I’ve noticed as of late that a lot of American servers are listing their region as Australian during periods of low peak. The intent is to make a fairly average server from the states appear to be a blockbuster server in my region which has the effect to funnel players unfairly from servers that are based in Australia by appearing higher in the server listing. For the average Australian, playing on US servers has a pretty steep penalty of 250+ ping on average and for Europe, its far worse, practically unplayable.
What would ideal is to prevent these globe trotter servers from changing their regions / locales so abruptly as to gain an unfair advantage by deceptively tricking people into joining their community’s.
Ideally, yes. However, at this point there’s no centralized storage for server listings, so it’s a little difficult to implement a solution like that,- the server list is basically an aggregate of what has been submitted most recently.
This may change in the future when the listing is more centrally managed in a sort-of admin panel.
… and how would you see that work at all? Some servers may target a particular region, but be hosted in a neighboring region and language for cost reasons.
The scenario here (countries using a similar language, but located on the opposite side of the world) is a little particular, anyway, and sadly due to ‘protection’ systems that obfuscate server IPs (including, again, from the listing backend), we also can’t just ‘block’ faraway stuff from showing up as anything in the Oceania region.
Such data may, again, be difficult to obtain due to odd proxy systems and other variants of inaccurate IP-to-location data sets, especially for non-residential datacenter-style ranges.
This is actual messed up that they are even allowed to do this. Servers should be set so the region cannot be changed these guys are rorting the system this is stupid.
i mean its kind of messed up, if i search in my region i dont want to be seeing any other outside servers.
if i search Australia i should see Australia. if other outisde servers wanna show up in other countries they should have to pay for it and it should have to say sponsored
Another option, force owners to set the region that is applied to all servers they own via keymaster. Ensure that users can only change their region for all servers once every 24 hours.
I know some community’s operate in multiple regions so for those few massive community’s, there should be special consideration to those groups to request special exemptions.
