Unbearable Latency? Not Here

Ever since Sega of America relocated the PSU servers to their new offices, a lot of players have been complaining about the sudden spike in network lag, which they claim has continued even to this day.

I'm not sure where this is coming from. Latency after the server move doesn't seem to have changed at all. Yeah, it's still frustrating at times -- nothing is more irritating than being killed even though you healed right before getting hit -- but it's not terrible as some people say.

Still, there might be a problem. I have noticed that most of the players complaining about latency are playing PSU on the XBox 360 servers. I don't know anything about the infrastructure of those servers, but if a problem really exists, I'm more inclined to believe that it is occurring there. I myself play PSU on a PC, and our servers seem fine as far as I can tell.

What I do know is that XBox 360 PSU is integrated with XBox Live. Maybe the new network infrastructure doesn't jive well with the Live service. Or maybe it takes the console longer to connect to the servers at their new location. Lots of things might have changed in the move -- IP addresses, DNS servers, etc. Obviously, it's hard to tell what could be going on, but it would be in Sega's best interests to fix the problem before the majority of players decide to leave.

A lot of XBox 360 players who claim that they are being hit with latency issues don't seem to know why this is happening to them and not PC players. Take this comment from a recent forum thread on a PSU fansite:

I really can't understand why lag isn't apperent to the Ps2/PC's but it is on the 360, which by most causes is a supieror processing machine.

Obviously if this is a latency issue, processing power has nothing to do with it. You can't process what the server has not given you. And even if this were the case, under no circumstances does an XBox 360 have as much processing power as a good gaming PC. None. Period. That might be true when comparing the 360 to a PS2, but that's a whole different issue altogether.

In any case, if Sega of America wants to keep this game alive, they ought to focus on investigating some of the problems plaguing it, starting with latency and slowdown. Like it or not, the XBox 360 players are providing the majority of the community funding for this game in the United States and Western Europe, and if they decide to leave, we're all screwed.