have to have even servers. Ea needs better server system

 

@Eamonn if you want to test, I have a router that shows that exact server where the game hosted.

 

You can probably accomplish the same thing with server choice

 

Just confirmed that Central is the one that gets me 82 ping.

It's also the closest to me of the three non-west servers by a good 400-600km. Weird.

 

Based on the way things were talked about in the interview with McDonald I thought the point of the server selection system was to find the most competitive server for both teams so that the combined pings are as even as possible. But the way it's addressed in the OP just seems like a small variation of how EA already selects servers which focuses on the location of everybody in the game. The problem is that this ignores competitive balance and doesn't do anything to address situations where one team is entirely QC and another has a mixed group of East / Central players. The majority of players in the game will ping best to the QC server which will designate it as the recommended server and the end result is that the QC team plays on an average of say 10 ping and the other team has an average ping of 40. Not very fun or competitive. And while I've laid out a more extreme example, this dynamic exists in various degrees every game which will favor one team or another and if the LG server selection eventually became mandatory it would just incentivize teams to stack their lines based on region to get their preferred server.

With all that said, it's a bit tricky to come up with a solution that everybody is going to be happy with but it seems like a better formula from a competitive perspective would be to find the average distance to each server for each team and then choose the one with the smallest differential between both teams. And to prevent weird situations where it recommends far away servers from both teams you could exclude servers outside the top 3 that all of the players combined are closest to. I think this would do a really good job of neutralizing server advantages for either side in a way that most people would be in favor of and would be a big improvement over the current server selection beta. Thoughts?