TOPIC: Server host

Lerpson wrote: East coast would have been fine imo, 80 ping is reasonable, 200 is not

Markus wrote: it would be the most equal ping ratio too, the only issue is that sam the sausage will have better ping

Lerpson wrote:
Lets be real not enough players for 1 but still would be nice to have the option to lag or not to lag (even more so because 90% of people cheat, before it was just aim botted now its gonna be aim botted and lagging )

Lerpson wrote: If this so-called 90% of gmod playerbase joins the new US server then it would have enough players

The Violinist wrote:
I could swear the majority of gmod players are Russians

User 24823 wrote: Except having 2 servers isn't possible with the current way the server, Having multiple servers with such low player count makes it cancer to nuke, as well as no one plays one of the servers and if we added a new US server 2. NO one from the EU would play it as you can clearly see in this post from the outrage of losing the ping advantage. (No one from the EU would join the US server in the past whenever we tried to get them to hop on and go there instead.)

User 24823 wrote: It's even worse when you consider that 90% of the people crying about the ping are infact injected for 100% of their gameplay and couldn't survive on their own ping whilst cheating

At the end of the day this is an understandable and right step towards the right path for Zarp, yet a huge one for it's current regulars and general playerbase, which imo should have been at least taken into consideration for making the announcement a bit more transparent towards this impactful change since it will drastically affect the current and future traffic of the servers.

ItsDonny wrote: Thank you for the insightful description of your opinion. I will take this into consideration!

i do not care

One step forward, 10 steps backward

ItsDonny wrote: Donny you saying its in the right direction for zarp makes me want it to go back donnycakes

I am going to give everybody a rundown of the maintenance, I am going to do my best to go into specifics however there are some points I am not personally fully clued up on, however I believe I know enough to give some information to people that is easy enough to understand.

Point number one, the difference between east and west coast.

The connection difference between the two locations is approximately 30ms, having the server positioned in either location would have made no noticable difference to anybody. The reason the west coast location was chosen was due to the available choices being better from a hardware perspective and more current.

Point number two, the reason the US location was chosen.

The reasoning behind choosing a US host this time around was due to servers having a much greater chance at finding players when based in that region. We were already aware of this information howerver, Sinz helpfully made a thread earlier containing the below image, this image clearly shows the not insignificant difference between different locations and the active players and owners of Garry's Mod in the past two weeks.

It would be a no brainer for us to listen to the community who for years at this point and make a very significant change in an attempt to bring in more players, this was the main driving force behind the decision. Moving an entire server of our size to a different location and to a completely different host company is not cheap, talking financially or in terms of the work required to make sure everything switches over and smoothly as possible.

This isn't a discussion that was had on a whim, we actually had talked about this extensively for multiple weeks and even used the host on the test servers for a long enough period of time to decide that this move would be suitable for the community.


Point number three, this is probably the most important point; the Valve Master Server browser.

This isn't something we would expect your average player to notice or even pick up on, although as it is a big part of the reasoning behind the switch, it needs to be bought up. IN short the Valve master server browser does not operate as it should. This list is what Garry's Mod and many other games utilize to display the servers to you when you're selecting what to play.

The idea of this list is that it'll query the servers based on your region FIRST, in an ideal world it'll display your closest and most optimal servers first however it was not and was doing this in reverse, meaning that people who went to the DarkRP multiplayer list for example would not see ZARP listed unless they waited up to or beyond a minute.

This was a massive reasoning behind the Prop Hunt server suddenly losing it's very active and consistent player base. It is why favouriting servers you enjoy is a good idea and probably a reason why dedicated active players never picked up on this issue. We will always encourage you to add ZARP servers to your favourites list, it is very easy to do and is extremely time saving.

The Valve master server query is something we have reported to Valve and fingers crossed they sort something out, however this is the best fix we can offer until that happens. You can test this yourself by going to any server list on Garry's Mod, refreshing the listings and hitting STOP after 1 second. You will immediately see that the results shown given huge latencies of beyond 300ms. Again this is because the list is being pinged in reverse order.

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The finishing point is, it would have been impossible for us to please everybody. We went through all the pros and cons, weighing them up and with all the outcomes in mind, we were never going to be able to please everybody, this was something we all agreed on and we know this is never going to be a possibility.

We aren't expecting anybody to see immediate changes and some of these improvements will take a bit of time to become obvious, but they are there. I personally am UK based but was on team USA on the basis that I thought we should pick what is best for the future and believe that a slight increase in ping is worth what I believe to be an extremely positive change.

I am more than happy to answer questions on Discord, as is the rest of the Community Team.