DBD Servers are too few and terribly spread
TLDR: We should have more servers and have them more thoughtfully spread out to properly cover especially certain parts of the US and Europe. If you want a quick comparison, I provided a current server map, a map of the comparable in playerbase size R6 Siege's servers, and finally an ideal DBD server map.
Hey everyone, I think everyone who plays this game has had many, many bad experiences with high ping players, or being on high ping. It's no secret that this is also aggravated by the fact that the net code is terrible and probably won't be fixed until the overhaul in a year. But just take a look at the current map of DBD servers, markers with red indicate that they either are very often offline or said to be unstable:
It is difficult for us players to know exactly how much of the playerbase is focused where, but around the US and Europe, despite there being many players, multiple servers are often offline or unstable, and even if they were fully operational, the servers are so clustered together that the entirety of central US and even the south east coast to some extent do not have great connection, and half of Europe is not properly covered either. In addition, other areas that could potentially have many players (some of which have talked about ping on this forum) are completely unsupported, such as Central America and north-South America, or especially South Africa and the Middle East. From publicly available player count, Rainbow Six Seige apparently has a pretty similar player count to DBD, look at their server map:
Not only are their way more servers, but they also properly cover both the US and Europe, and also have servers in South Africa and the Middle East. As a player and not a developer, I have no way of knowing exactly where large portions of the playerbase are. But at the very least, I can go off of population, and the server spread in the US and Europe should be amended, and several other server locations should be looked at. Here's a map I created, blue markers are servers that should be added, and yellow markers are servers that are optional or can be turned on and off as needed, as I'm led to believe that is similar to how the Oregon and Ohio servers work:
In the US, both Oregon and Ohio should be retired, they are way too close to the North California and North Virginia servers. A Dallas, Texas server should be added, as it's smack in the middle of the US and covers a broad reach, while also covering several very large cities in Texas. In addition, servers in Phoenix, Arizona / Chicago, Illinois / Atlanta, Georgia should be considered. All of these are in major cities and help bridge the gap between the central and coastal servers, or could also be used for overflow in the case that any single server is too populated. A Phoenix server would not only cover Phoenix but help ease the burden of the massive population of LA, a Chicago server obviously covers Chicago but also helps with North Central US, and Atlanta would help cover high population areas in places like Georgia and Florida along the south side of the East Coast.
I'm not sure exactly how much of the playerbase is in Central and South America, but servers in Mexico City, Bogota, Colombia, and Santiago, Chile should be considered based on playerbase population. At the very least I think it would be good to consider Bogota, as it is right in the middle between the US and the current São Paulo location.
For Europe, ideally the (from what I hear) unstable and often offline London server would be fully operational, then you probably wouldn't need the Dublin server. However, if that is not possible, a Paris server can be added alongside the Dublin server to cover that very populated part of Europe better, and a server in Madrid should definitely be considered as well. A combination of these servers would cover this incredibly active part of Europe very well, giving multiple options for players in between locations. In addition, if there are a decent amount of players in the north, a server in Stockholm could be added as well.
Placing a server in Cape Town, South Africa would finally give those players a chance to play on ping lower than 300ms, and placing a server in Istanbul might be a nice place to roughly cover southern Europe while also trying to reach the Middle East. If we have a decent amount of players there, we could consider a server in Dubai / Abu Dhabi for proper coverage of the Middle East.
I think it's worth considering all of these at least over time, as providing more widespread servers not only provides a more pleasant experience for current players but also opens up the game to people who may not have been able to play before.
Comments
We all know that ping is king, and DBD is notorious for having wide gaps in the server regions.
In both North America and Europe, there are servers that are offline for a lot of the time, and these are the following ones:
As for online servers we have these:
Now, here are some locations that I will suggest:
Reasoning for the suggestions:
Many of the server regions are either clustered together within small regions that does not cover a wide area with acceptable ping.
Such as with the United States, where the servers are located on the extremes of the country, which leaves the entire Midwest region in a weird spot, where the ping is pretty high (80-100 ms). This is where servers based in Denver, Dallas and Chicago would make sense.
Same goes for the entire African continent and the Middle East, where players often play on over 200 ms, because there are no regional servers nearby.
This is why Cape Town, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul and either Madrid or Lisbon makes sense, because these locations will cover a lot more of Africa, than any of the current servers does.
Latin America is also in a grey-zone when it comes to coverage, so a Mexico City based server would alleviate the weird connection routing of this region.
And a Chilean server would greatly help the players on the western side of the Andes range.
The last "wildcard" locations are not as critical, but would definitely help certain regions achieve better connection.
