Australian races. Help!

[RINGO2287R]

Hi all as you might be able to tell from the title, I live in Australia.

Playing Grandturismo is something iv loved (It’s the only reason I buy a PlayStation) since the first one. ( I’m 36). This game has been a staple in my life since I first played it.

Iv finished all of them however GT7 is taking the longest to collect all the cars. Iv put as you could probably imagine countless hours and miles/kilometres driving almost every car. I started playing online and competing against others around the world for lap times back in GTSport. (Turns out I’m fairly quick, imagine that with the amount iv played).

However I need to ask someone that works for them about the Australian online experience. Australia is a pretty large place population is spread out a bit and our player base from what I can gather isn’t anywhere need that of other countries like Europe, Asia and America. That being said we connect with a lot of players from Japan,Korea, Malaysia, Honkong and even China. And more often than not we are connected to there server or host however it works I’m not sure. Just to put it into perspective Japan from Australia is 3,647 miles or 8,356 kilometres away and China well that as you could imagine is even further.

Because of this pairing the cars don’t perform consistently and there are issues with delays and all sorts of funny business. I’ll list a few major ones iv noticed over the years.

Tyre wear appears to have a larger impact than it should. Say your medium tyres are worn to down a quarter, the grip levels are incredibly low given that much wear. It feels very sketchy. Playing off line with that amount of tyre wear does not appear to impact the car to the level it does in an online race. I can only assume this is because the cars moving around a lot more with a jittery connection that is causing the tyres to wear faster and position your car in slightly different locations on the track. That causes the car to be inconsistent with its grip level.

The next is performance. The car at times feels sluggish low on power and handling is heavy and dull. The car is really unresponsive and looses all its agility.

I don’t mean to be a complainer however I really don’t understand why Australia and NewZeland can’t play on our own server/player host. Don’t get me wrong this does happen and the feel of the driving is noticeably better the sound is clearer also, it’s muffled vs the the other servers, however because of lap times I’m guessing there’s not always enough players within a specific time gap to fill a lobby. (Or because both our countries connect to the same areas they have just been placed in other lobbies.

Now I’m not expecting everyone to understand what I’m talking about or experience the same types of issues as I do. I’m fully aware that a large majority of players are in Europe and America so please try and be respectful and understand your population is much much larger and distances from servers or connected players is far less. Uk to the most furthest part of Europe is roughly around 3,000 miles and America to Brazil is roughly the same. But your player population is far greater so the chances of you connecting consistently enough to lobbies were the majority of players your racing are in these locations is very small.

So in closing if this forums is observed by employees of the game could they please take this on board and maybe consider what I said earlier and have Australia and NewZeland connect solely with each other. I think the combined player base in both countries would be more than sufficient to fill lobbies and the skill levels of drivers will increase to a better standard and possibly we will see more players competing in the World Series races and being competitive.

 

[Famine]

And more often than not we are connected to there server or host however it works I’m not sure.

Yes, so here's the thing.

Nations Cup has a dedicated Oceania server through which racing is conducted on a client-server basis. It's in Sydney.

Manufacturers Cup has Asia-Oceania servers, through which racing is conducted on a client-server basis. I don't entirely know how this operates, but there's some evidence that racing is shared or alternating between the Sydney and the Tokyo servers.

No other online races have servers for racing. There's matchmaking servers, but the actual racing is peer-to-peer - your consoles are both clients and servers. They are regionally restricted, sure (Asia-Oceania, Americas, EMEA), but there's so much else that can affect the experience rather than just geography, which actually can include people from outside the region using accounts set to that region.

I’m fully aware that a large majority of players are in Europe and America so please try and be respectful and understand your population is much much larger and distances from servers or connected players is far less. Uk to the most furthest part of Europe is roughly around 3,000 miles and America to Brazil is roughly the same.

That's not so much the case.

Tip to tip, the Americas region is nearly 10,000 miles, but pretty narrow. EMEA is Europe, the Middle East, and Africa is also about 10,000 miles between extremities, but 6,000 miles wide as well.

However, raw geography isn't really important here. What's important is data distance, and Australia's doing... well, let's say "okay" in terms of that to and from Japan.

There's a couple of pretty fat pipes that run from Tokyo to east coast Australia through Guam, at around 8,000 miles (66ms). West coast is further, but the line is newer and runs up through Singapore before the Singapore-Tokyo leg, at around 10,000 miles (83ms).

For comparison, the data distance from London to Cape Town is also about 8,000 miles (66ms) - with a nice new pipe coming online soon - while New York to Buenos Aires is also around 10,000 miles (83ms).

Of course we have further extremes than that - Americas could cover Nome to Ushaia to Honolulu to Montreal, or even Guam and Diego Garcia (I'd only be guessing at that), while EMEA is Iceland to Vladivostok to Mumbai - but that's core population centres in countries that are well represented in their regions. Asia-Oceania could well cover Kiribati to Mongolia too, for example, but I suspect rarely does. I've seen Iranian, Indian, Israeli, Lebanese, Russian, and Saudi players in EMEA lobbies, but not terribly frequently.

I think the combined player base in both countries would be more than sufficient to fill lobbies

Personally... not so sure. There's basically 8 Daily Races every hour, every day, for a week. That's 1,344 possible races, with an average of 14.6 slots per race - or about 20,000 slots. GT Sport's stats showed that only about 4,000 players were active in Daily Races on any given day globally, and Australia and New Zealand combined had made up around 3% of the global active playerbase.

If we're generous, and reckoned GT7 outsold and has a higher active playerbase than Sport by a third, we could muster up 160 active players every day in Daily Races, so they'd need to do 125 races each, every week, to completely fill out the lobbies. Maybe we can say a lobby with two spaces is full, in which case that drops to ~105 races each, every week.

Adding Japan alone cuts that to 35, so we can probably see why PD would take that approach.