Should you switch to EUW? Summary of tradeoffs and solutions

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Summary because there seems to be a lot of information in different places and it’s difficult to get an accurate picture of whether it’s worth.

A large part of the issue is that the deal gets worse the longer you don’t take it and it’s a bad deal for lots of people to start with.

There’s also the fear that the new region’s population will die out and become a ghost land, especially because the deal is only really worth it right now if you’re new or casual.

Tradeoffs

Things you lose

  • Double up of any exclusive items in any founders packs (e.g. skin/mount)
    • These can be redeemed on existing server a second time
  • All of the non-exclusive items in any founders packs (e.g. leveling chests, rapport chests)
    • Newly given founders packs only include the exclusive items, so you lose these
  • Leveling/roster/island/collection progress, having to do lots of stuff you’ve done already again (+ you can’t skip first time stuff again)
  • Ability to play with friends that don’t move
  • Any content from spent royal crystals
  • Any content from purchased starter packs
  • Twitch drops (I’ve heard it might be possible to get them again by making a new twitch account and linking it for the reruns next week, but this is annoying to do)

Things you gain

  • No login queue + actually be able to do endgame instanced content
  • Special login rewards that roughly equate to the same stuff you lost from founders chests + missed dailies if you’re already 50
Special login Rewards

Some clarifications

Solutions to the server problems

EUW Boosts

Give an immediately usable powerpass to anybody with a 50 on another region when starting on EUW.

  • Development time - I suspect this would take between low and moderate work from smilegate because powerpasses currently validate themselves based on whether you’ve gotten to a certain point in the game yet - that’d need to be worked around.
  • Downside that powerpasses autocomplete side content without giving you character rewards. Would be nice to also get those rewards.
  • Might also consider just giving it to everyone but then new players can skip doing story which could be a shame as some bits of it are pretty cool.
  • It doesn’t fix anything long term. Actually creates more problems than it solves long term if the region doesn’t take off and sustain population well enough.

Region Transfer

Open transfers from EUC to EUW

  • Development time - this is likely to be very difficult to implement especially since even server transfer tech doesn’t exist yet.
    • Implementing cross region transfers would essentially be a server transfers + more work to implement the region-wide account data.
  • Still has the issue of dividing the playerbase and groups of friends where some move and others don’t.

Fix Server Architecture

This is the definitely the best long term solution - fix the networking bottlenecks making login and matchmaking slow

  • Development time - could be anything from very difficult (weeks/few months) to borderline impossible (many months/years) depending on how messy the current architecture is.
    • Given what amazon have said and the solution they picked of introducing another region, these bottlenecks arise from login/matchmaking services being designed in a way that’s not scaleable.
    • Fixing this issue likely requires rearchitecting a significant part of the games networking stack.
    • Then requires rolling out this change to established servers and game clients (a much larger than normal maintenance maybe required).
  • There’s no downsides to doing this well, it’s just hard to do - especially after the fact.
    • Merging regions could be done down the line. This is likely to be somewhat problematic due to naming conflicts and such but nothing impossible to solve. (FTLOG allow duplicate names with # identifiers already, why games don’t do this is beyond me. Imagine your irl name had to be unique and was taken?!)

To summarize the solutions, boosts might be a decent fix they could implement short term but region transfers and server fixes are both more ideal but aren’t likely to be implementable quickly.

(TL:DR) Should you start (again) on EUW?

If you’re new (or only a small amount of progress made) - certainly yes, you’ll get more rewards for free.

For everyone else it depends on how much the losses weigh up against the gains for you. If you stay on EUC, it’s unlikely that the situation is going to get significant better in the short term unless enough people quit that it fixes itself.

Good questions to ask yourself are:

  • Are queues affecting my fun enough for me to care about the losses?
  • Will I overtake where I currently am quickly from actually being able to login/play?
  • Is my playtime limited enough that I’m basically not getting to play anyway?

If you are an amazon/smilegate employee reading this - you need to make the switch deal MUCH more lucrative and FAST if you want people to switch in mass amounts.
The longer you wait, the worse any deal gets for existing players. The rewards literally have to be so good that people are willing to start again just to get them. Current rewards are paltry. Psychologically humans perceive taking losses far worse than achieving gains, so you have to tip the scale.
People that have already spent royal crystals or bought starter packs feel scammed for considering moving - appeal to them by rewarding copies of anything they bought on EUW as well.

Anything I missed or is wrong? Comment and I’ll edit to add it.
Also posted on reddit here

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