Thread by @FTMKeienburg

There's a pretty cool web application which can help you to get an idea how good your connectivity to our servers is (or will be).



#brawlstars #latencies wondernetwork.com/pings

Just enter your home city (or a bigger city close-by) as the "Source" city and add the following "Destinations":

✅ Moscow
✅ Frankfurt
✅ Dublin
✅ Milan
✅ Mumbai
✅ Singapore
✅ Tokyo
✅ Sao Paulo
✅ Los Angeles
✅ Des Moines (Soon™!)
✅ Portland
✅ Miami
✅ Washington

These are average results (they send/receive 30 pings) and cover data-centers, i.e. in real-life applications like Brawl Stars the latency will be somewhat higher depending on your exact location and infrastructure.

For reference:

💜 = 50 ms (or lower) | Perfect!
💚 = 51-100 ms | Great!
💛 = 101-150 ms | OK'ish (but delay starts to show)
🧡 = 151-200 ms | Pretty bad!
❤️ = 201 ms (or higher) | Unplayable!

Gaming companies these days rarely operate their own data centers since it's seriously expensive and inefficient. Today companies rely on major cloud providers to setup and maintain data centers around the globe.

Now: these companies operate data centers to ... make money. Yes. I know. Crazy. As a result data centers usually follow a pattern of population density and more importantly, economic opportunities, i.e. companies requiring their services.

Major cloud providers today:

✅ Amazon (AWS)
✅ Google (GC)
✅ Microsoft (Azure)
✅ Tencent (TC)
✅ Alibaba (AC)
✅ Oracle
✅ IBM

If you are looking for availability and performance, it's mostly three of them - on our end we also work with Tencent for obvious reasons. 🙃

To give you an example how that looks in practice, these are the AWS regions and Google Cloud regions around the globe. You will quickly see a pattern - they pretty much cover the same regions.

Some upcoming regions which are interesting for us are Israel (AWS) and Santiago (GC) to serve our players in the Middle East and the South West of South America better.

But even then it's always a fine balance.

We've experimented with 2 other regions: Bahrain (Gulf region) and Sydney (Australia) and while both regions improved connectivity significantly the overall impact on our players was negative since matchmaking times increased significantly and we turned them off again.

The TL;DR is: the majority of players expect fast matchmaking times MORE than they expect perfect connectivity for a mobile game like Brawl Stars. Even with much better connectivity, the player base started to decline immediately in Australia and New Zealand.

Once we turned of the servers in Sydney, our player base started to recover and is now back to previous levels. Practically speaking, there's no good solution for some regions like ANZ and MENA. The situation in South America is slowly improving, but still not ideal.

I hope these insights are useful for you guys. If you have other questions on the topic, just drop a comment below and if it hasn't been answered here already, I'll do my best to get back to you. 👊