Questions About The Server

[Kyriumi]

I've been playing on this server for about 2-3 years now, but I have some questions.

1. Why is the server located in France?
I'm sure we have players from France and all that, but why there specifically? Is it cheaper to host there? Is it a good middle ground or something? I'm genuinely curious. Vendetta Gaming, another group that has private servers for games, once did a poll regarding where the server should be located. Of course, this won't be able to please everyone, but they catered to the majority. Could that be possible for our servers as well?

2. Why do people still lag often?
I do party runs a lot, and I'd say 70% of those runs, there's always at least one person experiencing lag. Sometimes it's me, sometime's it's other party members. People have to resort to using VPNs to be able to play. I have no doubt that this happens in other games too but I think it happens too often here, no? I know a few people that can't run with parties at all because of the lag. Sometimes it's party lag, sometimes it's the server. Even then, why does this happen? What causes this? Does the team ever think of finding a solution? Or is it impossible? This has been a problem ever since I started playing.

3. Don't we have more players than ever? Doesn't that mean we have more AP buyers than ever?
More AP buyers = more money for Aura, will any of this money ever go to the upgrading + relocation of servers, or anything else?

I love this game, but some things make me go "lol wat". I haven't heard of party lag in MMOs until AK, so I just want an explanation as to why this is a thing. Anyways, I look forward to a reply from management.

Thank you for reading~

[Miss_Garnet]

I'm just a fellow player only, but here's my own input on this.

1. The servers are likely located where they are for one or many of a number of reasons. Usually, they will be hosted in or near the region(s) they are being hosted for. For example, in all of the official versions, the regions all have the server hosted within that country/continent (Japan for Japan, North America [previously Canada, and them the United States] for NA, I expect france and Germany have their servers in or close to those regions, etc.]. As far as I know, this is an international offering not aimed at one specific region, so Europe makes sense when you consider 1) I think (?) the one(s) providing this server is also from there, so it might be by default, cheaper, easier, who knows, and 2) it's seems like a good middle ground considering North and South America to the West, and the Asias to the East. Catering to the majority is good and all, but the true way to do that is to make it as accessible as possible, which isn't necessarily the same as placing the server nearest to the majority of your players.

2. I personally can't speak much of lag or delays as I'm not very technically versed, but personally, I have no (or so little it can be considered no) extra lag, delay, whatever you want to call it to this server as I do to Aeria's own NA version server, which resides in the same time zone as me, so to me that would make it seem like the server is okay. Personally, when I have had issues, it's been my entire internet at fault, not the server. Some times, yes, I seem to have issues specific to the game, but it's usually rare or minor and on the whole the connection seems as good for me across an ocean as it does to one in my time zone. As far as I would chance a guess, and this is PURELY a guess based on my own perception, the Asia region to the rest of the world connections (and vice versa) seems... lacking? It seems like a larger number of players from those regions complain that they experience issues, unfortunately (seen this on both Aeria server and here, even though the majority of Aeria's remaining players seem to be from the SEA region than the region the server is hosted for, ironically enough). Likewise, when I played for a day on the Asia private server it was awful for me.

3. No ideas here about player counts or income and expenses the server deals with, but I know it's a bit more lively from a player's perspective (more dungeon activity) than Aeria's NA servers, regardless if there's less total players. Also, if there IS extra revenue to help with providing the server, I'd MUCH rather see it go towards catching up on fixing some of the bugs and missing or wrong translations rather than moving the server. I'm still personally a bit upset I donated to support and got a costume weapon that is STILL visually inconsistently broken, and seems it will forever remain so because "it's not high priority or game impacting". Stuff like that makes me cautious to donate more.

[Kyriumi]

@Miss_Garnet, thank you for your input c: Was wondering what another player's opinions might be on this. I think all the points you raise are great and they do make sense.

Regarding the fixes, I 100% agree with you. I'd be pretty upset too if I donated and the thing I'm supposed to get stays broken because it's not "important" enough. In my opinion, it kind of says something about how donators (people that help keep this game up and running) are valued and seen by management.

