A Large-Scale MMORPG Game

Customer Background

A large-scale MMORPG game with a focus on PVE, using a partitioned server architecture, has deployed game services in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America. The expectation is to support more players from different regions to cooperate and compete in the same venue, such as Europe and America sharing the same server, and the Americas sharing the same server.

Customer Needs

Is it possible to have Europe and America share the same server across continents, and North and South America share the same server across continents while meeting network latency requirements?
When deploying servers within a large area, are there recommended deployment methods and locations for the server nodes?
For different scenarios such as static resource acceleration and player-to-player data acceleration, are there recommended network acceleration solutions?

Solution

Through GINTS network speed testing across three nodes in the western United States, eastern United States, and Frankfurt, the overall speed test results are as follows:

  1. Tencent Cloud is slightly better than GCP and AWS, with Tencent Cloud's Virginia coverage reducing latency to Europe by about 20ms compared to GCP and AWS;
  2. Using the western United States node (Tencent Cloud Silicon Valley, GCP Los Angeles, AWS California) to cover the European region, the average latency is over 150ms;
  3. Using the eastern United States node (Tencent Cloud Virginia, GCP Dallas, AWS Miami) to cover Europe (excluding Russia), Tencent Cloud has an average latency of 98ms, GCP has an average latency of 125ms, and AWS has an average latency of 120ms;
  4. Using the eastern United States node (Tencent Cloud Virginia, GCP Dallas, AWS Miami) to cover Russia, Tencent Cloud has an average latency of 149ms, GCP has an average latency of 168ms, and AWS has an average latency of 167ms;
  5. Using the Frankfurt node to cover North America, Tencent Cloud has an average latency of 127ms, GCP has an average latency of 123ms, and AWS has an average latency of 125ms;

Based on the above data conclusions, it is recommended that the business adjust the resource deployment strategy for some countries and regions. If cross-regional coverage of Europe and North America is needed, Tencent Cloud's Frankfurt node is the most cost-effective solution. After business verification and user experience data feedback, the adjusted deployment strategy effectively solves the network latency problem for cross-regional players, while choosing Tencent Cloud resources also reduces the cost of infrastructure computing resources by about 50%.

Customer Feedback

Infrastructure network speed testing servers, combined with the characteristics of the business itself, provide services from node speed testing to screening, and then to the additional deployment of nodes for special cases. This effectively avoids the non-game content loss risk caused by the blind selection of server deployment strategies in overseas business.

—— Game Distribution Manager