The following open letter is addressed to WarGaming.net and its shareholders on behalf of the Australian & New Zealand players that frequent your World of Tanks – Asia server.

For months now, we have experienced endless high ping and packet loss, an issue common to those accessing your World of Tanks – Asia server from within Australia & New Zealand.

We humbly ask that you consider an Australian / New Zealand server that would accommodate the thousands of players that find themselves within these two countries. Often, ping ratings of 170 – 450ms make the game unplayable and unenjoyable for us. Many also experience packet loss and short dropouts or timeouts as frequent as three times a game.

Some of the most elite tankers regard a certain amount of ping as being optimal for playing World of Tanks. Popular World of Tanks player ‘Sir Foch’ who not only streams gameplay videos but also is renowned for his tanking prowess believes that any ping higher than 70ms is unplayable (CITATION NEEDED). QuickyBaby (2013), another player with a large following on YouTube, adds “I get 40[ms] on cluster one and 20[ms] on cluster two [of the EU server]…Sometimes when I am about to make a pressure shot I actually look at my ping to see if I need more or less delay”.

Some players will also argue that the higher ping affects not only their enjoyment of the game but also their overall stats, thus leading to unfair judgement of player skill levels by other players which in result can lead to insult, mockery, belittlement, lack of trust, lack of faith & other constant judgement/s of the player.

A strong argument supporting this is of the potential influence towards WN8, the most widely used and respected form of tracking statistics. WN8’s algorithm is designed to assign players a score based on the formula WN8 = average damage per game/average expected damage per game , when a player cannot confidently cause damage due to causes stemming from a poor connection, their WN8 is inadvertently affected along with their Hit Ratio, Survival Ratio & Kill/Death Ratio.

Many players believe this to be a major contributing factor as to why many of the statistically strong and skilled players are found closer to Singapore, the server’s location. Many believe that this, coupled with the disadvantages of high ping, contributes majorly to a lack of Australian and/or New Zealand teams in tournaments and other e-sport competitions.

On behalf of my clan, I can say that as a clan we partake in tournaments where our connection or ‘lag’ is just as large an obstacle to overcome as our opponents. This makes the e-sports environment even more difficult for Australian and New Zealand teams when partaking in fights either on the global map or other forms of e-sports against teams that do not have to deal with the connection hurdles we face.

This may also be a major reason as to why E-sports is not very big within the ASIA server when compared with the EU cluster or NA server. Of the few Australian/New Zealand teams that do make the effort to compete against the odds and for those that may in the future,

All New Zealand and Australian teams who participate in E-sports and the competitive realm face a struggle to compete against teams from other parts of the SEA server due to the disadvantages created by massive lag issues. The insane lag discourages other clans from the region to participate. World of Tanks is in theory a fair game; we have seen punishments netted out for those who use warpack, and many bots banned. However, we propose that the immense disparity in lag across the server makes this game relatively unfair. Skill level is one factor, but this game should be about variance in skill rather than variance in lag. This is manifested in tournaments and the like. For many it appears as if they are fighting an uphill battle people refuse to acknowledge and in their eyes the seemingly endless pain and frustration it would cause is not worth the sliver of glory it may sprout.

And rightly so.

So on behalf of the Australian and New Zealand player base we respectfully ask WarGaming to at least publicly look into an Australian and New Zealand server to better serve the players and potentially revive a dying e-sports environment within the region.

Similar requests have been made before, most of which seem to be looked at while they are in the limelight and duly dismissed. The supposed small amount of Australian and New Zealand players is not an excuse. Statistics show that the ASIA server receives 33,000 average users stretched across a single server while America is served by 2 cluster servers stretched across a player base of 29,000. If America has 14,500 players per server, surely ASIA can afford to split its 33,000 player base towards another server (Wiki.wargaming.net, 2015).

One should also note that the ROK server is a dedicated server, servicing roughly 6,000 users within its player base. (Wiki.wargaming.net, 2015)

To quote WarGaming’s own published and publicly visible webpage: (http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Servers).

“ It is usually best to choose a server closest to you so that your ping-rates will be low and you can be more effective in the tank of your choice.”

Why when even your own publicly published intellectual property acknowledges the detrimental effects to performance caused by high pings, do 2 countries still suffer from high ping related issues?

Australia is 1 of 7 continents, 6 realistically as Antarctica is not commercially serviced or inhabited. Yet Australia suffers more from connection issues to your server than Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia & even certain areas of Africa. The eastern coast of Africa is closer to the ASIA server than the eastern coast of Australia. Meanwhile, the eastern coast of Australia houses many of the country’s major cities yet all these cities are further from your server than Bangladesh.

We acknowledge that Australia’s international internet connectivity is sub par however, Australia’s domestic connectivity within Australia’s borders is more than capable of withstanding the workload needed to maintain a server of such large proportions domestically.

Australia houses the only main submersed connections to New Zealand bar the deep see cable ‘Southern Cross Cable Network (SCNN)’ which routes its way across the entire pacific ocean before its meets landfall on the west coast of America in California, a state more than 10,000km from Takapuna. The New Zealand landing point.

As such moving a server to mainland Australia would not only significantly improve issues for Australian’s but also for New Zealand players who would be able to enjoy a much more pleasant gaming experience while playing World of Tanks. It is likely that South East Asian players closer to a theoretical server in Brisbane or Sydney than Singapore would benefit from this too.

As it currently stands the entirety of your Australian player base and by extension your New Zealand player base, all connect to war gaming’s ASIA server via the only currently operational Australia to Singapore deep see cable – the ‘SeaMeWe -3’ a 39,000km submersed cable servicing 39 different landing points internationally. All of this on a cable constructed in the 20th century with 20th century technology. Don’t you think its time for an upgrade? , well most of Australia does as well, unfortunately the next submersed cable Australia will see along the Perth-Singapore line - The ‘Australia-Singapore cable’ is not due to be operational until the fourth quarter of 2016, not very long from a corporate perspective but light years towards the average player that funnels through 1 20th century cable along with every other Australian destined to send data to a similar region daily.

So to WarGaming, we the Australian and New Zealand combined player base urge you to publicly look into a possible Australian server and please keep us the players aware of any issues arising from such proposals.

we would like to see one of the following outcomes:

A) A branch/extension of the ASIA server be brought to mainland Australia

B) A standalone Australian server 

Sincerely, your players.

With full support from the following clans:

[BUFLO], [HMNZ], [C_A_D], 

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To support our Petition on behalf of your clan please email CrazyBuffaloes@gmail.com w/ IGN - Clan - Pledge allegiance to the petition.

However please ensure you hold a level of authority within your clan e.g. [Officer+]