There are so many bugs that never get fixed, the oldest one I can recall is being stuck in character select when you want to switch characters. It's been an issue ever since I started playing, it's not game-breaking or anything, but holy hell it's annoying when it happens.

It's also annoying with the STH gets bugged and people have no choice but to run STC. Sometimes it gets hotfixed, sometimes it doesn't. I don't even know if there will be any compensation for it.

[Aura]

Our GMT has been EU based since 2014, when the server was first released. We have always been GMT+1 and advertise ourselves as an EU based server. So it is a shock to me that anyone could find the server location surprising, since it has been consistently the same for four years. There is absolutely no reason that could justify moving the server to a different location given how diverse is our population. And as miss_garnet wisely states, EU is a good middle ground when you have people connecting from US, South America, Europe itself and Asia as we do.

Lag on the other side its a complicated topic. Whenever they don't experience a smooth gameplay, players tends to blame it to the server status, even if there's absolutely no technical foundation for their claims. But there are many reasons behind lags and disconnections, which aren't always a global issue and highly depends on the specifications of every player. For instance:

1) The server distance highly impacts on how smooth the game plays, but this also is influenced by your internet speed and the stability your internet provider is giving. In that sense, it is a known fact that most of asian providers not only offers a slower internet connection but lacks stability. In addition, the asian region tends to suffer from issues of the submarine network, as it happened a few weeks ago (and also happened last year, and the year before). When problems like this strike, there is absolutely nothing we can do in our end to improve the gaming experience for those players.

2) People usually sends me messages of the sort: "I have no problems with my connection, I only lag when I play Aura Kingdom". As you can imagine, this is as general and non-specific as it could get. Cause if you are comparing the speed requirements with things as youtube or even streaming, it is not the same than playing an online game. If your connection has, for instance, micro cuts, it might not be noticeable when navigating the internet or streaming series and movies. It will certainly not be noticeable when using netflix, to set an example, who pays high dollars to have streaming priority to internet companies. It will be noticeable on an online game, where a micro cut is enough to disconnect you from the game.

3) People also usually complains about laging specifically in parties, while not having problems when playing solo. But they also often confuses lag (which is a condition based on the internet stability of yourself and/or the server host) with freeze. If your game stats to freeze only while in party, it is also very likely that the problem is associated with your PC specs and not your connection at all. It is not secret than this game has some deficiency on how it manages resources. Basically, the most extended is the period of time in which it has been opened, the more resources consumes from your PC. So a computer without a gaming graphic card or low ram could experience freeze while being in party because your PC not only needs to process your own character's actions but the ones in your surrounding. That is why I always advice to players with this specific issue to:
- If your RAM is low, you can always try to increase your virtual memory to make the game run a little bit better. The virtual memory is basically the designed space on your disk that windows can use as ram to run their usual processes. You need to have some free space disk to set as virtual memory, but it does help to make the game run a bit smoother.
- If you are used to play with high graphic settings and experience lag when playing in party, lower them during your runs.
- It is also a good exercise to get used to restart the game before running long dungeons runs, like sky tower or nightmare dungeons. Given how the game is coded, a simple restart will lower the memory requirements and make the game run smoother.

But also as you can see, there are too many variables that could affect what players considers to be lag from the server. Is impossible for us to check them all, and in some cases, is impossible to even do anything about them. Your PC specs, your internet connection, are things beyond our control. We do the best we can to provide a good experience to all, like:
- We use not one but several PC hosts, devoted to different channels, to provide a high performance.
- We use SSD disks to guarantee a faster reaction of our PC hosts.
- We monitor in daily basis the PC activity and the resources comsumption, to guarantee the hosts are running smoothly.
- We perform daily backups to secure all of your data.
- We use a trusteable server host, that has a very long and proffesional experience running sites.
- We use cdns to patch, that even if sometimes give you a headache on maintenance days, their goal is to equilibrate the patching speed when you are connecting from a far distance from our server host. Otherwise, it would be almost impossible to patch the game if you are, for example, in Asia.