Depending on player numbers, players could be routed to different servers based on player availability in certain brackets.
Also, exclusively using AWS, when Google (and other providers) offer a wider range is not a good idea.
Besides, more backup locations means better coverage during downtime.
Adding a map of my suggestions below:
I know I located the Californian server in LA, when it should be SF - Just imagine the green dot being in SF instead.
I live next to Frankfurt and have been dealing with high ping players for 10 years now… it's so frustrating and unfair because in DbD living close to a server actually puts you in disadvantage. Usually you would expect the exact opposite …
By far the largest player base in Europe seems to come from Russia and the surrounding regions and the most of them connect to Frankfurt. And I keep getting hits from killers when vaulting a window on MacMillan while they're being on Coldwind Farm (Kappa).
It's an absolute joke that the world's largest country isn't getting its own server.
Yeah I didn't realize how many Russian players there are, but as @wesker_shades put in his post a Moscow server would be great for that if possible. We just have a pathetically low number of servers right now, and several of them are constantly off
This game needs some kind of rollback netcode it would really help alleviate higher ping players and make the game much more responsive and less about who lives closer to the server
Yeah the net code is a huge issue as well, it was bandaid fixed to make this game hosted on servers rather than peer-to-peer and was never fixed. I'm assuming it'll be redone with the coding overhaul, but not only will that be another year (if they release it on time), but fixing the net code alone won't fix the issue.
Even with decent net code, many players in the US and Europe will still be stuck on 70-100ms, with a lot of other players being stuck anywhere between 100-250ms because BHVR does not have any servers near their country. This game is incredibly ping dependent, it literally bottlenecks your capabilities. Especially if they want the graphics and coding overhaul to be a big deal and bring in a lot of new players, they absolutely need to fix both the net code and the amount of servers to actually keep those players.
Look up what rollback netcode does it would most likely solve most ping related problems if implemented correctly
Rebalancing game servers should be much much easier than fixing the network code. There's no excuse for not doing that UNLESS the developers just don't care about user experience (which is true and most people would agree with this).
After looking up rollback netcode, there would be a few issues. I think the idea is in the right direction, but rollback netcode is meant for small game state, 1v1 games which is why it's often used in fighting games. It's also apparently very hard to implement because you have to rewrite the core game logic in order to make it work, although I guess the coding overhaul would be the time for that.
I'm no expert, but it seems like DBD currently uses a very simple server-side hit validation system, where the killer's client makes an input and the server validates the hit, but it doesn't seem to factor in lag properly. I think DBD might need to go down the path of the netcode from tactical shooters, which has similar elements to rollback netcode. They use client side prediction alongside server side lag compensation (which is the part that is similar to rollback). Their netcode is built for larger game states with 10 players at a time, which is much more along the line of the 5 players a match DBD has. Could be completely wrong though, I'm not a developer.
I think it honestly is just more penny pinching. BHVR solely uses the Amazon Web Service servers, which are incredibly limited as you can see on the current map. Most online games are on Google or Microsoft servers, often a combination of 2 or 3 of all these providers.
I want the overhaul to be a big deal that brings in new players and encourages them to try DBD or get back into DBD, and keep playing. The 9th anniversary FNAF chapter brought a ton of new people to the game, but I don't think the game managed to actually retain many of those players because of it's poor state. Hopefully the overhaul will fix the terrible code and netcode, along with making the game look modern rather than out of the PS3 era, but the game will still struggle to keep many new players if a lot of them are not properly supported with servers. If a large chunk of players can't get lower than 80ms in a game that is extremely ping dependent, they're much more likely to give up on it.
As much as I hate this game sometimes I also love it, and I want to see it succeed.
100% agreed. As someone forced to play on EU from ME, 130+ ping completely ruins the experience. Getting hit way after vaulting is pure pain. Thanks for putting together this map and comparison, hopefully BHVR actually listens.
When you are playing Apex Legends, you can switch from the menu which server - location & latency, you want to play on.
For sure, I imagine the problem is generally even worse in EU than in the US. I feel very lucky to be on 60ms, but I'm usually sitting anywhere from 70-110ms. In the EU I know there's probably a lot of traffic on the edges that get much worse. Unfortunately BHVR probably won't listen because they're penny pinchers, but this only harms the game long term. What new player wants to start playing a game repeatedly when they know they will never get lower than 80ms? It's going to especially bad if this is the same when the overhaul comes out.
I haven't played much Apex, but Valorant has much the same thing. I think it's always nice when games, especially very ping dependent ones, give you that option. Right now though, if DBD added that feature the options would be immensly pitiful.