As a result of our policies regarding the server management and given our past experience, you could claim that:
- We almost don't have any offline time with the exception of scheduled maintenances.
- In the situations we did had any offline time, it has been in majority the result of external attacks and we have promptly work on a solution.
- Unless a few exceptions, we have made ourselves available to solve emergency situations even during the weekends.
- When the complains about the server's connection stability has been general they always has been checked and worked on.
- In four years, we never had any major rollback in the server, something not even OS could claim.
- Even with a quite reduced team, we update the game in weekly basis.
- Even with bugs and errors coming in maintenances (something not even TW is exempt of) we work in their solutions and perform emergency maintenances if the situation calls for it. The time for our server's maintenances is reduced, if you use OS as a comparison extent (that sometimes takes up to 12 hours to do data backups processes).
- We also work in custom content to have something different to offer you than official servers, and with a surprisingly sucess, given they are to this date some of the most popular features the game has.

As for the current bugs in the game, we have every intention to fix even the last one of them. But we cannot do it at the cost of sacrifcing scheduled content maintenances. In order to please the majority and keep the server alive, our content maintenances are key to this process. The particular case of the exported costume weapons with broken textures is already in our to do list, and we plan to add a fix to this problem very soon. In the midtime, and if it's something you don't feel you could wait for until is solved, I will gladly replace you the weapon for any other of your liking.

As for translations errors and miss placements, it is a situation it has improved greatly on the last couple of months thanks to Lindley's collaboration. Regardless, in order to make all of this work, we do need to make some compromises. In our opinion, those compromises has been minor errors and translation issues, because we feel they do not take as much from the game as it would not having periodically updates, weekly maintenances, etc.

[Noy]

On the lag/freeze topic as someone with good/very stable internet and a higher end computer AuraKingdom is just a unoptimized game and that’s probably causing your issues but you can’t really do much about it even my friends with similar internet connections and pc’s as me still get all the freezes and laggy gameplay like for what ever reason I get a freeze at the bottom of dawncliff cart hill that’s like 2-3 seconds for who knows why it’s always consitsanty there some ppl I ask have the same issue others don’t thats just AK

[Aura]

On the lag/freeze topic as someone with good/very stable internet and a higher end computer AuraKingdom is just a unoptimized game and that’s probably causing your issues but you can’t really do much about it even my friends with similar internet connections and pc’s as me still get all the freezes and laggy gameplay like for what ever reason I get a freeze at the bottom of dawncliff cart hill that’s like 2-3 seconds for who knows why it’s always consitsanty there some ppl I ask have the same issue others don’t thats just AK

The problem at Dawn Cliff Path cart hills is completely differente. You get 2-3 seconds because you are being hitted by an invisible monsters (there is suppose to be a fire there that causes you damage). This is going to be fixed on today's maintenance.

[Noy]

The problem at Dawn Cliff Path cart hills is completely differente. You get 2-3 seconds because you are being hitted by an invisible monsters (there is suppose to be a fire there that causes you damage). This is going to be fixed on today's maintenance.

It’s been happening to me since the release of the dungeon so your saying it was bugged from the start? Or no

[Aura]

It’s been happening to me since the release of the dungeon so your saying it was bugged from the start? Or no

It's possible but I can't confirm it. I can confirm there is a fire on top of the hill, next to the carts that wasn't visible until now.

[Noy]

Well if this fire atop the hill is what was causing my freeze at the bottom then it’s defiantly not consistent since ik ppl who have the same issue and ppl who don’t have it all

[Aura]

Well if this fire atop the hill is what was causing my freeze at the bottom then it’s defiantly not consistent since ik ppl who have the same issue and ppl who don’t have it all

Today's maintenance will give you better confirmation. But if your problem is only at that dungeon, as said, there was a broken effect exactly at the location you claim to have problems.